[Naaktgeboren]

I am once again becoming disillusioned with gaming and have been trying recently to pinpoint both when this started and why.

I have been gaming from the ages of 6-7 on the old Atari 2600 and would guess I have had most of the available systems since, in fact I have been gaming on and off for 26 years

I have reached my own conclusion and wonder if it is shared. I think that game producers these days are knowingly releasing inferior products knowing damn well that they can milk in even more money when they release the sequel. I feel they are guilty of deliberately holding back game content, just in an attempt to keep franchises running, a key example of this would be EA Sports, looking at the Fifa & Fight Night franchise in particular. After FightNight round 3, the developers could have browsed most forums looking at feedback and absolutely nailed Round 4, they would have been aware of what problems existed.

Instead, there is a broken online element, the 'face in the game' is terrible and produces laughable results but hey ho, I am sure these will be fixed in FN Round 5

On the other hand, the wait for Duke Nukem, the developers explained they were looking to create the perfect game.... Seems that the guys with their money behind the project were not interested in its quality, probably realised that the sequel would take too long.

I know there are some exceptions these days, it just seems to me that when I was younger, games never needed to be patched etc, they were made correctly in the first instance. Developers used to put everything into the titles and this made games fun to play.

Any other opinions?

[Sinzer]

I have to say Rose Tinted glasses

a key example of this would be EA Sports

That is the worst example of a publisher there is, they are exceptionally bad. There are plenty of good examples. You must remember that a dev and publisher is seperate, devs can produce patches, but they are ultimately delivered by the publisher. Some good examples are Valve with Steam, most of their games are continually updated with bug fixes and content for free. Stardock a small publisher on PC, is also a great example of Publisher/Dev that supports their games.

Don't expect EA to fix much of anything.

games never needed to be patched

No they shipped with game breaking bugs, that you needed to simply restart your game and suck up the loss. Another, example is the disk version of Elite for the BBC, that had a nasty bug on it, they had to ship everyone out a floppy disk with the update.

Developers used to put everything into the titles and this made games fun to play.

Yes, you could produce a game on your own and with simple code. Nowadays, even the code to create a fire effect graphic in the background can be substantially more code than the code for Jet Set Willy. The complexity is astonishing.

If you are into PC gaming, then you can pick up a lot of indie based gaming. People still make these "simple" love affair pieces of code, they simply are not hyped like the CoD series etc.

I think it is valid to say that you can lose interest in gaming, I certainly do sometimes, just because a lot of games feel very generic. I spend 80% of my time purely playing multiplayer games, often niche titles, because they are different everytime and feel more competitive. I think if I concentrated on Single Player I would hang up my controller/keyboard & mouse.

I don't like people using arguments like bad development or no bugs or gameplay over graphics. The days when one guy could code 5000 lines of code on his own and come out with a mainstream game are over. There was lots of tosh released 15 or 20 years ago, the budget shelves were full of badly coded rubbish games. People remember playing the good games, in 10 years time you too will remember only playing the good games, and then thinking that oh my god do they really release so much rubbish these days!!!!

[Snake79]

I know where you are coming from although I don't think it is that bad. Gaming has evolved over the years and I believe you tend to look more fondly at the past (I am the same) that the games were better than what we have today. There have been a lot of crap games released over the years, Pit Fighter anyone??

I have fond memories of old Spectrum, Master System and Mega Drive games as at the time I was young and did not know or care about greedy software companies milking every last penny out of us gamers. Now as an adult I am noticing a lot more cash-in's, sequels and slight updates to games that don't justify it.

There has also been a massive shift in where games are being created. 10-15 years ago Japan produced a lot of games but now it is mostly western European developers or American software houses. One thing I will say for certain is that although there have been some groundbreaking games this gen, I think creatively, previous gens have been better. There has been a lack of truly original games that the Japanese were great at.

This is why the Dreamcast is my favourite console. As well as having a great collection of standard titles it had some of the most original and innovative games ever. I had an xbox after the DC and it was a huge disappointment, I could never really get into it the same way, games did look better but in many cases didn't play as well and were just not as much fun. I had lost much of my gaming appetite and for a few years after the death of the DC it got most of my attention. Only now that I have a 360 have I felt that things are getting better.

[Kieron]

Originally Posted by CloggyNL

I have been gaming from the ages of 6-7 on the old Atari 2600

it just seems to me that when I was younger,

they were made correctly in the first instance.
Any other opinions?

Pac-Man and ET on the VCS were abysmal. In fact re-visiting a load of 2600 games using a hacked Xbox I was stunned at the simplicity of it all.

A little like Subbuteo - you had to use your imagination to help the entertainment.

At least patching is now available on most consoles. Imagine my horror at spending £30-£40 back in the 70's on a VCS game and it turning out to be utter rubbish! No internet review sites back then - just the pictures on the (lovely) cardboard boxes.

I still love Atari though

[Ratinho]

Two terrible examples in the first post.

EA Sports have completely overhauled their main teams in recent years, and Fifa have made massive strides forwards with a whole new engine for next gen, leaving their competitors in that area well behind. On top of that, the new team are incredibly community focused and everyone can see the changes they are making in terms of feedback from the gamers. They won't get everything right, but the suggestion this specific team are not doing this suggests you used that example without looking into it.

EA in general are a lazy example that always get used in this area, mainly as it's what they used to do. They released some of the best original stuff last year and launched some quality new IPs, mainly Dead Space.

Duke Nukem team trying to make the perfect game? Given a phenomenal amount of time, produced very little and a handful of screenshots and very few complaints from that team later, it's no more. From everything i've heard in the actual community through podcasts and news from inside the industry, you can hardly lay the blame at the people who paid them to produce nothing for years and years and years........

Nostalgia's a great thing until you make it a reality. There was much more crap back then, at even bigger cost. We rightly expect more now, but the idea it was so much better and everyone cared so much more is a little warped.

[CAS FAN]

Personally I feel that there is a lot more effort & creativity that go into games now than there ever has. There are some fundemental reasons why people alway hark back to the old days and I often do it myself.

Those reasons are (IMO) mainly a) Nostalgia, as we fondly remember times spent in out youths playing the games of yesteryear and b) the fact that when we were growing up through the early days of gaming new ideas were a lot easier to come by (simply because they hadn't yet been done).

What I do see these days are game developers creating really exciting and interactive new worlds that I could only dream of when I was a lad! I used to spend a lot of time playing a game called The Fury on the Spectrum. Basically it involved futuristic races round racetracks that ran around moons and planets, shooting drones and other competitors with weapons. You upgraded your car with improved armour, weapons, engines etc. but in reality the game was pretty average and it was really the idea that I loved. I dreamed of being able to play a game like say Wipeout HD and would have seriously played a game like that to death if it was around when I was say at school.

I do wonder if it's more me who just doesn't have the time, has more important things to do etc. which sometimes leaves me thinking of gaming less fondly these days to what I did in the past. As a school child i'd often spend all day hammering a Spectrum, Amiga, Megadrive game until I finished it, where as now that's just not feasible.

If anything I think gaming has vastly improved in terms of quality and creativity and as has been said above it really is a case of 'rose tinted glasses' that folk sometimes think differently. I lost count of the games I bought as a child that were bug ridden and often just unplayable. These days I find that games contain very few bugs or issues at all in comparison.