I don't shrug at the good parts. In fact, I think it's rather amazing that games are what they are, considering that a few decades ago there were no such things as video games. I think the bar has been raised so high now that being innovative is becoming harder for the designers. That's probably a fault of the gamers, but then, gamers are a fickle audience by their very nature. How do you keep the interest of people who, by and large, have exceedingly short attention spans coupled with exponentially increasing expectations? How do you do what hasn't been done before? Before Wolfenstein, first-person gaming was almost unheard of. You had a few simulations, like the old Star Trek, and Battle Zone, then Hovertank, but everyone knew Wolf. Everyone wanted to shoot those Nazis. Then came Doom, and the world of gaming changed forever. Then Quake, and online gaming was born. Half-Life came along and made a war hero out of a physicist who had never handled a gun prior and showed the world that "yes, nerds can kick ass". And the game kicked ass and moved the FPS into a more real-world setting with an edge of uncertainty and unease about what might happen next. It introduced a bit of subtle problem-solving as well. When I played Half-Life 2 the puzzles seemed obvious and contrived. Episode 1 I think brought back some of the feel of the original in some places. I want a puzzle to make me have to think and not be overly obvious.
The effort it takes to make a game like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 is staggering. I do think it's underappreciated the effort that goes into making them. I'm not trying to knock that. Detail in games does get my attention. I remember playing Unreal and drooling over the skyboxes and the environmental beauty. Here was a whole world, complete with a populace that actually had a culture behind it and in the process of fighting the bad guys you were, in essence, saving someone else's world. To me, Quake 2, Half-Life, and Unreal represent the pinnacle of single-player FPS gaming where you had rock-solid gameplay, impressive (enough) visuals, interesting enemies and weapons, and a large amount of freedom within the overall linear progression of the game.
Visually what can be done within a game is fantastic now, but what about the gameplay itself? That's where my primary concern is now. I love eye candy, but if a game stops being fun I'm not likely to continue playing it. It just seems anymore that at one end of the spectrum you have very narrow, scripted gameplay where you have to follow an exact path and everything's always going to happen the same way or very close to it, at the other you have an open mosh pit. I just think games like Doom, Quake, Quake 2, and Unreal had a much better balance between what the designers intend for you to do and how you can choose to go about doing it. I look at new stuff coming out like Rage and wonder, after all the effort that's going into making the games look interesting visually, what's the gameplay going to be like? Is it something I'm going to want to play over and over again?
Consider this. I could pay $5-$10 for an Atari 2600 game cartridge when it was new, and play it over, and over, and over, hours and hours of fairly repetitive gameplay that visually was as primitive as you could get, and yet I still find a lot of these old games entertaining. Today new games cost around $50 and perhaps they are worth one or two replays. So does the complexity of the technology make games better? I think it just makes them more realistic to some degree, but to me that's only valuable up to a point. I'm not willing to shell out $50 for a potential disappointment, especially when the hardware to play them is very costly. Why do you think I wait for "next gen" games to hit the bargain bin? I sure as hell wouldn't have paid more than the $10 I paid for Quake 4, and that was only because it's the DVD copy that has installers with patched copies of Q2 and the Q2 mission packs incase I ever have to do a from-scratch reinstall. To give you some better idea, I first played a demo of Quake 2 in software mode at 320x200 after picking up a copy of Wolfenstein 3D (the demo was on the Wolf CD) because I lost my Spear of Destiny disk and I wanted to play Spear. The gameplay in the demo impressed me enough to buy it outright and play it on outdated hardware - and I never did get around to playing Spear, come to think of it. After getting a voodoo 2 card Quake 2 became my second favorite game of all time after Doom. I have yet to see a game since Quake 2 that would convince me to "go out and buy it right now". I'm wondering if I'll ever see that property in a game again, or if I've just become too jaded and hard to impress. I do enjoy the newer games to some degree, but not to the degree I enjoyed the older games. I'm still trying to pin down exactly why that is.
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