if any thread ever deserved a TLDR, it is this one.
I grew up in the infancy of video games. And back then, videogames were MAD expensive. i remember paying 10-15 dollars for a boxed game back when f* Wasterland came out, that's 36 years ago. Same for SSI's D&D games. Games actually have come down in price since then.
What i don't like, is that games have been designed worse and worse since the late 90s. Yeah ok i love the amazing graphics and whatnot. I'm all for immersive storytelling, but there's two massive problems that pre-AA games tried to solve and that AA games seem to have simply ignored.
1. AA games are self-contained.
This absolutely blows. In 2002 one of the world's greatest games was released, Neverwinter Nights 1. You install the game, and inside the install is a .. a mission, an adventure, a module, a campaign, a scenario, call it whatever is the term your RPG group uses, it's the story that you will play, but it's not *the game*. And in the same way, you can then download, for free, a community-created module, and play an entirely new story, with new characters, INSIDE the game.
We seem to have completely forgotten this. Yeah some games have swaggy DLCs but it's insulting that you, the game design company, are the only one who has the competency to write a story, when in reality the community modules are often substantially better than what your PG-13 ass can put out. And, you know, it's gonna take me maybe 1 day to play through your DLC. Even worse is when a DLC picks up from the ending of the main game, and you just steamroll everything without any effort whatsoever.
2. AA games are very limited.
See, if you spend millions of dollars in creating content for your game, and because of (1) YOU are the only entity allowed to create content for that game, you sure as hell want your players to see that game content. This is a solid portion of the main reasons why modern games are so linear, and also because they are so damn easy. When i was young, it wasn't common AT ALL to "beat" a game. It was common to buy half a dozen games and maybe manage to beat one of them, but most you'd cap out at your maximum skill and you just couldn't go any further. I've never beaten Ricky Dangerous, never beaten The Shard Of Spring, jesus i never even beaten Pool Of Radiance (damn bar brawls and hordes of kobolds).
We'd hotseat games like Simon The Sorceror and Day Of The Tentacle because on our own, there's no chance we'd beat them, but as a team we'd come up with whatever absurd solution the puzzles needed. I beat every Wing Commander game ever made, but i was the only one of my group who could do that. We had a guy that was good at Lemmings, we had a guy that was good at Fury Of The Furries. I never beat Sid Meyer's Pirates, Defender Of The Crown, or Prince Of Persia, and many, many more.
Games were meant to be hard, they were meant to be cryptic, they were meant to test your skill and that you'd go to school the next day and ask everyone how tf do you beat this or that screen.
I really don't mind if a game costs a hundred bucks, i wouldn't mind if it costs TWO hundred bucks, but i have a long, long list of demands, of things i expect in a videogame of 2024.
I expect a challenge, hard enough that i can feel i have accomplished something by beating it. I expect replayability, community content, i expect fully customizable control and UI, i expect multiple paths, and gameplay designed by people who actually play. A good game can keep you busy for months, games like Tekken, or WipeOut, Gran Turismo, buying one of these meant weeks and weeks and weeks of play, and today, i expect even more. And i'm just not getting any of it.