- Joined
- Mar 25, 2012
- Messages
- 2,334
There is a significant difference between gaming pre 1997 and after it, or really between 80s and 90s, before the emergence of 3D accelerators and after, before Doom became a hit and after, etc. There were always shifts in games, there isn't a neat clean line where you can say games changed fundamentally before and after, except perhaps things like the introduction of the personal/home computer and the general availability of the Internet from private ISPs.
As an example, while Oblivion in the video thumbnail doesn't apply, overall in the midlate 2000s linear overly scripted action games were incredibly common and popular, a handful of years later anything linear was considered awful bad design and the next decade (2010s) was all about "open world" games regardless of if they made sense or not - and in recent years people have started to complain about everything being open world and want shorter handmade linear stuff. This alone (there are other trends) is one thing that makes playing games made in the 2000s very different from games in 2020s - case in point, can you find a new game like BloodRayne or BloodRayne 2? I was looking recently and everything seems to be made 15+ years ago, the closest would be (based on a quick look, i haven't played it) Lollipop Chainsaw Repop but that is a remaster of a game from 2012 - i.e. a decade+ old game. Other games that are similar at a surface level might exist but if you dig even slightly deeper you'll notice things like RPG elements, Dark Souls-like combat, open world level design, etc.
Even if the game production of 2010s (and late 2000s) is more similar to that of 2020s than the 90s, trends do not remain static for decades and they heavily affect how the games look and play to the point where even two games from the same franchise can play differently if there is a decade or more between their release (well, not always, a few developers do stick to their own thing - like Spiders before they were bought - but they tend to be the exception).
