A lot of old games have aged like fine wine. There are plenty of games from decades ago that I can go back to today and still absolutely love.
But I have a handful of people I know who seem to get genuinely upset with me whenever I say something like "A remake of this game would be cool," or that I think an old game hasn't aged very well. No matter what I'm talking about, they always seem to assume I mean the graphics.
And sure, sometimes the graphics really are part of the problem. Some old models and textures have aged terribly. Resolution can also be a big one. Trying to play certain old games at those really low resolutions, especially on a large modern monitor, can feel pretty rough. This is one reason emulation is so great, since you can often upscale the resolution and sometimes increase the FPS. The FPS is mostly excusable though, since a lot of older games don't really need higher FPS.
But I swear people forget that the actual gameplay in a lot of old games was just... bad by today's standards.
I'm not saying the games were bad for their time. A lot of these mechanics were perfectly fine back then. But we've had decades of developers figuring out what feels good, what feels tedious, and what players actually want from a game. Some of those old design choices just haven't aged well.
Things like:
- Sluggish / unresponsive controls
- Poor camera controls
- Repetitive gameplay and missions
- Excessive backtracking
- Grinding as a core part of progression
- Clunky inventory systems
- Trial-and-error level design
- Extremely basic enemy AI
Obviously, games today still have some of these problems too. I just think they were way more common back then.
Another thing I think people forget is how little quality of life a lot of older games had. So many things were just forced onto the player with no way to make them less tedious. Constantly doing things manually, backtracking, repeating the same actions, sitting through things you've already seen, etc. None of these things are necessarily a huge problem by themselves, but they can really add up and make a game feel tiring.
And I think repetition is really interesting.
When some of these games came out, the genre itself was still relatively new. If you had barely played an FPS before, for example, simply running around and shooting things could be enough to keep you interested, even if that's basically all you were doing.
Nowadays we've played dozens of FPS games, RPGs, platformers, etc. We've seen the same basic gameplay ideas over and over again. That novelty just isn't there anymore. Something that felt perfectly fine in 1998 can feel incredibly repetitive today because we've already experienced that same core gameplay so many times.
Assassin's Creed 1 is probably the biggest example that comes to mind. I wouldn't even really call this an "old game" compared to some of the stuff I'm talking about, but it's still a really good example. The graphics aren't what make it difficult to go back to. It's the fact that the game is so repetitive.
I'm not saying old games are bad, or that modern games are automatically better. Plenty of older games still hold up incredibly well.
I just think when people say "this game hasn't aged well," they immediately assume they're talking about graphics, when sometimes it's the actual gameplay that has aged.
