Jump to content

The difference between 'good' games and technically superior games


Clephas

Recommended Posts

One of the things I've noticed over the years I've spent as a gamer (almost twenty-two years now, to one degree or another) is that a technically superior game (such as Final Fantasy XIII) is not necessarily a 'good' game.  I've frequently asked myself why this is... and I've yet to come to a full conclusion.

 

So, I decided to use an example of a truly great game that wasn't necessarily technically superior to everything around it.

 

Dragon Force- It was the release that interested me enough to pick up the Sega Saturn, a Working Designs localization of a conquest-strategy/rpg.  There were eight different nations you could start out leading, each with their own storyline (leading to the same endgame, but meh) with a different protagonist for each.  There were a lot of different units you could use, ranging from generic footsoldiers and cavalry to gorgon-like dragons and zombies.  You could recruit generals by capturing them after defeating them in battle, and the object of the game was to crush the other large nations, capture their leaders, and recruit them into your army. 

 

Now why was this game great?  First, it was downright addictive.  The gameplay was never the same two playthroughs in a row (though the methodology was) and considering the limited capabilities of the Saturn, it startles me what they did with the limited resources they had available to them, looking back at it now.  Second, it had ridiculously catchy songs.  I found myself humming along for hours while I fought battle after battle, never really getting bored with it.  Third was the story... while - like all conquest-strategy games with story - it was mostly activated by your conquest of certain castles/areas, it nonetheless managed to draw you in nicely.  The desperation of the shattered Kingdom of Izumo, the ambition of Junon, the mix of isolationism and a sense of duty driving the elf queen Teiris... All of these things served as a nice beginning, and the endgame was surprisingly poignant (despite being extremely predictable story-wise from a veteran rpg-gamer's point of view).  Also, I rofled constantly at the beastmen and the really weird music they stuck on their story sequences. 

 

Now, those are ELEMENTS of what made the game great... but by themselves, all of them could be matched to one degree or another in a number of other games.  Generations of Chaos (the first one released in the US) was a direct spiritual tribute to Dragon Force, and it seemingly had a similar level in each individual area... but it failed to be as addictive or interesting.

 

Why?  Because a truly great game is like a puzzle, its elements fitting so well together that it creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  Games like Dragon Force and Chrono Trigger are unusual more for this quality than for any individual aspect of their gameplay or story.  They are almost works of art, rather than simple merchandise. 

 

Needless to say, I was fortunate to grow up in the early era of video games, because it gave me an appreciation for this kind of masterful game artistry that I doubt I could have obtained if I had begun in the PS2 era or later, where technology began allowing the creation of games with an unbalanced emphasis on a one or a few aspects of a game while still managing to gather in mainstream and casual gamers. 

 

I'm not saying such artistry is dead, because that would be patently ridiculous.  It is just a lot rarer, proportionately, because of the simple fact that it IS so much easier to produce relatively high quality games under current technological conditions.  To be blunt, gaming has suffered from the same thing that happened to every cottage industry after it hit assembly-line mentalities... predictability.

 

Of course, some indie companies are reviving what was best about the old era, but they are also indulging in nostalgia far too often.  Yes, I do like the FFVI style... but is it really necessary to copy it or Dragon Quest for EVERY SINGLE new jrpg-imitation that comes out?  *Clephas rolls his eyes in exasperation*

 

I'm not saying that the 'golden age of the jrpg' (the SNES and PS1 eras) was absolutely unequivocally better than the modern era of games... it was just oh so much easier to recognize a truly great game when you saw it, lol.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's all about design and gameplay. You'd first have to ask yourself what truly defines a game and perhaps - what remains a "good", or rather - a meaningful game. Back in the old days, we were much more limited; higher emphasis often went not into the graphics, or sound, but mainly the game mechanics and simple ideas were often the most fun. Take Archon for example. I spent days and days playing it with my dad and sis back in the old days when C64 ruled the world; it had simple graphics and sound, and in overall was nothing more than a variation on a chess game - but with such a twist! When two pieces clashed, the game turned into arena-styled battle game and each piece had it's distinct pros and cons. It was even possible to beat such dangerous foes like a bishop with a mere pewn, provided a player was good enough to do so.

Ideas are often important as well. I'm not saying they are the soul of a game, since in the end only execution matters, but good games are often works of art; they always remain stylish and distinct in that sense that even if the graphics are simple, they will have that something "special". It's what made games like Cave Story very succesful as well; people fell in love with it's retro stylistics and simplified gameplay, which still managed to sport so much variety within the gameplay. I'd say that good games are often very challenging; they don't need to be ridicolously hard, but there's always that "line", visible within that distinguishes casuals from hardcore gamers, while still allowing everyone to enjoy everything.

I won't say modern games are bad, not at all. We still get very nice titles that prove the game industry is progressing onwards and there's a lot more to discover; the only issue is that most creators nowadays create games that don't contain any real content, only form. They have nice graphics and everything, stories written by the biggest scenario writers, scores composed by famous musicians but they always lack something, including a soul. It's perhaps why I reverted to retro gaming over the last few years and generally hold older games in much higher regard than any of the new titles; there's something in it, indeed, since most of modern games don't amuse me anymore.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

the most fun. Take Archon for example. I spent days and days playing it with my dad and sis back in the old days when C64 ruled the world; it had simple graphics and sound, and in overall was nothing more than a variation on a chess game - but with such a twist! When two pieces clashed, the game turned into arena-styled battle game and each piece had it's distinct pros and cons. It was even possible to beat such dangerous foes like a bishop with a mere pewn, provided a player was good enough to do so.

 

We must play some time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When applied to the modern world, I have certain requirements for games to be considered "good," please note this is for NEW games, I will discuss already released/older further down.

 

Newer games must be capable of bringing out the capabilities of my machine, that is the first and absolute requirement I have.  I have invested over $5,000 in my gaming PC and I want games that will make it worth it.  The only games that have been able to do so in the past few years have been Metro:  Last LightFarcry 3Battlefield 4The Witcher 2The Elder Scrolls V:  Skyrim (fully modded) and Crysis 3.  However, someone might bring up the point of games that are graphically taxing are the same as graphically intensive, that is incorrect.  Metro 2033 is argued to be fairly graphically intensive because it took a lot of GPU power and memory, but rather the game just ran like CRAP on all machines.  With Metro 2033 it had issues with just about every single piece of hardware and when I played it I still had my two Titans installed, but the game could not register SLI very well at all and I had to remove one just to play it without significant framerate loss.

 

Now for older games, such as the fallout or final fantasy franchises, it's first a matter of nostalgia combined with mechanics which causes me to play them still to this day.  I have over 2000 hours on Fallout 3 alone with another 1500+ on new vegas, and I don't believe I could count the amount of times I completed everything in final fantasy 7, 8, 10 and 12, it just isn't possible.  The fallout franchise has mechanics that I'm very familiar with and will always enjoy, that's the second reason I bought Skyrim was because it had very similar mechanics (first being it was the best looking game to come out EVER at the time).

 

I cannot say without despising myself, that something in the past, aka the "golden age of the jrpg" as you call it, was the single greatest time of games ever, because we live in the modern world where new things are always being made.  I put more hours into Skyrim than I did final fantasy 6, Grandia 2 or the Power Stone games, which is arguably a way to say if a game is better, but it can also be said it just has a LOT of content and can be approached in different ways, or it's just plain addictive to play.

 

Now I'm not saying that the old games are bad, not in the least.  One of my favorite games of all time was Phantasy Star Online  for the dreamcast, I played almost nonstop when I was younger, and when it got ported to the gamecube it was a MASSIVE improvement, including the release of Episode 2.  At the time this game was graphically fantastic, but even when I started to build my PC I still played it because it was a great game.

 

With that you might be thinking I also follow franchises based on previous games, yes and no.  While I did love Phantasy Star Online, it's successor Phatasy Star Universe was a colossal flop of a title and I dropped it very soon after picking it up.  There was practically nothing in that game that I enjoyed even though it was a great looking game for it's time.

 

Now, for the newer and less graphically intensive titles, such as Transistor as someone had said before me, it takes quite a bit for something such as that to impress me and push me to trying it.  A few exceptions are say Terraria which runs in a fantastic way on my craptop for when I'm away on business or vacation, or South Park:  The Stick of Truth, which is practically a required buy for any South Park fans, it looks like crap, but it's South Park.

 

A huge example of what games I don't play, is the Dark Souls series.  The games absolutely, look like ass.  The gameplay is designed for people who love their own suffering and love to progress through that suffering but they both still run like ass.  First one could not be played without third party mods and the 2nd one, while it is an improvement, it still has awful graphical features and has the same kind of gameplay.

 

Now for the concept of quality.  It first depends on the genre, whether it's an RPG, an FPS, a Point and Click, a Rogue-like, an Amnesia-like horror, a Hack n' Slash, Fantasy or Simulators (stop buying them, they're Youtube bait).  With all games I have the factors of replayability, length and difficulty.  For the matter of replayability, it focuses on several aspects, but one way to think of it is by looking at those Amnesia-style horror games or very linear games with no adaptation of certain aspects, there is absolutely no reason to play them more than once.  Length is a very big case for me, as it's blatantly the thing that killed the newest Wolfenstein game for me; $60 on a game that had a net length of 4 hours for me.  While it ran BEAUTIFULLY it was still far too short.  Even if it was a cheap game or even free, I wouldn't want it to end quickly or feel as if it was rushed through it's plot if it had one.  And finally difficulty, the only game do it right so far, has been the newest installment of Thief.  In-depth customization of difficulty is absolutely the greatest thing that could happen other than it's graphical fidelity, making the game play how YOU want it to, how YOU want to experience it and how YOU want to change it is the best way to handle it.  While it's still acceptable in other aspects, the simple 3-5 difficulties with maybe a perma-death setting is getting to be far too redundant in this age of hardcore gamers.

 

I of course have my own personal tastes when it comes to games as does everyone else, but those are my two-cents.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PC RPG gamers have been arguing similar points for many many years. PC RPGs used to all be about player choice, then about 15 years ago the emphasis changed, publishers were increasingly in control, player choice was too hard and a significant waste of resources, graphics are what sold games after all. That and action gameplay. RPGs had to be developed on the console as well, to gain maximum profit etc etc. So the emphasis in RPGs changed, and PC RPG fans have been crying about it for more than a decade. I'm not going to recap a decades worth of arguments here though, lets just say the RPG landscape has been pretty barren for a long time.

 

Which is why I'm such a big fan of Indie games. For the first time in a very long time, I'm genuinely excited about games again. Some developers tentatively wanted to create games like we saw in the old days, launched a few kickstartes and fans threw millions of dollars at them. So much money that a few publishers have sat up and taken notice, 'maybe there's a market for gamers that aren't just after pretty graphics. Could it be that there's a section of the population not thrilled by an "awesome button"?'

 

I'm so hyped about Divinity: Original Sin, I honestly can't contain myself. Best game of the year, yes I'm declaring it now!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I mostly said it was the 'golden age of jrpgs' because it was on the balance point, when money had seriously begun to build up in the Japanese age of the industry, but before things hit the 'assembly line' level of production.  People with skills were able to wield them to their hearts' content, within the extreme limits of the hardware, mostly because there were no industry outsiders who 'already know what the public likes'. 

Basically, because no one had any real idea of what the public wanted from video games as the capabilities of new systems gave them more options, the developers were allowed to figure it out themselves, with relatively minimal outside input (exceptions like Xenogears, where well over half the game was shortened or cut out entirely only serve to outline how different things were back then).  To be blunt, no large studio could get away with that kind of relative freedom nowadays, which is precisely why the indies are flourishing.  Preconceptions of what the gaming public wants (sometimes right, sometimes horribly wrong) are the greatest weakness of the large studios... in particular when those expectations are coming from people who don't game in the first place. 

 

Perhaps the biggest reason for the way the PS2 age glutted us on medium quality games in general is because of that previous age of innovation and the way they shifted from that innovation to expanding on existing concepts in that era.  While the PS2 definitely signaled an improvement in system capabilities, the main concepts behind the games coming out for the new systems had already been tested on the Saturn and PS1 in the previous era.  If anything, the PS3 era has been even worse that way for the Japanese market, because they've ended up with a glut of dungeon crawlers, hunting games, and crappy online games, as their market has switched to the portable systems almost entirely.  It does make the truly great games that come out over there stand out more, though...lol

 

As for here... our end of the industry has been going through its own growing pangs.  tbh, I've been more disappointed in general over the last generation for games over here than in any other part of gaming (including the hundreds of VNs I've plowed through).  That isn't to say that I don't find something great on occasion... but that's the point, it really is occasionally.  Proportionately speaking, games really worthy of being enshrined in a 'gaming hall of fame' have become much rarer.  Too many series are resting on their laurels, new games show a startling lack of innovative concepts (despite lots of hype) and terrible execution (in most cases), and certain series (*coughs* Call of Duty *coughs*) have been milked to death by their producers. 

 

Exceptions, (like The Last of Us) only serve to prove my point... they really are exceptions. 

 

Edit:  I am aware that COD is a case of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', but is it really necessary to put out a new iteration of the series with practically the same gameplay every single year?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...