Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2020-02-10 11:08 am
rionaleonhart) wrote2020-02-10 11:08 am
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Press Start.
One of the reasons I'm so interested in videogames specifically, of all the storytelling formats available, is that I've grown up alongside them. There have been changes in television and film storytelling in my lifetime (television in particular, with the shift in expectations from 'you'll probably watch one episode a week and may miss some here and there' to 'you'll probably watch the whole thing from start to finish and may watch several episodes in a session'), but I've watched huge changes happen in videogames, and it's fascinating to watch this storytelling medium deciding what it wants to be.
Even 'becoming a means of telling stories' is a change that's happened largely in my lifetime. Games with stories did exist before I did, but over time I've seen more and more emphasis placed on the storytelling side. Our first household console was the Sega Master System II, which didn't get much more intricate plot-wise than 'TAILS HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED; FIND TAILS.' At the time, I couldn't have imagined anything on the level of, say, The Last of Us, either in storytelling or in gameplay complexity.
I still remember reading Ender's Game in the Game Boy era and being unable to comprehend the scene where Ender, offered two glasses by a giant in a videogame, chooses not to drink; instead he kicks both of them over, climbs up the giant's face and burrows into his eye. Videogames only had two buttons to me; one was the 'jump' button and one was the 'everything else' button. I couldn't get my head around the idea of having that sort of freedom.
There have been some obvious changes in games over the last twenty-odd years, such as the improvement in graphics. (I remember seeing a Final Fantasy X trailer for the first time and being absolutely stunned by the graphics. The characters looked exactly like real people! I could never have imagined a game looking this good! Surely this was the pinnacle of visual achievement? It's sort of hilarious to look back at it.) But here are some other shifts I've noticed over time.
A note: there are consoles I've never owned - in particular, the Xbox line - so these observations are going to be skewed by my personal experiences, which are mainly on Sony consoles and Nintendo handhelds. I started playing games in earnest in the late 1990s, with the Game Boy. I didn't actually play our Sega Master System II, because I couldn't take the pressure of being responsible for Sonic's life; I just made my brother play so I could watch.
- It's now much easier to pick a game up if you've drifted away from it for a few months. I once had to restart my playthrough of Final Fantasy VII because I'd set it down for too long and forgotten where I was supposed to be going. If that happens in Final Fantasy VII, you're absolutely screwed. If it happens in XV, you'll be fine; the 'quest' menu will tell you what you're doing and set a map marker to help get you there. (Final Fantasy IX was the first in the series to take pity on forgetful players; you can go into Qu's Marsh and ask the Moogles for directions if you're not sure what you're supposed to be doing.)
- When you start a new game nowadays, it'll probably tell you what you're supposed to do! Silent Hill 2, for the PS2, assumed you'd read the manual in the game box and already knew what the controls were; woe betide you if you hadn't. On a replay, I was flailing around frantically as the first monster approached before I worked out I was supposed to hold R2 and press X to attack.
- Games are more forgiving, on the whole. There's an understanding that, once a player has shown they can do something, there's no need to force them to do it again. I replayed PS2 game Jak II recently, and the checkpointing was a nightmare; I'd have to play through a lengthy sequence tens of times because I kept dying and having to restart from the beginning. If that game came out today, those sequences might still be tricky, but they'd probably let you restart from later, rather than making you replay segments you've already done to get to the part you can't get past.
- On a related note, I expect modern games to respect my time more than games did in the past. Forgiving checkpoints are an aspect of this, but I also expect to be able to save when I need to, and to be able to pause or skip cutscenes. The addition of a 'skip cutscene' option was a very noticeable change between Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2.
- I no longer expect games to become progressively more difficult. There may be a slight increase in challenge, but I don't expect the game to get near-impossible by the end if I'm doing fine at the start.
- Limited lives are rarely a thing nowadays! If you fail, you can retry as many times as you need to. Life systems feel like they were probably a holdover from arcade games, which have limited lives so they can prompt you to enter more money; there was never any real need for them in consoles. Jak and Daxter was the first time I saw a platformer without a life system, and I remember reading a magazine review that considered it extremely noteworthy.
- The earliest platformers I experienced, Super Mario Land for the Game Boy and the Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Sega Master System II, had limited lives AND NO SAVE SYSTEM. You were expected to beat the entire game in one sitting, and if you ran out of lives you had to start the entire thing from the beginning. It was awful.
- There's been a really noticeable increase in female protagonists. When I really started getting into videogames, around the turn of the millennium, Lara Croft and Samus Aran were the only female game protagonists I knew of; they weren't the only ones who existed, but the number was still very small. I've now played over twenty games where the main playable character is female, although male-led games still dominate hugely.
- There are no longer the PS2 era's lengthy delays between US releases and European releases, which I appreciate!
- Some genres have almost disappeared; some have flourished. There used to be so many colourful, child-friendly collectathon platformers in the PS1 era; those were fun, but you rarely see them nowadays! The first open-world game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption on the PS3, and since then open-world games have become very common. (I suppose you could say Shadow of the Colossus was the first one I played, actually, but it's very different from modern open-world games.) There's been a rise in games that focus solely on story, without any combat, or at least a rise in those games being available in Europe: 'walking simulators', choice-based narrative games etc. Games by small developers seem to have become more widely available.
There are developments I'm not a particular fan of. I miss the days when you could put a disc in your PS2 and start playing immediately, without hours of downloading/installation. DLC often feels like an excuse to hold content back for extra money, and, while the ability to patch is obviously useful, it means that sometimes developers can rush an unfinished game out of the door and go 'we'll fix it later'. Microtransactions are dreadful. But it's been really interesting to watch the ways this medium has evolved, the good and the bad. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
If anyone else has thoughts on how games have changed, please share!
Even 'becoming a means of telling stories' is a change that's happened largely in my lifetime. Games with stories did exist before I did, but over time I've seen more and more emphasis placed on the storytelling side. Our first household console was the Sega Master System II, which didn't get much more intricate plot-wise than 'TAILS HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED; FIND TAILS.' At the time, I couldn't have imagined anything on the level of, say, The Last of Us, either in storytelling or in gameplay complexity.
I still remember reading Ender's Game in the Game Boy era and being unable to comprehend the scene where Ender, offered two glasses by a giant in a videogame, chooses not to drink; instead he kicks both of them over, climbs up the giant's face and burrows into his eye. Videogames only had two buttons to me; one was the 'jump' button and one was the 'everything else' button. I couldn't get my head around the idea of having that sort of freedom.
There have been some obvious changes in games over the last twenty-odd years, such as the improvement in graphics. (I remember seeing a Final Fantasy X trailer for the first time and being absolutely stunned by the graphics. The characters looked exactly like real people! I could never have imagined a game looking this good! Surely this was the pinnacle of visual achievement? It's sort of hilarious to look back at it.) But here are some other shifts I've noticed over time.
A note: there are consoles I've never owned - in particular, the Xbox line - so these observations are going to be skewed by my personal experiences, which are mainly on Sony consoles and Nintendo handhelds. I started playing games in earnest in the late 1990s, with the Game Boy. I didn't actually play our Sega Master System II, because I couldn't take the pressure of being responsible for Sonic's life; I just made my brother play so I could watch.
- It's now much easier to pick a game up if you've drifted away from it for a few months. I once had to restart my playthrough of Final Fantasy VII because I'd set it down for too long and forgotten where I was supposed to be going. If that happens in Final Fantasy VII, you're absolutely screwed. If it happens in XV, you'll be fine; the 'quest' menu will tell you what you're doing and set a map marker to help get you there. (Final Fantasy IX was the first in the series to take pity on forgetful players; you can go into Qu's Marsh and ask the Moogles for directions if you're not sure what you're supposed to be doing.)
- When you start a new game nowadays, it'll probably tell you what you're supposed to do! Silent Hill 2, for the PS2, assumed you'd read the manual in the game box and already knew what the controls were; woe betide you if you hadn't. On a replay, I was flailing around frantically as the first monster approached before I worked out I was supposed to hold R2 and press X to attack.
- Games are more forgiving, on the whole. There's an understanding that, once a player has shown they can do something, there's no need to force them to do it again. I replayed PS2 game Jak II recently, and the checkpointing was a nightmare; I'd have to play through a lengthy sequence tens of times because I kept dying and having to restart from the beginning. If that game came out today, those sequences might still be tricky, but they'd probably let you restart from later, rather than making you replay segments you've already done to get to the part you can't get past.
- On a related note, I expect modern games to respect my time more than games did in the past. Forgiving checkpoints are an aspect of this, but I also expect to be able to save when I need to, and to be able to pause or skip cutscenes. The addition of a 'skip cutscene' option was a very noticeable change between Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2.
- I no longer expect games to become progressively more difficult. There may be a slight increase in challenge, but I don't expect the game to get near-impossible by the end if I'm doing fine at the start.
- Limited lives are rarely a thing nowadays! If you fail, you can retry as many times as you need to. Life systems feel like they were probably a holdover from arcade games, which have limited lives so they can prompt you to enter more money; there was never any real need for them in consoles. Jak and Daxter was the first time I saw a platformer without a life system, and I remember reading a magazine review that considered it extremely noteworthy.
- The earliest platformers I experienced, Super Mario Land for the Game Boy and the Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Sega Master System II, had limited lives AND NO SAVE SYSTEM. You were expected to beat the entire game in one sitting, and if you ran out of lives you had to start the entire thing from the beginning. It was awful.
- There's been a really noticeable increase in female protagonists. When I really started getting into videogames, around the turn of the millennium, Lara Croft and Samus Aran were the only female game protagonists I knew of; they weren't the only ones who existed, but the number was still very small. I've now played over twenty games where the main playable character is female, although male-led games still dominate hugely.
- There are no longer the PS2 era's lengthy delays between US releases and European releases, which I appreciate!
- Some genres have almost disappeared; some have flourished. There used to be so many colourful, child-friendly collectathon platformers in the PS1 era; those were fun, but you rarely see them nowadays! The first open-world game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption on the PS3, and since then open-world games have become very common. (I suppose you could say Shadow of the Colossus was the first one I played, actually, but it's very different from modern open-world games.) There's been a rise in games that focus solely on story, without any combat, or at least a rise in those games being available in Europe: 'walking simulators', choice-based narrative games etc. Games by small developers seem to have become more widely available.
There are developments I'm not a particular fan of. I miss the days when you could put a disc in your PS2 and start playing immediately, without hours of downloading/installation. DLC often feels like an excuse to hold content back for extra money, and, while the ability to patch is obviously useful, it means that sometimes developers can rush an unfinished game out of the door and go 'we'll fix it later'. Microtransactions are dreadful. But it's been really interesting to watch the ways this medium has evolved, the good and the bad. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
If anyone else has thoughts on how games have changed, please share!