More Than Nostalgia

I am kind of old. Not really, but compared to most of the people on campus I have a lot of years’ head start. Being thirty doesn’t feel like I should be considered old, but in gaming years, ten years is an eternity. Technology moves fast and games move fast with it. However, I find myself looking back more and more. I am not going to go full nostalgia and say that old games were always better or that there is no good in all of the new things that technology allows games to accomplish. I think that would be foolish. I do think old games are worth the time. There is jank and old graphics, but the things they do that are unique make them worth the time.

What Have We Lost?

So I am going to lead with the first thing that I love about revisiting games from my childhood. The one thing that I think is missing the most from new games is a complete package. Before games could be easily updated and added to post-release, Game Devs had to be careful what they shipped. A buggy mess could sink a studio, their reputation forever tarnished as a purveyor of big promises without the technical follow-through. There were no day-one patches. There was no DLC that would be released to add back in cut content. For better or for worse, what was on a disc was what you got. There was also no need for an internet connection to play or install a game. This also meant no microtransactions or strange skips shoved into a single-player, paid experience. It was simpler; you got what was on the disc. You decided whether what you got was worth it or not after playing. In the world of indie dev this is much more common, of course. I do yearn for the days when this kind of system was expected rather than the exception.

Replayability

On the note of getting what you paid for, games also did more to provide good value. Games were expensive and free-to-play games were non-existent. There was pressure on game developers to provide good value. Replayability was a key way that developers would convince gamers that their game was worth the high price tag. We are spoiled for choice these days. You can take sixty dollars to a sale, especially on Steam, and buy five to ten high-quality games. If you play them all, then you may have gotten a few really satisfying experiences. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing but the design of a game that wants you to keep playing it long-term appeals to me. I want games that are complex or deep in some way. Games that encourage you to take your time with them and learn their ins and outs. This brings me to my first real case study, my favorite game of all time, “Diablo II.”

The Gold Standard

I am sure that I’ve mentioned “Diablo II” in previous articles. It is constantly in my head. I replay the game at least once a year. I’ve modded it, I’ve played the remaster, I’ve played every class multiple times. I basically have it memorized. This is the kind of game that encourages mastery and encourages a player to explore it multiple times. The developers knew the game they were making was something special. They wanted it to be the sort of game that players would return to over and over. As an avid fan of ARPGs, it could be argued that no game has been able to do it better than “Diablo II”. I’ll admit my own bias as I grew up with the game, but I think the controls hold up well. That being said, the game has rough edges, things that would not have been an issue for gamers at the time. For instance, the game is heavily designed around chugging health and mana potions which are purchased from vendors. That means it’s encouraged for you to fill your inventory with potions rather than leave space for collecting loot from monsters. That sort of goes against the entire “kill monsters, get loot” design philosophy. However, this was just the expectation of the time. The game plays much slower than modern ARPGs, which may cause modern audiences to lose interest. However, if you can appreciate some janky controls and some slower gameplay with some admittedly grindy endgame, “Diablo II” has some of the most open and engaging loot and character building of any RPG.

Diamonds in the Rough

I can understand the hesitance to dive into gaming history. There are so many interesting experiences to be found if you can stand a little bit of friction and grind. Old games tend to have a steeper learning curve than modern offerings. If you enjoy just wandering around in RPGs like “Skyrim” or “Kingdom Come: Deliverance.” I would highly recommend going back to early “Elder Scrolls” games, especially “Daggerfall.” These games do not have the polish of some newer entries in the RPG space. However, they excel in personal expression and world-building. When they were released, the idea was to make a world that would encourage the imagination of players. Graphics were rudimentary and worlds couldn’t be as alive due to technical limitations. This meant that developers had to be clever and use various tricks to give the illusion of a grand world. “Daggerfall” does both of these. While you technically can walk between the towns in “Daggerfall’s” massive continent, you will not run into anyone on the road or in the wilderness, for the most part. It was still a technical achievement just to allow walking between such massive distances. However, populating that space with anything interesting was out of the question. So the game is mostly fast traveling between the locations that do have points of interest. The game is also randomly generated; the dungeons were generated and placed into the game. So some of them have very strange and janky layouts. Luckily, there are modern-day mods to fix this issue. However, it means that each dungeon is unique and interesting to explore. Quests are also randomly generated, although they generate as you play. Each new character is fully unique, and with a little imagination, each character has their own story to tell based on the guilds and factions they interact with. It’s a true sandbox for roleplaying and storytelling which would not be recreated until the likes of GTA online roleplay servers nearly twenty years later.

Why Look Back?

So why go back to old games? Why should you brave the jank and frustration of games before we had written books about how to make them? For the same reason silent films or classic novels should be returned to and studied. Not only are they foundational, (every ARPG, “Call of Duty,” and gacha game owes at least part of its identity to “Diablo II,”) but almost all of them have something interesting. Before games were products first and experiences second, before we could fix things after launch, games took risks and had to be creative; they had to work as advertised. There were issues and gaming has come such a long way, but I think we could bring back a lot of what old games taught us. Thankfully, for someone who can’t stop looking back, I can still download “Diablo II” or “Daggerfall Unity” and play something that was daring and different. These are just some examples of games doing things that were unheard of and groundbreaking for the time. It also helps that they’ve aged like a fine wine.