A large number of adults have never played Ultima or anything like an old school RPG. The average gamer is 24-35 and most of them would rather play WoW or COD than anything else. These aren't kids, the market is just much bigger than it used to be and the majority of gamers like it a little easy.
A large number of adults have never played Ultima or anything like an old school RPG. The average gamer is 24-35 and most of them would rather play WoW or COD than anything else. These aren't kids, the market is just much bigger than it used to be and the majority of gamers like it a little easy.
I wouldn't say 'easy'. I'd say 'more in-game, less out-of-the-game'.
The old school RPG wasn't 'hard' in a Demon Souls (PS3) hard. It was hard because it required specific compositions/player numbers etc which has nothing to do with the actual game.
When most gamers play a game, they want to play the game IN the game. Not out-of-the-game, waiting for XYZ which has nothing to do with the actual difficulty.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
The problem today with the RTFM is that the Manuals have become so very bad and uninformative while the ingame tutorials often...well...be very basic.
Today a good manual is a strategy guide or whatever its called you have to buy it extra and the only game with a quite good informative ingame manual is Civ.
No wonder nobody reads them anymore...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
It's not just game, it's the whole internet era. All these kids born in the 90's never lived in world without internet or cell phone. How do you expect them to understand games that were made when DOS was the operating system.
Just tell me what this is.
If your 20 years old or less it's normal not to know.
Or this:
You know really, all you computer bound sissies had it lucky. When my generation wanted to play an electronic game we had to make do with one of these:
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
The problem today with the RTFM is that the Manuals have become so very bad and uninformative while the ingame tutorials often...well...be very basic.
Today a good manual is a strategy guide or whatever its called you have to buy it extra and the only game with a quite good informative ingame manual is Civ.
No wonder nobody reads them anymore...
Heck, a good Wiki site for a game means that you don't need to buy any strategy guides.
Originally posted by bobfish Kids is the wrong terminology. A large number of adults have never played Ultima or anything like an old school RPG. The average gamer is 24-35 and most of them would rather play WoW or COD than anything else. These aren't kids, the market is just much bigger than it used to be and the majority of gamers like it a little easy.
I wouldn't say 'easy'. I'd say 'more in-game, less out-of-the-game'. The old school RPG wasn't 'hard' in a Demon Souls (PS3) hard. It was hard because it required specific compositions/player numbers etc which has nothing to do with the actual game. When most gamers play a game, they want to play the game IN the game. Not out-of-the-game, waiting for XYZ which has nothing to do with the actual difficulty.
I remember when you had to read the game manual if you wanted to know what all the buttons did, or what the commands were. I also remember being able to just start playing a game without having to read the directions because the game was simple enough to play without directions, the game included instructions in the game play itself, the feedback from the game was enough to figure out the controls or the game had some kind of online help. Eventually, the online help in the game moved out to the internet.
People are still reading the manual. They're just doing it while they're playing the game instead of before they can start playing the game.
I'd like to see a follow up of what happened once the students read the manual (which was online).
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
In a few years time children will stare at a kitchen sink full of dishes not knowing what to do with it ... without a dishwasher.
Progress people, let it go allready.
Games these days are not progress lol maybe grafik wise, but all dumb down games these days simpler and simpler i dont see as progress.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
It's kind of silly to argue this in this particular forum. If you're even here looking at this, you're not part of the mainstream in most games that even we're all playing.
I know an equal amount of adults to kids that are total twackjobs when it comes to games. If it's not completely obvious out of the box, they can't be bothered.
If there is anything that I have noticed from playing MMO's, is that the general level of intelligence for the RPG faithful is a bit higher than most of the rest of society. Not to mention the attention span. I know people that will balk at spending thousands of hours leveling a character, and reaching endgame, but will spend that same amount of time playing the same map of Left4Dead or CoD over and over again.
But back to my original point, so many people these days are just absolutely and terminally stupid. It doesnt necessarily have anything to do with age.
I think its more of a supply issue then a demand issue.
I think overall youth are more intelligent then we give them credit for. I think game companies are just more intrested in controlling the supply chain of games so that they are easy to make, copy etc.
Intresting history note on UO. UO 2 was canceled because the business decided it might hurt the existing UO player base which was good enough in their mind as it was.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
It's not just game, it's the whole internet era. All these kids born in the 90's never lived in world without internet or cell phone. How do you expect them to understand games that were made when DOS was the operating system.
Just tell me what this is.
If your 20 years old or less it's normal not to know.
Or this:
You know really, all you computer bound sissies had it lucky. When my generation wanted to play an electronic game we had to make do with one of these:
oh cool I forgot about the merlin. I played that often on road trips with the parents.
While trying to memmorize all the dialoge in star wars using a tape I took into the movie to record my dad said 'you know son that tape player only has so many clicks in it before it breaks, stop rewinding and playing so much'
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
My 2 year old plays Angry Birds, Sonic (She can beat the first level in Sonic 2 and Sonic 4), and other kid-friendly games. I'm pretty sure she's going to be a lot better at video games than I ever was.
If she doesn't like old-school RPGs, I'm not really going to stress out on it, not everybody wants to whip out a pad of graph paper and draw maps, and read lists of spells from a manual trying to figure out what class combination is optimal. I'm sure she'll be amazingly better at some types of games that we as ancient cane-waving forum goers can't even imagine at the moment, and she'll look pityingly upon us and our subpar skills where we can't even handle the kind of mental gymnastics it takes to follow the new types of brain-stretching, because our brains are calcified into old-school patterns that aren't relevant.
It's not just game, it's the whole internet era. All these kids born in the 90's never lived in world without internet or cell phone. How do you expect them to understand games that were made when DOS was the operating system.
Just tell me what this is.
If your 20 years old or less it's normal not to know.
Hell, iam 20 years old and i know that's a Floppy Disk however i never used that one as that's an 8" i used a 3.5" alot when i was 5 years old just to play Commander Keen, Jazz jackrabbit, Duke nukem and alot of less famous games.
I perosnally find all this kind of disingenous.I grew up during the era when video games were first evolving.I palyed the Wizardry,most of the Ultima,Might and magic,SSI games(not limited to the D&D ones),Bard's tale,Fallout and Dungeon master series without ever having to look at a manual other than to answer the questions used as copy protection in some.Not to mention games that were a one off or never got a sequel liek Amberstar,Sentinel Worlds 1:Future Magic and my all time favorite Wasteland(though it was the spiritual father of the Fallout series).
In fact the only games I cna recall needing to look at a manual for was vehicle sims and a little known Looking Glass Studios game called Terra nova because it was the first game that using wasd and mouse for movement was mandatory(never used mouse for Doom since keyboard was good enough).
Hell, iam 20 years old and i know that's a Floppy Disk however i never used that one as that's an 8" i used a 3.5" alot when i was 5 years old just to play Commander Keen, Jazz jackrabbit, Duke nukem and alot of less famous games.
From the proportions on the label, that is almost certainly a 5 1/4" floppy. Not that I guess the distinction is that important. '
When I started off, it was cassette tapes. Man, I feel old. Not as old as my dad though! Gah, punch cards.
I don't know weither to be sad or angry about this, doesn't give me much hope for the future of gaming when these are the sort of minds that will be creating.
Even some of the comments posted on that article were disturbing.
"I downloaded Final Fantasy 7 over PSN and I could not get into it. It's not even very obscure like Ultima IV. I'm 16 I feel a little shafted not getting being able to play some of these awesome old games (I just can't get a grasp on Mega Man)."
Can't understand FF7, ok I can accept that, it's a deep jrpg and they aren't for everyone, but not even the simplest of concepts in games like megaman?!
Dumb article. I grew up playing ultima, quest for glory, zork and all that jazz. But guess what? Games evolved, innovation occurred. I'm sorry that people feel that those old games are "better" in some way than new games. What utter nonsense.
It's like saying, "People these days just can't handle old-school motor-vehicles." Yeah, let's see you lot go out and risk breaking your wrist while you hand crank your engine and then drive around without any modern saftey devices.
Remember when pressing "i" or "b" didn't open your inventory/bag? Yeah, totally fun to go into an archaic menu system and try to find the potion you need. So many things we take for granted these days, but that's because things got better, we just consume products way too quickly to enjoy them now is the main difference.
Back then, you didn't rush to the level cap, you just sat down and played the game. Between, then and now, we've seen and heard some fantastic story-lines and interacted with well developed non-player characters. Because of that, our standards have been raised, we expect more.
Most old games have retarded conversations, simplistic plots, little to no character development and so on. Nostalgia is worse than crack, I highly suggest people learn to enjoy things because in another 10 years, everyone will look back thinking, "those were the good ol' days."
It's not just game, it's the whole internet era. All these kids born in the 90's never lived in world without internet or cell phone. How do you expect them to understand games that were made when DOS was the operating system.
Just tell me what this is.
If your 20 years old or less it's normal not to know.
It's not just game, it's the whole internet era. All these kids born in the 90's never lived in world without internet or cell phone. How do you expect them to understand games that were made when DOS was the operating system.
Just tell me what this is.
If your 20 years old or less it's normal not to know.
Heh, yeah. Back when a floppy disk was literally floppy.
RPGs were only PnP at one point, and that typically involved reading tons of manuals and source books to be able to play them. When the first electronic versions of RPGs started coming out, people who were most likely to gravitate to them were already accustomed to having to read information about how to play a game. Today, most RPGs are online only, with just a few die-hard holdouts who still roll actual dice and scribble on character sheets. There's nothing really surprising in this article. I don't think it's disheartening either. Online RPGs typically feed the information a player needs to know, when they need it, instead of dumping it all in their laps up front. It's just more efficient that way and what we've become accustomed to. Not to mention, it's less expensive than printing rulebooks.
Dumb article. I grew up playing ultima, quest for glory, zork and all that jazz. But guess what? Games evolved, innovation occurred. I'm sorry that people feel that those old games are "better" in some way than new games. What utter nonsense.
It's like saying, "People these days just can't handle old-school motor-vehicles." Yeah, let's see you lot go out and risk breaking your wrist while you hand crank your engine and then drive around without any modern saftey devices.
Remember when pressing "i" or "b" didn't open your inventory/bag? Yeah, totally fun to go into an archaic menu system and try to find the potion you need. So many things we take for granted these days, but that's because things got better, we just consume products way too quickly to enjoy them now is the main difference.
Back then, you didn't rush to the level cap, you just sat down and played the game. Between, then and now, we've seen and heard some fantastic story-lines and interacted with well developed non-player characters. Because of that, our standards have been raised, we expect more.
Most old games have retarded conversations, simplistic plots, little to no character development and so on. Nostalgia is worse than crack, I highly suggest people learn to enjoy things because in another 10 years, everyone will look back thinking, "those were the good ol' days."
I agree. I am 33 years old, so I have played a crapton of the "old school" games. Yes, many of those games were completely awesome for their day, but there's really no reason why anyone from later generations should have to "get them".
I'm not entirely sure why there is so much elitism tied in with videogames. I mean come on, we're all nerds who spend a bunch of money on living vicariously through our characters in virtual worlds. Just because I played through Dragon Warrior (aka DragonQuest 1) on my NES when I was like 7-8 doesn't mean that I have some divine knowledge of what a videogame should be, or even make me a better gamer. All it means that I was able to experience some great games from when I was younger.
Yes, we should show respect to the old games that paved the way for the new games, but like everything else, games evolved. Games can both be intuitive and challenging, a lack of infuriating UI or game mechanics doesn't make a game great, it just means it's dated.
I look forward to the games I am interested in, I play the crap out of them and enjoy every minute. At the end of that day, that's all that really matters.
Dumb article. I grew up playing ultima, quest for glory, zork and all that jazz. But guess what? Games evolved, innovation occurred. I'm sorry that people feel that those old games are "better" in some way than new games. What utter nonsense.
It's like saying, "People these days just can't handle old-school motor-vehicles." Yeah, let's see you lot go out and risk breaking your wrist while you hand crank your engine and then drive around without any modern saftey devices.
Remember when pressing "i" or "b" didn't open your inventory/bag? Yeah, totally fun to go into an archaic menu system and try to find the potion you need. So many things we take for granted these days, but that's because things got better, we just consume products way too quickly to enjoy them now is the main difference.
Back then, you didn't rush to the level cap, you just sat down and played the game. Between, then and now, we've seen and heard some fantastic story-lines and interacted with well developed non-player characters. Because of that, our standards have been raised, we expect more.
Most old games have retarded conversations, simplistic plots, little to no character development and so on. Nostalgia is worse than crack, I highly suggest people learn to enjoy things because in another 10 years, everyone will look back thinking, "those were the good ol' days."
I agree. I am 33 years old, so I have played a crapton of the "old school" games. Yes, many of those games were completely awesome for their day, but there's really no reason why anyone from later generations should have to "get them".
I'm not entirely sure why there is so much elitism tied in with videogames. I mean come on, we're all nerds who spend a bunch of money on living vicariously through our characters in virtual worlds. Just because I played through Dragon Warrior (aka DragonQuest 1) on my NES when I was like 7-8 doesn't mean that I have some divine knowledge of what a videogame should be, or even make me a better gamer. All it means that I was able to experience some great games from when I was younger.
Yes, we should show respect to the old games that paved the way for the new games, but like everything else, games evolved. Games can both be intuitive and challenging, a lack of infuriating UI or game mechanics doesn't make a game great, it just means it's dated.
I look forward to the games I am interested in, I play the crap out of them and enjoy every minute. At the end of that day, that's all that really matters.
I'm sorry but playing through games back in the 80's DOES make you better than the kids of today. Games back then were challenging. They weren't designed to be beaten in 6-12 hours. You had limited lives. Everything about games from back then was harder, and it shows. Kids are helpless these days, and it's because EVERYTHING is being dumbed down. Idiocracy is a movie that pretty much sums up where the world is heading.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"
Comments
Kids is the wrong terminology.
A large number of adults have never played Ultima or anything like an old school RPG. The average gamer is 24-35 and most of them would rather play WoW or COD than anything else. These aren't kids, the market is just much bigger than it used to be and the majority of gamers like it a little easy.
I wouldn't say 'easy'. I'd say 'more in-game, less out-of-the-game'.
The old school RPG wasn't 'hard' in a Demon Souls (PS3) hard. It was hard because it required specific compositions/player numbers etc which has nothing to do with the actual game.
When most gamers play a game, they want to play the game IN the game. Not out-of-the-game, waiting for XYZ which has nothing to do with the actual difficulty.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
HAHAHA !
Read the manual !
Good one !
HAHAHA !
If this forum had smileys, I would use a lot of them now.
Today people dont even read the manuals of serious software. Games ? Forget it !
But seriously, 1985 ? Thats when PCs had like 1 MB RAM or something.
The problem today with the RTFM is that the Manuals have become so very bad and uninformative while the ingame tutorials often...well...be very basic.
Today a good manual is a strategy guide or whatever its called you have to buy it extra and the only game with a quite good informative ingame manual is Civ.
No wonder nobody reads them anymore...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
Or this:
You know really, all you computer bound sissies had it lucky. When my generation wanted to play an electronic game we had to make do with one of these:
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Heck, a good Wiki site for a game means that you don't need to buy any strategy guides.
I remember when you had to read the game manual if you wanted to know what all the buttons did, or what the commands were. I also remember being able to just start playing a game without having to read the directions because the game was simple enough to play without directions, the game included instructions in the game play itself, the feedback from the game was enough to figure out the controls or the game had some kind of online help. Eventually, the online help in the game moved out to the internet.
People are still reading the manual. They're just doing it while they're playing the game instead of before they can start playing the game.
I'd like to see a follow up of what happened once the students read the manual (which was online).
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Games these days are not progress lol maybe grafik wise, but all dumb down games these days simpler and simpler i dont see as progress.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
It's kind of silly to argue this in this particular forum. If you're even here looking at this, you're not part of the mainstream in most games that even we're all playing.
I know an equal amount of adults to kids that are total twackjobs when it comes to games. If it's not completely obvious out of the box, they can't be bothered.
If there is anything that I have noticed from playing MMO's, is that the general level of intelligence for the RPG faithful is a bit higher than most of the rest of society. Not to mention the attention span. I know people that will balk at spending thousands of hours leveling a character, and reaching endgame, but will spend that same amount of time playing the same map of Left4Dead or CoD over and over again.
But back to my original point, so many people these days are just absolutely and terminally stupid. It doesnt necessarily have anything to do with age.
I think its more of a supply issue then a demand issue.
I think overall youth are more intelligent then we give them credit for. I think game companies are just more intrested in controlling the supply chain of games so that they are easy to make, copy etc.
Intresting history note on UO. UO 2 was canceled because the business decided it might hurt the existing UO player base which was good enough in their mind as it was.
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
oh cool I forgot about the merlin. I played that often on road trips with the parents.
While trying to memmorize all the dialoge in star wars using a tape I took into the movie to record my dad said 'you know son that tape player only has so many clicks in it before it breaks, stop rewinding and playing so much'
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Do you know the "In my times we used to..." mentality makes you older than you even are?
My 2 year old plays Angry Birds, Sonic (She can beat the first level in Sonic 2 and Sonic 4), and other kid-friendly games. I'm pretty sure she's going to be a lot better at video games than I ever was.
If she doesn't like old-school RPGs, I'm not really going to stress out on it, not everybody wants to whip out a pad of graph paper and draw maps, and read lists of spells from a manual trying to figure out what class combination is optimal. I'm sure she'll be amazingly better at some types of games that we as ancient cane-waving forum goers can't even imagine at the moment, and she'll look pityingly upon us and our subpar skills where we can't even handle the kind of mental gymnastics it takes to follow the new types of brain-stretching, because our brains are calcified into old-school patterns that aren't relevant.
Oh i thought this was about pencil and paper RPG =/
Hell, iam 20 years old and i know that's a Floppy Disk however i never used that one as that's an 8" i used a 3.5" alot when i was 5 years old just to play Commander Keen, Jazz jackrabbit, Duke nukem and alot of less famous games.
I perosnally find all this kind of disingenous.I grew up during the era when video games were first evolving.I palyed the Wizardry,most of the Ultima,Might and magic,SSI games(not limited to the D&D ones),Bard's tale,Fallout and Dungeon master series without ever having to look at a manual other than to answer the questions used as copy protection in some.Not to mention games that were a one off or never got a sequel liek Amberstar,Sentinel Worlds 1:Future Magic and my all time favorite Wasteland(though it was the spiritual father of the Fallout series).
In fact the only games I cna recall needing to look at a manual for was vehicle sims and a little known Looking Glass Studios game called Terra nova because it was the first game that using wasd and mouse for movement was mandatory(never used mouse for Doom since keyboard was good enough).
Ultima IV was an exception not the rule.
From the proportions on the label, that is almost certainly a 5 1/4" floppy. Not that I guess the distinction is that important.
When I started off, it was cassette tapes. Man, I feel old. Not as old as my dad though! Gah, punch cards.
I don't know weither to be sad or angry about this, doesn't give me much hope for the future of gaming when these are the sort of minds that will be creating.
Even some of the comments posted on that article were disturbing.
"I downloaded Final Fantasy 7 over PSN and I could not get into it. It's not even very obscure like Ultima IV. I'm 16 I feel a little shafted not getting being able to play some of these awesome old games (I just can't get a grasp on Mega Man)."
Can't understand FF7, ok I can accept that, it's a deep jrpg and they aren't for everyone, but not even the simplest of concepts in games like megaman?!
What is the world coming to..
Dumb article. I grew up playing ultima, quest for glory, zork and all that jazz. But guess what? Games evolved, innovation occurred. I'm sorry that people feel that those old games are "better" in some way than new games. What utter nonsense.
It's like saying, "People these days just can't handle old-school motor-vehicles." Yeah, let's see you lot go out and risk breaking your wrist while you hand crank your engine and then drive around without any modern saftey devices.
Remember when pressing "i" or "b" didn't open your inventory/bag? Yeah, totally fun to go into an archaic menu system and try to find the potion you need. So many things we take for granted these days, but that's because things got better, we just consume products way too quickly to enjoy them now is the main difference.
Back then, you didn't rush to the level cap, you just sat down and played the game. Between, then and now, we've seen and heard some fantastic story-lines and interacted with well developed non-player characters. Because of that, our standards have been raised, we expect more.
Most old games have retarded conversations, simplistic plots, little to no character development and so on. Nostalgia is worse than crack, I highly suggest people learn to enjoy things because in another 10 years, everyone will look back thinking, "those were the good ol' days."
That better not be my Orcs & Humans game!
Heh, yeah. Back when a floppy disk was literally floppy.
RPGs were only PnP at one point, and that typically involved reading tons of manuals and source books to be able to play them. When the first electronic versions of RPGs started coming out, people who were most likely to gravitate to them were already accustomed to having to read information about how to play a game. Today, most RPGs are online only, with just a few die-hard holdouts who still roll actual dice and scribble on character sheets. There's nothing really surprising in this article. I don't think it's disheartening either. Online RPGs typically feed the information a player needs to know, when they need it, instead of dumping it all in their laps up front. It's just more efficient that way and what we've become accustomed to. Not to mention, it's less expensive than printing rulebooks.
I agree. I am 33 years old, so I have played a crapton of the "old school" games. Yes, many of those games were completely awesome for their day, but there's really no reason why anyone from later generations should have to "get them".
I'm not entirely sure why there is so much elitism tied in with videogames. I mean come on, we're all nerds who spend a bunch of money on living vicariously through our characters in virtual worlds. Just because I played through Dragon Warrior (aka DragonQuest 1) on my NES when I was like 7-8 doesn't mean that I have some divine knowledge of what a videogame should be, or even make me a better gamer. All it means that I was able to experience some great games from when I was younger.
Yes, we should show respect to the old games that paved the way for the new games, but like everything else, games evolved. Games can both be intuitive and challenging, a lack of infuriating UI or game mechanics doesn't make a game great, it just means it's dated.
I look forward to the games I am interested in, I play the crap out of them and enjoy every minute. At the end of that day, that's all that really matters.
So true so true
-Semper ubi sub ubi!
always wear underwear
Downhill progress maybe.
I'm sorry but playing through games back in the 80's DOES make you better than the kids of today. Games back then were challenging. They weren't designed to be beaten in 6-12 hours. You had limited lives. Everything about games from back then was harder, and it shows. Kids are helpless these days, and it's because EVERYTHING is being dumbed down. Idiocracy is a movie that pretty much sums up where the world is heading.
"I am not in a server with Gankers...THEY ARE IN A SERVER WITH ME!!!"