Ajax said:
| Captain_Tom said:
LOL based on what? A lot of people say "Games are Easier" but honestly I don't really think they are. If you actually go back and play those games that gave you trouble when you were little, you usually skull crush them. We just used to suck!
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No. New games can just be as difficult or more difficult. Not FF though. You cant go game over anymore.
I just finished FF3 again and i was using ethers and elixers in normal battles just to not go game over and lose an hour playing time. No auto-safe, no auto-heal, normal enemies who are strong and you need to prepare yourself for a new dungeon. No save points for extended periods sometimes.
FF4's difficulty was actually turned down for the NA release. The PSX port is almost the same as the original Japanese though. But the loading times are killing. Later FFs almost need no grinding.
In old rpgs, it often takes a time to get from a save point to a boss. So you have to win the boss battle. You can be surprised by regular enemies being in bigger groups making you fight for your life all of a sudden or flee to not go game over and lose an hour playing time. In some games right now you respawn where you die. Right before your last battle. That completely destroys the tension of any battle. Why care if you die? You dont need to play half of the dungeon again to get there anyway. You might as well give your little cousin the first try with the boss.
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Resident Evil is a fantastic example of the way expectations in games have changed. Don't get me wrong, I thought RE4 was fantastic and actually really enjoyed RE5 in co-op online. Though they weren't exactly anything like the previous games.
A lot of the scare factor from Resident Evil actually came down to the fact that you had limited saves through the ink ribbons. Did you risk wasting one? Or did you plod into the next room having not saved for the past 2 hours and see what's in there first? Knowing that so much progress could be lost so easily really did help make things more intense.
The control scheme was also revolutionised by 4, to the point that it also removed some of the intensity.
Many people would now consider the mechanics from the earlier Resident Evil games outdated and archaic, but when those were lost, so too was a lot of the terror. The conflicts with enemies, became much more of a struggle, when struggling with the restrictive movement of forwards, backwards, left turn and right turn mapped to the pad with a turning circle rather than full analogue movement and straiffing.
But they actually were vital parts of what made Resident Evil, Resident Evil.
I also think an awful lot of diversity has been lost, though this isn't actually due to gamer tastes as some in there have said being so restrictive, it's much more down to the cut throat nature of the development budgets for games which are as technically accomplished as many demand (look at the hate towards indie on this very forum from many members). I think the 6th gen was probably the sweet spot here. It was the first point where we truly had 3D hardware to be able to realistically push developers visions, without being too cutting edge that the development budgets were sky high. There was also no dominating genre at this point, action and arcade games still had much more of a place in the market as big name releases.
Just for reference, I started gaming on the ZX Spectrum and have owned pretty much every other system since then at some point or another. So I don't just prefer the generation when I got into gaming, it just felt like the peak for me, but there's still plenty of great games out there now.
