well I said that it was a better way to express what those people are thinking than "that a game ages poorly", not that it was a better criticism. It's more accurate and has a clearer purpose. Trying to make objective statements on an artform tends to fall apart pretty quickly.

well, the issue i have here is behind the phrase's sentiment above all else. not really the semantics pertaining to its meaning. i see where you're coming from i just think the whole line of thinking is silly

The truth is, games and their designs don't age, the audience does, the expectations and the trends do.

Some design decisions, made to suit the audience tastes at the time, actually make those designs more interesting than the designs made to suit current audience trends. Wizardry games from the 80s can get me way more engaged with gameplay with their attention-intensive design than some of the more hands off easy going indie RPGs releasing nowadays. And some super hard and super long games may have been good fits when the market was less saturated back then but now with the market being wider with options most people don't have the desire to commit that kind of time to one game. But if the games design is really interesting, I'm still willing to spend a lot of time and energy on one game. The question is still the same as back then even if the factors are a bit different.

In this sense, game design does not 'evolve' to suit the needs of players, it mutates. Some mutations get picked up and keep thriving, some fall out for a while. Sometimes an older one that's been ignored for a long time gets picked up again to grow and spread, and sometimes they arrive very healthy and die quickly.

I hate using this example but it's the most accessible and easy one, demons souls was aged badly on day 1 it arrived. Now it's youthened up quite a bit.

Game design is not a linear line of progress, it's like a spectrum of ideas going through time. You can play any game at any era once you adjust to what that game is going for, I think understanding the goal of a game is more important than trying to adjust context of the time, although sometimes the context is useful, since games as art responds to other art and to its audience. But I don't believe design ages or degrades in value

i generally agreed with you until you mentioned demon's souls. demon's souls was massively popular in the hardcore gaming scene on day one, which is the only audience it was marketed toward in the first place. the people who thought it was too hard back then are still the same ones who think it should have an easy mode today

Yeah you're right about that, I guess I should say instead the acceptability of a game like demons souls within the majority of gamers. That series isn't just appealing to that core early group of hardcore gamers. The bubble of players interested in that kind of experience has expanded out to increase the marketability of a game offering that kind of experience. More and more people are willing to try a game like that than back then imo. The trends at the time were focused toward accessible and casual games where the perceived new market was. Shuhei Yoshida called the game "crap, an unbelievably bad game" when he played it shortly before its release.

Not to say accessibility isn't important anymore, I think it's just that the way that conversation goes has shifted toward modes and supplemental options to support wider and different demographics.

it's not that i necessarily completely disagree with your point but i find it to be a weird perspective that hinges more on grammar than a comment on game design; when someone says a game "hasn't aged well" it's incorrect to make it akin to spoiled milk or rotten meat where the game inherently gets worse over time as much as it is that the game design is outdated per modern perspective. super mario 64 is the easiest one here: the camera has always sucked, but would it have still been made like that if it was made 10 years later? they're growing pains that stem from the transition of 2D to 3D and while on release it was a non-complaint, the way game design has evolved and changed inflates these issues and creates a reevaluation of the way the experience is judged. it's also noticeable that the other examples are really just a case of directorial intent and execution instead of any real technological limitations or the transitional period of game design before reaching a set mold; P3FES is pretty obviously the obvious example where there's a clear storytelling vehicle used behind its combat, i'd even say you could do it nowadays and no one would claim it'd be "outdated game design" as much as people would go "bro this shit sucks" (you could make an argument this HAS happened, Atelier Ryza's ATB system has you control one character at a time and if a character's turn happens when they're not in control, AI makes the turn action for them, not the same but similar enough that AI party members isn't an aspect that aged poorly), the point is is that "aged poorly" is absolutely a valid point to make once you've started to judge a work with the modern perspective, it's just grossly overused for multiple works that don't apply to it

(the above two deleted comments were my own due to formatting issues)

@dwardman
we should definitely draw a line between acceptability accessibility. accessibility is awesome and has no bearing on core game design. it's just adapting already-defined ideas to solutions for people who may be less fortunate than others. that stuff's great and should be the norm for everything going forward

i do see what you mean though because while the consensus towards soulslikes is still the same on paper (you'll see plenty of half-baked journalists claim the genre is elitist and restrictive whenever a new title comes out) there has definitely been a normalization of a lot of its concepts. bonfire-style checkpoints and soul-retrieval mechanics have found their way into plenty of mainstream games (hollow knight comes to mind) and i'm sure plenty of people have grown more open to those sorts of concepts by playing those first. this really just goes to further show why i have so much disdain towards the general public deciding what has "aged well"

@apocynadeae
mario 64 is a particularly noteworthy example because the answer to "would it still suck if..." is a resounding "yes" because the n64's controller is inherently flawed. would you say that a first person shooter aged poorly on the psp? no - you'd immediately realize it wasn't an ideal circumstance for the system to begin with

responding to the rest of your comment is kind of redundant as the same points have been made. i'll just be brief and say that i don't think what is generally considered a "modern perspective" is always best for anything. "modern sensibilities" lead to dilution and homogenization. i believe that sticking too closely to what the lowest common denominator wants is exactly why popular games are in such a creative rut right now

the audience has aged well toward the soulslike design, yes, is my point. it's a reverse relationship, the audience ages to adopt or not adopt ideas attempted by designers (who then chose to respond or not respond to those reactions further).

Accessible is probably the wrong word to describe the trends of the era prior to souls. I just mean that I remember a time that easier games were in vogue and it was popular to think that if a game kills you too many times it was in bad taste. Maybe approachability would be a better term for what I meant

sure. i think we're on the same page there

i also want to add, in response to @apocynadeae again, that even a matter like camera control is a very slippery slope in terms of modernity automatically being better. i can understand it in a situation like mario 64 where having a more fully controllable camera wouldn't really sacrifice any of the original game's integrity. but in say, metroid prime, i do absolutely feel that the decision to give it standard fps controls is a complete misstep because the game was designed with tankier controls in mind

what exactly do you consider a "popular game" per your message

also yes camera control is very much case-by-case and i can't exactly comment on Metroid Prime as I haven't played it; in general I wouldn't really compare an FPS and a platformer's camera control as both have distinct play styles and both aim for different things; per what I know of Prime then yeah I think the original aim for it is fine and hasn't really aged badly as much as it is a non-standard design choice relative to what we consider to be the norm nowadays, but execution matters more and that's something i'll try for myself... eventually

@apocynadeae
when i refer to most popular games being in creative ruts i'm talking about AAA titles seemingly following templates for game design - especially third person action/adventures. your assassins creeds, horizons, god of wars - those kinds of games. sure there's still some more experimental shit like sifu that's decently popular, but in general that kind of thing is a lot fewer and further between than it used to be. this is due to a lot more than general consensus - big budget games cost more money to make nowadays - but the issues go hand i hand. it ultimately boils down to releasing safer products for wider audiences so that money isn't wasted

and as for prime - not to say "just take my word for it!" but the best way i can explain the original metroid prime is "imagine if ocarina of time played in first person", then imagine replacing that playstyle with call of duty. more first person aiming/shooting and less locking-on/circle strafing, basically

i think i get what you're going for here, though it's hardly a watertight argument. i mean, it's true of other artist media in a way: music and film don't age! except they do, but the ways in which they age demand an understanding of history and the technology involved, modes of distribution, etc. time continues to pass and things continue to change for better or worse. '70s judas priest albums feel very different from their '80s output because of a shift in the standards of production, evolving instrument tech, developing skills, changes in taste and lineup, etc. everything ages. every part of a thing ages. including video games. and we can call a game like doom timeless, but we also need to understand the ways in which it has aged and why these qualities were good or bad and remain so. there's no need to uphold all video games to some lofty abstract of timelessness.

@zn0
i don't fully see eye to eye with you here. i understand that things age in the sense that time very literally passes after release, but citing judas priest as an example is just furthering my point because i think british steel is way more interesting than screaming for vengeance. the former's rawer sound totally appeals to me above the cleaner and more polished vibe of the latter. it's not a matter of objective quality - it's a matter of preference. same thing could be said for anyone preferring the cure's early post-punk output over pornography and on

that said, i find it curious that so many people are able to brush off older or weirder music they don't like with, "eh, it's just not for me", but with gaming people often feel entitled to condemn entire ideas without having enough insight as to why those ideas were used in the first place. this is a bit of a tangent, but i think a lot of it has to do with player input - especially in the case of older, "hardcore" games - if you get your ass handed to you by a nes game like ninja gaiden it's so much easier to just write it off and say "it's too hard! it's cheap! aged bad!" rather than accept that it may not have been made for you or that you just didn't reach the skill level it demanded

i digress. if someone wants to use "aging" in an actually educational and proper historical context, like i dunno - talking about the history of recording music and how x band did y thing to innovate on the recording process - then that's fine and great. i don't think these things can simply be labeled outdated or valid so carelessly though. my intent is to attack the phrase's reductive and ignorant usage - not to say that modern game sensibilities haven't or even necessarily shouldn't have changed over time

it seems to me like we agree more than you think. good or bad, things age and it's a lot more interesting to simply accept that and to discuss why and how things have aged, how the qualities of their agedness have changed the way we perceive them in the present, etc. i mean, yeah, imo stained class and sin after sin are two of judas priest's best and earliest records and a very big part of that is the uniquely delicate clarity of their production vs the more 'solid' heavy metal sound they developed through the '80s (climaxing with painkiller, a totally different sounding record from their early stuff). it's cool and fine to talk about things this way, and i would say it's 100% the opposite of lazy or shallow to explore the finer details of said things' place in history (the history of the medium, of art, of the world, the people who played it, what it affected, and on and on)...

again, my entire argument is against the "aged poorly" side of things. if someone wants to talk about the history of platformers and their various innovations, or any other genre, then that's totally cool and great. if someone wants to make a reductive point about a game being shit either because it didn't click with them or because they liked a newer one more, then that's dumb, ignorant and shallow

Gta 3 is the best open world game to this day and it being 22 years old means nothing because it's still awesome to this day (Your opinion is wrong otherwise just to note)

Play more games huss

huss pulling up to validate all of my points