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Nostalgia Goggles
Elfslikedino
Member Posts: 37
We've all heard about the ''good times''. Asherons Call 1, Everquest, Ultima Online and Dark age of Camelot. But what if you just came out of your mothers womb 10 years ago? Without the nostalgia goggles.
Comments
Some people just cannot let go and move on. I played all of those games back in their heyday and while I had great times, I'd rather remember them they way they were and not try to revisit them today.
I've tried to go back to UO and DAoC, but its just not the same. The games have changed and so have I.
I could take off my nostalgia goggles more easily if modern games didn't feel like:
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
While the nostalgia argument may have some merit, it is still fundamentally flawed. It's nothing more than an attempt to invalidate people's personal opinions and taste on game mechanics based purely on claiming that because their experiences are old they are somehow irrelevent.
As much as some try to use the above argument, it still completely neglects the fact that there are many oldschool gamers that fire up oldschool games. I for example still dig out my copy of X-Com, Fallout, Balder's Gate, etc, and have another enjoyable playthrough, moreso than most newest games simply because their gameplay is superior.
MMOs however, you can't quite do this, because the nature of MMOs causes them to evolve over time because they are very content driven, which requires a lot of content changes. That's why many of us bring up "the good old days" about past MMOs don't go back and play them, because they're very different games from when we used to play them.
As per newer gamers not enjoying older games, that's because they've been conditioned. They are exposed to games with more flash and less substance, and therefore they tend to prefer those types of games. That's not necessarily wrong or bad, that's just how much fo the gaming culture has shifted.
Justin Webb posted a very relevent article relating to this topic:
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/4175/Why-You-Like-What-You-Like.html
Games are what you make them. If you feel like you are riding a child's bike, then you are playing the game like you are riding a child's bike.
I can play my 53 Loremaster in LOTRO and spend time on the lvl 60 areas. Takes all I've got to survive and I have a great time.
Or...
I can stand around and gank newbies in DFO and "maybe" think that is fun, but the question is: Which one of those two is the "child's bike"? DFO.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but you need to understand that, for the most part, it's the player who determines how the game plays out.
Nostalgia goggles wouldn't be bad if they just made the past look better than it was, but they also make the present look worse than it is.
I like EverQuest as it is now. I liked it in the past, but I really prefer the "new" EQ over than the old days when you could fall into a timesink and not find your way out for MONTHS. If you don't insist on trying to relive the past, there's still a lot of "there" there, and the changes that people like to put down as "dumbing down the game" are largely streamlining, removing frustrating obstacles, and making up for the lower population numbers. What's still good about it? It's still not as quest-driven as most games today. The raiding portion of the game is still top-notch. It's still evolving. (I might point out that most of the major titles aren't exactly what they were when they were released either, and this is one of the best things about the MMO format, in my opinion.)
BTW, I like that eyegear in the first post. Shiny!
Then they will enjoy the modern mmos a lot. It's a matter of point of view, the one you have with the nostalgia googles. Without it the actual mmos are fun, diferent from some of the past, but fun too.
Go back to Asherons Call 1? Vanilla EQ corpse runs?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
I say there's nothing wrong with a little nostalgia.
Looking back on great games is one of the coolest parts of being a gamer. Sure sometimes we tend to forget the really bad times, the bugs, the server downtimes, the poor graphics, choppy animations and all the fun stuff that came along with getting into a fledgling gaming genre but really, so what?
I'm often amazed at how I tend to remember some games as being absolutely amazing but going back to them now I realize they much less than perfect but that is the joy of memory and the human race. We tend to look back on the good and put asside the bad.
I'm also certain that in 10 years, we'll be doing the same with the current crop of games that we're playing. I'll continue to remember my days of gaming past fondly, even if it they waren't as great as I tend to think they were
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Important Information regarding Posting and You
Dismissing other players enjoyment of older games as purely nostalgia has led us to this wonderful age where multiple MMOs are released each month all vying for the same population. Until a modern game comes along that combines todays technology with the features so many of us miss from older games then your claims of nostalgia will remain just an opinion with zero evidence to support it.
Good luck with that. The largest population of gamers want this new style of game and who do you think the mainstream development houses will target? That leaves smaller comapnies who don't have the capital or programming chops to sucessfully pull it off (StarVault? Aventurine? Icarus?) It should be possible in the genre, but it just isn't.
"The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is." - Lenny Bruce
Kids don't know how easy they got it these days.
We used to have to sit in the snow while we played. None of this fancy indoors, padded seat stuff.
A mouse? We had to use real rats! And you had to catch them. And the suckers would bite!
But we had fun. Kids don't know how to have fun these days. We used to have to camp mobs for ten days straight! Our fingers were bleeding cause of rat bites. And we couldn't feel our butts because we were sitting in snow.
Now that's fun!
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Screw this new nostalgia. Nostalgia was better in the old days and THAT IS AN UNDISPUTABLE FACT!
SANDBOX! SANDBOX! Let the kiddies play in Disneyworld, I WANT A SANDBOX!
Get like a million buddies and I'm sure someone will oblige.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
When I was a kid, there were no videogames. We played board games. What's funny is, board games penalized you for making a mistake, or just being unlucky.
Monoploly: "Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200."
Parcheesi: Another player lands on your piece, you go back to start.
Chess: Lose a piece, and you don't get it back unless you can advance a pawn.
I was 7 years old and I accepted that mistakes, and even misfortune, had consequences. But that was part of the challenge. Back then, challenge was fun - not just instant gratification.
But today, if you are even inconvenienced for more than a minute or so you hear the howls about time wasting and lack of fun.
And you wonder why people see this as a "dumbing down." It's not just a dumbing down of videogames. It's a dumbing down of the very concept of games.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
ROTFL, and I would add...
Monoploly (1970): "Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200."
Monopoly (2010): "Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Purchase a get-out-of-jail-free card at the cash shop in the courthouse to bypass your incarceration. Collect $200 anyway."
---
Parcheesi (1970): Another player lands on your piece, you go back to start.
Parcheesi (2010): Another player lands on your piece. You activate a temporary 'safe space' that restores you to your former position on the board. This is a limited buff -- You may only do this 1,457 times per game."
---
Chess (1970): Lose a piece, and you don't get it back unless you can advance a pawn.
Chess (2010): "Lose a piece, buy a respec potion and reset your pieces to the way they were at the beginning of the game. You opponent's pieces, however, remain in their current positions."
Oh you are just being Nostalgic. Theres nothing fun about old board games so take off those rose tinted glasses!
Nostalgia is great ....when you keep it to yourself or at least keep it in perspective. But when people preach on about how great game X was and how new games need to play like game X, it gets stupid. Especially when 99.9% of people who'd try game X would think it sucks and everyone knows it except the people stuck in nostalgia land. People have to remember the disclaimer with nostalgia...It was really awesome, "for its time".
It's not right to just dismiss the whining as nostalgia-vision, but at the same time, some of the stuff back then really WAS utter crap. There just wasn't anything else competing at the time, so developers got away with it. We may have a lot of dregs coming out these days, and some impatient, instant-gratification seekers changing the target market, but that doesn't mean we haven't come a long way from the good old days.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
Fantastic points. I played those games back in the day too, I enjoyed them at the time but I also recognized their bad points. Back in the day, I had the time to waste sitting online for 15+ hours a day. Today I do not. To be honest, at the time, nobody knew any better because those were the only games available. Most of us have learned our lesson and most of us actually have more responsibilities today than we did then, we have families and jobs and social lives and games do (and should) take a back seat to all of that. Therefore, most of us just aren't the same people that we were 10+ years ago when UO came out, we've moved on and have much more on our plates than playing some silly online game.
I agree, it's a lot of people looking at these games through nostalgia goggles, that or these people have never matured over time and are still the same no-life geek who wants to spend their lives doing the same nonsense over and over.
In either case, it's sad.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
Well I remember great things about SWG before it changed...but I cant play that again to see if I actually really liked it, or if it was just nostalgia
Though, my first MMO was Asheron's Call (my favorite was SWG though)...I played that 1999 to 2001. I went back a few months ago, and the game was exactly how I remember it being. And. I didn't like it at all.
In my case, I should of left the memories of AC be just that...memories
Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be...
Anyway, a lot of these nostalgia posts do have a point. Sure they sound whiney and what not and yeah those old games had some really bad points, but I don't think it's so much the actual game people are nostalgic for, but rather how different each game was from each other.
As someone else said in another thread; Before the age of WoW each game tried to be different and appeal to different play styles.
We had EQ, AC, AO, DAoC, SWG, etc, etc...
And while these games had some similar aspects the overall game was different.
After the age of WoW developers stopped trying to be different and instead took to mimicing. SOE started the trend by taking SWG, a game that was doing fine as it was, and pulling a 180 on it's playerbase in a vain attempt to be more appealing to the crowd that played WoW. New games in production went even further and tried to make their games in WoW's image with a slight twist. None of this worked to well, and these games ended up limping along to the present. This trend lasted pretty close to 5 years.
This is where nostalgia comes into play. People really have no option in the current generation of MMOs because its either play WoW or play a cheap knock off of WoW. Innovation and evolution hit a brick wall when WoW released, and it's not WoW or Blizards fault this happened.
Some of us look back on the days before WoW as the 'good old days' because each game brought something new to the table. Each new MMO, while similar in some ways, offered so much more to diferentiate themselves from the rest. New MMOs today just all seem to blend together and in most cases you can hardly tell the difference between them.
But as of 2009 there seems to have been a break in the whole 'Monkey see, monkey do' philosophy. A lot of new MMOs are now in development that seem to be sticking to their own ideas and not trying to copy WoW. Maybe once the genre is out of the mire that is the 'clone age' you will see less and less nostalgia posts...
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
Don't forget those of us who had responsibilities, families, jobs and social lives back then and still found a couple of hours per night to enjoy those games. Enjoying features from older games does not mean everyone wants to spend 15+ hours a day gaming like you claim you did.
If the definition of maturing is insulting people who enjoy the same hobby you used to enjoy then I don't want to mature
Most of the features that people hold up as superior are just mindless timesinks. Corpse runs, camping boss respawns, etc. How any of those things make a game more "hardcore" or "better" is entirely beyond me. It's like saying 300 baud is better than broadband because it took more time and gave you more time to do other things while you were downloading. For the most part, when those things went the way of the dodo, MMOs vastly improved.
Some people claim that all this downtime allowed people to be social, but that assumes that the people around you are worth being social with. In most games, they're not, at least IMO. They never really were. The same asshats who would stab you in the back in WoW were present in UO and EQ. If you want to socialize in any game, the option is always open to you. UO and EQ left people so bored out of their minds that they had little choice but to socialize, there was nothing else they could do.
Forced socialization with people you don't especially like to begin with isn't a sign of a great game, sorry.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I can understand why, with this outlook, you may not have had a good social experience in EQ. But many of us did.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests