Reasons Why Younger Gamers Don't Get Older RPGs?.

[Snufkin]

I watch black and white movies, Treasure of the Sierra Madre comes to mind, and I would be annoyed if if were colorized. I even enjoyed it when I was young. Original twilight Zone Show as well. There are quite a few.

Watch this movie colorized:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062228/

 

[wishbonetail]

For me it's the controls. I grew up with consoles so PC's mouse+directional pad+rest of the keyboard is pretty much unmanageable. As I understand i'm requred to have three hands like those nerds of old or am i missing something? Anyway, if not for Grayface's patches fo MM6-8 or System Shock ED i would never got into these gems and I'd give my arm and leg for WASD+mouselook in Ravenloft games.

 

[Brzęczyszczykiewicz]

"Reasons Why Younger Gamers Don't Get Older RPGs?."​

Because they are different than games they are used to.

 

[Serious_Business]

This thread could probably be considered as the essence of the Codex, even more so than discussions on what is a rpg. It seems all to be about defending a declining culture, the one of "old games" ; in order to be in phase with this you have to be very emotional about it, aggressive towards those who dare look down on it, and so on. It has this very infantile aspect of insulting and considering everyone with a different taste as "retarded", or a "faggot", which would be rather amusing, but the thing is, most people here cannot express their opinions without such dramatization. This vulgarity is insufferable, and truly it is the worst expression of taste, the very worst aspect of a character that has no superiority but pretends at intelligence.

Anyway now that I have negated the negation and done my little moralising speech, I can feel superior at little cost, and I'll say that, of course, "younger gamers" are not a homogenous group, nor are older ones for that matter. As long as you construct dilemmas around generalities, you'll get general answers which in the end don't mean much. Who are younger gamers? Why do they all "don't get" older rpgs? What happens when they sometimes get them? Does that mean that they, like the OP, somehow have access to an inclusive culture, the one of "reading books"? Are you talking about video games or literature then? What kind of literature? Is literature a signifier for intelligence or cultural capital? The point of these "discussions" is just to have a kind of sad satisfaction, which I find to be miserable, so I hope you fucking feel miserable too. Have a good day, sir.

 

[Skorpion]

For me it's the controls. I grew up with consoles so PC's mouse+directional pad+rest of the keyboard is pretty much unmanageable. As I understand i'm requred to have three hands like those nerds of old or am i missing something? Anyway, if not for Grayface's patches fo MM6-8 or System Shock ED i would never got into these gems and I'd give my arm and leg for WASD+mouselook in Ravenloft games.

I like that Im old enough to remember when no one knew how to type, then the computer revolution and even derps could type decently, and now were back to people too retarded to use two peripherals at once (mouse + keyboard) let alone individual fingers.
The circle is complete, now get off my fucking lawn if you can use both your legs at once or I will beat you with a nes controller's wicked edges!

 

[IMPERIVM RECTVM]

Because it's against pop culture. Pop culture is about creating not so quality shit, consuming it and moving to next big thing.

 

[anvi]

I hope some people can see that old games were better in terms of gameplay, even if there are some bad parts like controls and UI, old graphics etc.

I am playing NWN at the moment and I love some aspects of it, but it's infuriating how fucking terrible the loot is. I really want to physically assault whoever is responsible for it, but it's partly the public's fault for not complaining about it sooner. Every 10 feet I travel a fucking barrel or chest or crate. And each has a few gold coins in. They even have a fucking chest with a trap and then needs lock picking, and inside is 3g. It's the most weird and retarded and insultingly bad thing. I hated it when the game was new but looking back it looks more odd than anything. I would love to know if they thought people would enjoy that or if it was deliberately to waste the players time and add more length to it.

I love the game besides that but it's a big problem. I think of NWN as a modern game but even that's a pain in the ass control wise too. The EE is slicker but it still sucks. If you have the camera follow the character it fights you constantly. And if you have free camera you have to constantly adjust the camera as you play. It's pretty ass. And going back further in time just has more wonky ideas. But the games are better so what can you do.

I think smart people will be able to separate the good games from oldness. One thing I think young people will struggle to understand is how the games seemed relative to the time. You could look at a lot of classics and think they look like shit, but they looked amazing at the time. I doubt a zoomer would understand that some 90s games looked almost photo realistic to us, even though today it looks like crap.

 

[wishbonetail]

For me it's the controls. I grew up with consoles so PC's mouse+directional pad+rest of the keyboard is pretty much unmanageable. As I understand i'm requred to have three hands like those nerds of old or am i missing something? Anyway, if not for Grayface's patches fo MM6-8 or System Shock ED i would never got into these gems and I'd give my arm and leg for WASD+mouselook in Ravenloft games.

I like that Im old enough to remember when no one knew how to type, then the computer revolution and even derps could type decently, and now were back to people too retarded to use two peripherals at once (mouse + keyboard) let alone individual fingers.
The circle is complete, now get off my fucking lawn if you can use both your legs at once or I will beat you with a nes controller's wicked edges!

Maybe i cannot type effectively but can i see you have trouble reading. I grew up on consoles in 90's and i got my first PC when i was 20+ and started to get into old games only on my fourth decade. Typing is not fun for me and real life is taxing enough. I cannot be arsed to learn new dense control schemes now as if i was a teen.

 

[tindrli]

most of younger players are Graphtards. so that would be a main reason. Cant be anything else. nowadays most of games without any exaggeration are barely games compared to old days. and then that graphix, before, it was as it was but it defenelty made me IMAGINE things. now its completely opposite and opposite in a BAD way. no imagination whatsoever

 

[Kalon]

Because it's against pop culture. Pop culture is about creating not so quality shit, consuming it and moving to next big thing.

What you're describing sounds more like mass-media culture than real pop culture.

 

[MLMarkland]

After reading much retardation concerning the venerable IE games and how modern gamers "Can't into them" it struck me that there may be a reason(s) beyond decline, lowered IQ, and general spastication.

My main conclusion is this: I doubt modern gamers have read a book in their life. I had an entire collection of books (from pocket money and jobs) when I was a teen. It developed my imagination. So when I played BG, I wasn't playing a RPG with 'barren maps and no feedback' I was playing a game with a character that represented my alter ego in the FR. And a character that I built within it. That character was built around characters I had identified with in the books I read.

Without writing pages...you'd get it if you're my generation or older. And read books as a kid. But younger gamers seem to need that...prior imaginative blueprint. Like flashing images and 1 sentence responses from social media that continuously tell them who their character is.

And without that - they think older games are boring.

If you didn’t read Edward Gibbon unabridged before you could drive a car, you probably can’t into real games.

 

[Feyd Rautha]

Reasons Why Younger Gamers Don't Get Older RPGs?.

Because they are not gamers!

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Real gaming lords can play anything no matter how banal it is. There are some old games that have utter ass controls and that spreads from action to rpgs to adventure and more. There were always graphics-whores and there always will be graphic simps who will suck on the graphix cock because they are weak.

 

[MLMarkland]

For gen z I think most of it is GTA effect plus they can riot in most cities and do most the GTA things IRL.

Hard to keep a game that exciting compared to actual mayhem.

 

[Jackpot]

Why do old people not get newer games?
Are their brains too slow and drained of creativity to understand how to roleplay as Freddy Fazbear in Friday Night Funkin' Highschool in Roblox?

 

[Pompey]

As a zoomer, I think it's difficult to get into older rpgs because there's are many things to take in and adjust to. Partly because we don't want to read the manual. I remember playing fallout as my first crpg with no preparation and I would get confused, lost, not knowing what to do and would shut it off after an hour. It would however it would sit in the back my mind after playing it and I would go back to it where I would have the time of my life blinding everyone with my ripper. There are a lot of quality of life things that we also take for granted and when we go back to an older game where there are features that should be present but are not there, we are thrown for a loop. I remember playing Wizardry 6 and getting introduced to the concept of making my own maps for the levels (I should try Wizardry again after I get done replaying fallout 1 and 2). I think that Role-Playing games and especially older ones are fundamentally different than any other game which requires completely different skills. There is hope however because I notice more and more people getting into tabletop which could be a gateway for CRPGs.

TL;DR: It's a lot to take in for a young person to play an older crpg

 

[MLMarkland]

Why do old people not get newer games?
Are their brains too slow and drained of creativity to understand how to roleplay as Freddy Fazbear in Friday Night Funkin' Highschool in Roblox?

I was top 500 players WW in PUBG at 12M DAU at 40 years old, so old can into new quite strong.

But what new awesome game should I grab until Hooker Beating Simulator 6 is out?

 

[Jackpot]

I was top 500 players WW in PUBG at 12M DAU at 40 years old, so old can into new quite strong.

But what new awesome game should I grab until Hooker Beating Simulator 6 is out?

Errr...wasn't PUBG that really old game that Pewdiepie used to play before Fortnite came out? Uh, yeah grandpa, you're really into the "new games".
If you want some actual good new games to try out, just check out the front page of Twitch! That place is always filled with the cutting edge of quality!
Asmongold and Cr1TiKaL are like the father figures I never had!

 

[MLMarkland]

I was top 500 players WW in PUBG at 12M DAU at 40 years old, so old can into new quite strong.

But what new awesome game should I grab until Hooker Beating Simulator 6 is out?

Errr...wasn't PUBG that really old game that Pewdiepie used to play before Fortnite came out? Uh, yeah grandpa, you're really into the "new games".
If you want some actual good new games to try out, just check out the front page of Twitch! That place is always filled with the cutting edge of quality!
Asmongold and Cr1TiKaL are like the father figures I never had!

PUBG peak concurrent was Q3 2017 through Q3 2018, so it’s peak is 5 years ago.

Fortnite was a failed Minecraft clone for consoles that Epic cashiered and then repurposed into a bigger tent pole PUBG competitor, but development on Fortnite started in—

2009

I’m a Twitch partner. I haven’t been on Twitch in several years.

 

[KateMicucci]

most of younger players are Graphtards. so that would be a main reason. Cant be anything else. nowadays most of games without any exaggeration are barely games compared to old days. and then that graphix, before, it was as it was but it defenelty made me IMAGINE things. now its completely opposite and opposite in a BAD way. no imagination whatsoever

are we talking about the generation that grew up wearing minecraft shirts

 

[Axioms]

Young people don't get older games because they are over. No person on Earth has the time to consume all the media even in a moderate sized subgenre of a single medium. Additionally many games, like novels or movies, are products of their time. This is like asking why young people don't get Phil Ochs or Tom Lehrer.

For a young person to "get" older RPGs they need to be enough of a hardcore RPG player to play most of the major modern games, feels dissatisfied and then go back in time until they hit the "old" stuff. Then they have to find a specific type of "old" game they enjoy. Not everyone who likes early 2000s RPGs like all of them or even at least one game in every subgenre.

 

[Palomides]

As a zoomer, I think it's difficult to get into older rpgs because there's are many things to take in and adjust to. Partly because we don't want to read the manual. I remember playing fallout as my first crpg with no preparation and I would get confused, lost, not knowing what to do and would shut it off after an hour. It would however it would sit in the back my mind after playing it and I would go back to it where I would have the time of my life blinding everyone with my ripper. There are a lot of quality of life things that we also take for granted and when we go back to an older game where there are features that should be present but are not there, we are thrown for a loop. I remember playing Wizardry 6 and getting introduced to the concept of making my own maps for the levels (I should try Wizardry again after I get done replaying fallout 1 and 2). I think that Role-Playing games and especially older ones are fundamentally different than any other game which requires completely different skills. There is hope however because I notice more and more people getting into tabletop which could be a gateway for CRPGs.

TL;DR: It's a lot to take in for a young person to play an older crpg

So...have you started to read manuals in general?
Also, have you seen the mental cases that play table top RPGs these days? No thanks.

 

[Mortmal]

Are there any codexers with young kids or some in their family still? Noticed with nieces , nephews and cousins that books are no longer in their universe, they all use tablets. A book is something obsolete archaic from stone age, likewise reading a manual for a game is unthinkable. At the slightest difficulty or frustration, nephew go on youtube watch a letsplay..
No way they are going to play older games let alone rpgs. Plus most of them may not even run on their pc in the unlikely case they are still using that.

 

[MLMarkland]

As a zoomer, I think it's difficult to get into older rpgs because there's are many things to take in and adjust to. Partly because we don't want to read the manual. I remember playing fallout as my first crpg with no preparation and I would get confused, lost, not knowing what to do and would shut it off after an hour. It would however it would sit in the back my mind after playing it and I would go back to it where I would have the time of my life blinding everyone with my ripper. There are a lot of quality of life things that we also take for granted and when we go back to an older game where there are features that should be present but are not there, we are thrown for a loop. I remember playing Wizardry 6 and getting introduced to the concept of making my own maps for the levels (I should try Wizardry again after I get done replaying fallout 1 and 2). I think that Role-Playing games and especially older ones are fundamentally different than any other game which requires completely different skills. There is hope however because I notice more and more people getting into tabletop which could be a gateway for CRPGs.

TL;DR: It's a lot to take in for a young person to play an older crpg

So...have you started to read manuals in general?
Also, have you seen the mental cases that play table top RPGs these days? No thanks.

The tabletop thing highlights a very clear cycle in games. Basic D&D players mostly didn’t like the ever increasing complexity of rules & settings of AD&D (which form a significant bulk of my professional game experience) and then WOTC/Hasbro dumbed down D&D with D20 and Pathfinder and whatever it is now.

The people playing whatever D&D tabletop is today have more in common with the young boomers and old gen X that played Basic D&D in 1970s-1980s, than with the “complexity preferenced” young gen X / old millennial players who preferred things like a hundred books on minutiae and strange settings like Planescape.

I think some of it has to do with the extreme complexity of being born from around 1970 to 1984. If you are that age, you experienced almost everything pre-Internet & Cold War but also experienced everything post 9-11/GWOT/GFC/hyper online & online social world.

I remember both: “The biggest risk is Ukraine having nuclear weapons post-USSR dissolution, we must fix this With Russia” AND “Everyone must support Ukraine against Russia because Russia is bad.”

There’s a reason the most cynical people on the planet were born in about a 12-14 year time period.

I think it’s obvious why that group would select for complex games, and it’s obvious why age groups on either side would select for simple games.

It’s just this:
Gen 1: Nothing is complex
Gen 2: Everything is complex
Gen 3: We’d prefer if nothing is complex

In theory the next cycle would be: “We’d prefer that complexity mirror reality” OR “We’d prefer complexity be concealed again.”

Jury is still out on that — Gen 4 is not old enough to exert preference power in most markets.

 

[ItsChon]

I'll throw my own zoomer opinion in. It is important to draw a distinction between the pre-iPhone era and the post-iPhone era. There is a massive difference between the older Zoomers (1997-2005) and the younger ones due to how much the iPhone impacted how people function and think. As an example, I didn't get my first smartphone until I was around sixteen, and even then I didn't have unlimited data as it was still to expensive for my family to afford. I spent my entire childhood reading books, and while this obviously wasn't the norm for children even prior to the release of the iPhone, there is an evident difference in general intelligence and attention span between these two groups. As a disclaimer, both groups are filled to the brim with low-IQ degenerates who are being manipulated/brainwashed by the oligarchs that run the West, so even if we fix the following issues, I doubt it would do much good.

When it comes to Zoomers from the pre-iPhone era, there are many reasons why older RPGs are not popular. An easy one to start with is that many people did not grow up playing those games, and are thus unfamiliar with the genre. I distinctly remember young Chon being drawn to third-person/first-person games and being averse to isometric/top-down views (although I grew up playing a ton of Rise of Nations which was awesome and I begged my parents to buy me SC2. I never got to play it since our computer was incapable of running it, but still). It sounds strange to say this since now almost every game I play is isometric/top-down, but they really are a sort of "acquired" taste, and one really needs to devote a little time until they get accustomed to it, likely because it requires a higher level of abstraction compared to other types of games. Plus, strategy/tactics games are some of the most common types of isometric/top-down games, and these are harder for younger kids to enjoy/get into for obvious reasons.

Once someone becomes familiar with the genre, many older cRPGs are, well, old. They can be difficult to get running, low resolution, clunky, and hard to get into. To this day playing games in DOSBox feels like absolute shit for me, and it's a shame because I know that if it wasn't for the fact that they are DOS games, I could probably really enjoy them. As others have also pointed out, there are many things in RPGs which really aren't that intuitive, and can lead to people bouncing off. Making a character without looking up a guide for example. It is actually not that easy, we're just so familiar with the genre it feels that way to us. Getting lost and not knowing where to go and/or what to do are also things that commonly happen in older cRPGs, and they happened to people who played said games at the time. They just didn't have any alternatives so they dealt with it.

When a prospective cRPG enjoy overcomes these two obstacles, then the issue of advertising/popularity comes into play. Many people have simply never heard of classic cRPGs, I know I hadn't, and even when I did discover the IE games, I wouldn't have found out about many other classic cRPGs without the existence of this website. Outside of the RPG Codex, I feel like the idea of a classic, old-school cRPG doesn't really exist. It's so weird that so many people are completely clueless about the existence of games that used to be so popular. Plus, we don't even have new game sbeing released which are similar to old cRPGs. Isometric cRPGs and blobbers are basically only a step above being dead in regards to new releases in general, much less massive triple A studio releases.

The post-iPhone era is completely fucked, and we shouldn't even bother trying to ask what we can do to fix these. These kids brains have completely atrophied, and they are barely capable of basic mathematics, proper speech, and simple writing, so you can forget about them playing/getting any game with a modicum of complexity. The West have done an amazing job of securing their future, as future generations are assured to be mindless consoomers (and that's a generous classification).

TL;DR

- Zoomers did not grow up playing video games that are similar to old school cRPGs, making them naturally averse to trying those kinds of games.
- Older cRPGs are more difficult to get into in terms of game design, general clunkiness, and technology wise.
- Many people have completely forgotten about older cRPGs, and the cRPG genre itself is pretty much dead outside of niche indie titles.