Are there games that you tried but just couldn’t get into because they feel outdated? Games that, in theory, you would enjoy, but don’t because the controls, graphics, writing, or mechanics just don’t feel good anymore. Games that, compared to today, just don’t hold up to your standards.
I recently tried playing Heroes of Might and Magic III, and I realized that a lot of the invisible language used through game design from that era, I do not understand. There are many things that the game didn’t explain, and I assume they were just understood by players. Not only that, but I imagine there was a lot of crossover between video games and board games back then, so maybe that language was used as well. I ended up downloading a manual and putting it on my second screen and I get it and played it, but it just wasn’t for me.
I also dropped Mirror’s Edge, but this time it was because of the graphics. It looks and feels great, but the graphics give me a headache. There is way too much bloom, and for some reason, there are some parts that look like the imaginary lens has been covered in Vaseline. This didn’t bother me before, but my eyes are not used to it anymore.
There are also games like the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games that I can’t fully get into because they’re missing mechanics from the later games. The levels and controls feel great, but they don’t feel complete without those mechanics. It keeps me from enjoying the games as much as the others.
Please share yours!
Unpopular opinion for sure, but Vampire: The Masquerade. I’ve started so many playthroughs over the years but just cannot fall into it like other RPGs on account of its dated mechanics and graphics.
I assume you’re talking about VTM Bloodlines, the video game RPG? If you’re not playing with the fan patch, you need to. The game was never totally finished and was rushed out the door by their publisher, so it’d got a lot of jank and missing content. It’s probably a hard game to love, but if you get into it then it does so much better than a lot of other games.
Yes, Bloodlines, should’ve clarified. I’ve never looked into the patch but I’ve heard of it.
The funny thing is how much I love Fallout New Vegas, a game that gets thrown around a lot in the same discussions. Currently have several hundred hours of playtime on FNV across like five consoles and PC, but I’ve never been able to get into VTMB the same way.
The patch is so important I’m pretty sure it’s bundled into the GoG version of the game. It’s essentially required at this point.
I’ll second that the fan patch for VtM:B is pretty much essential for enjoying it. FNV had its bugs, but it was at least polished into a solid experience before release. VtM:B…wasn’t, unfortunately, but the patch gets it there.
Even so, I’d rather play a forward-port of Fallout: New Vegas to a newer engine with updated graphics, but I doubt that it’ll happen. Retexturing might be doable with AI upscaling or something like that, but I can’t think of an inexpensive way to remodel everything. If they’re going to do the kind of asset work that I suspect would be required, they’d probably be better-off just doing Fallout 5.
There’s the Tale of Two Wastelands mod that put Fallout 3’s content into Fallout: New Vegas, but it could just use the content directly, as the two were pretty contemporaneous.
Starfield’s engine runs vastly more smoothly for me than even Fallout 76’s, does a better job of streaming content into memory.
Also, I liked Fallout: New Vegas – one could change the world in many interesting and interacting ways, it had great DLC, I liked the New Old West setting, finding unique items felt really neat. But it had a number of warts, a number related to the engine, and I feel that sometimes people look at it with the gilding of nostalgia:
The game tended to load and save more-and-more slowly over the course of a game. Maybe with a present-day PC on solid-state storage, it’d be okay, but it got absolutely horrendous, especially on consoles.
It also, in my experience, tended to get less-stable over the course of a game.
Falling through terrain was an issue.
Enemy AI was pretty bad. I mean, it was par for the course for the time, but Starfield’s human enemies have gotten more-interesting behavior.
It wasn’t uncommon that I’d manage to break one quest or another on a given playthrough.
Some people really like the “skill point” system in Fallout: New Vegas and earlier, and dislike the shift to just doing perks in Fallout 4, to the point that there have been mods to forward-port the skill system forward. I don’t. One thing I liked about the Fallout series was that the SPECIAL points were significant enough that you could feel each point make a difference; this was a shift from the Dungeons & Dragons convention, where a single stat point often didn’t make much change. The skill points, however, broke with that, and a given level up didn’t make a really noticeable change.
The perks weren’t really balanced; some are clearly better than others. This isn’t to specifically criticize Fallout: New Vegas: that’s been true for the whole series. But it’s not on par with, say, a traditional roguelike, where there’s a very long, iterative development cycle where there are tweaks and rebalancing.
Some of the compromises that had to be made to get performance reasonable are really visible, like the walls around New Vegas, or the limited number of characters running around.
The view distance and weapon ranges were limited to the point that it was always kind of noticeable.
There was a lot of polygons clipping through each other. Not the end of the world, but it did impact immersion for me.
I played with the fan patch but still didn’t get very far. It feels very weird to play an RPG in an early version of the Source engine. Would be neat to see the game get a Source 2 port with upgraded graphics and modernized mechanics.
Bloodlines 2 is coming out sometime. It was in development hell for a while, but it’s a new team working on it now and they released something about it recently. It may actually come out eventually.
Good to know. I thought it was canceled years ago. Thanks.
It feels like trying to play a really old Half-Life 2 mod that was never updated after the initial release. Which makes sense since it was the first Source engine game to be produced by a 3rd party. Also doesn’t help that they tried to make an RPG in an engine designed for FPS.
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