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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest change is content. Games just have a lot more of it now. The ratio of content to mechanics has stretched out hugely. Older zelda games were pretty clear you get one item per dungeon and that's the gimmick and then the item won't be too important going forward. Mario games tend to hit a design theme for a few levels then move on and be done with it.

Now a lot of games just want to be big, even if the variety of gameplay doesn't change. People get validation and a sense of achievement from their numbers going up. People like exploring a big place and running through long scripted social encounters even if there's no autonomy. It's now a long lasting source of social and personal progression that we don't get in real life nearly as easily.

Which is fine honestly. But when a designer fucks up the balance it becomes work because there is no choice but trudging through trivial, reused content to reach the next goal.

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That’s mainstream games.

A somewhat Zelda related, modern indie game that comes to mind is Hyper Light Drifter. It’s one of the best games I ever played, and I have played a ton until about 5y ago.

The features/content are orthogonal, minimal and extremely well balanced. There is almost no unnecessary fluff and stuff that distracts from the core, everything is designed holistically. The gameplay is challenging and varied, while building on a few well thought out primitives.

Still you feel like you’re stepping into a world of wonder. The game has a distinct personality and encourages experimentation and exploration.

It rewards you with actual gameplay and not with ego soothing tricks.

Mainstream games that have this kind of polish and holistic design are very rare, even though they have access to humongous resources.

This is totally off-topic, but I also own this game and really enjoyed it, but I played it through once and then I was done. Was there some kind of replayability in it that I missed?

Aside from having secret corners and areas it definitely has replay value, because it is just so damn good. Like you would replay some of the Mario games, just to enjoy it one more time, do things differently, better, and maybe find some new tricks and so on.

> Now a lot of games just want to be big

There are several games in my library that I have yet to finish, because it just gets so repetitive to do it all. Spider-Man. Borderlands 3. I love AC:O, but how many bandit camps can you clear before you go mad? When you add in all the DLC, you're talking about many hundreds of hours of gameplay, if you do everything, but 75% of it is the just same fight, over and over again. Going back to Borderlands, Wonderlands is WAAAY shorter than 3, and I, for one, really appreciate it. (They'll probably blow that up with DLC tho.)

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One of the things that made console games need to get longer is the rise of a retail resale market. That's subsiding a bit with online delivery and online content.

Here's a nice illustration of mechanics vs. graphics. https://twitter.com/robotduck/status/759529875992698880

Oh my gosh I couldn’t disagree more! I have a friend who often plays games muted (on Switch, handheld) and it’s like a completely different experience without the dramatic music. The “decorative” aspects definitely make a game more immersive and add to the emotion of whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Hmmm, the author of the tweet goes into more detail later in the thread. In this case their point wasn’t so much about adding decoration but about lying to the player about the danger.

The game is presenting one thing “this is very dangerous you could slip and fall and die at any minute!” while the mechanics are saying another thing “There is no danger just a linear path”.

It’s not that the author thinks we should remove decoration but that the decoration should be authentic to the situation the player is is in.

If the game is presenting danger, BE DANGEROUS! If the game is presenting anxiety, BE STRESSFUL! But this in between of presenting danger without the play mirroring the experience is disengenuous.

Amusing. I felt the same way in tomb raider. But then I don't find any video game to be particularly immersive (and to pre-empt the inevitable responses, no VR is not immersive at all either). That's not universally true. Many people freak out when something like this happens to their avatar. But tomb raider was the epitome of the cinematic but braindead AAA gameplay genre. In terms of content its actually pretty lean. The game has a linear story and every moment is handcrafted faux-cinematics. Probably a problem, but certainly a different problem than the bloated content issue.

I think the lack of autonomy is largely due to the move away from written social encounters to voice acting. When good synthetic voicing arrives we may see the options open back up. I have an easier time with written rather than spoken communication, so I miss the walls of text in games like daggerfall or baldurs gate. In daggerfall a lot of the texts was generated, we could do that so much better now. Quest markers, fast travel, and automapping also made the smaller hand sculpted (rather than generated) worlds seem even smaller.

Microsoft’s remaster of AoE3 has been suprisingly decent.

The game at its core, is still the same, but they’ve been adding tons of new content, that’s breathed new life into the game to the point where it was even outperforming AoE4 for a bit.

But the new content is a mix of stuff. A lot of it adds new mechanics and diversity that make the game much more enjoyable. Only problem is I never properly learned how to play non-2005 vanilla civs.

I think you are thinking about cartridge games vs today's BluRay / Downloadable. CD-ROM Games circa 1997 had a ton of content. Look at games of that era such as Blade Runner, Zork Nemesis, Wing Commander IV various Sierra Games all had tons of art, music and live acting that would make them very expensive games to develop.

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