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

[Chippy]

My main conclusion is this: I doubt modern gamers have read a book in their life.

Speaking like an old fags out of touch with reality.

These days the youths doesnt read paper books or official ebooks released by publishers, true.

But that's because those publishers are out of touch with reality, or full of their own political agenda. So the youths dont even want to read their products.

These days they read amateur or free novels on Net first, and if they like what they read, they would read official ebooks later. That way if they dont like author's agenda they can smear them full of shit, figuratively. Good luck doing that to official publishers' authors~

After a long time reading amateur writings, now when I read any official novels by official authors printed/sold by official publishers.... I feel like jumping up and down in their comment threads and listing all their sins, all their shitty agenda... and I cant do that because modders will shut me down, ban and blacklist me faster than light.

Case in point: RPG, books and games, are full of their own political agenda. That's fine and all, provided that we can jump up and down listing all their shitty points of arguments in public. But no, they wont do that. They will pretend that they are santimonious apolitical saints and god help anyone dare to prove otherwise~ THAT is why people no longer favour traditional RPG publishers or traditional book publishers.

In all honesty I am totally out of touch. Having said that - nobody told me about music from decades before my time and I still found the greats from the 1920s > 1980s. They can try to burn books or re-write and re-shoot films, but younger people should be able to disregard crap. What concerns me is that I don't think their brains can handle it, so they don't even give it a chance.

If the younger gamer's brain has been wired to the point where we don't even read manuals anymore, then they'll never play a game like PST. And if they lack the mental capacity to play a game like PST, then maybe that's why idiots in Hollywood and elsewhere are always saying they need to see themselves in characters in other media - like black elves in The Witcher?.

 

[turkishronin]

they'll never play a game like PST

GOOD
Planet Escape Borement fucking sucks

 

[Pink Eye]

If the younger gamer's brain has been wired to the point where we don't even read manuals anymore, then they'll never play a game like PST. And if they lack the mental capacity to play a game like PST, then maybe that's why idiots in Hollywood and elsewhere are always saying they need to see themselves in characters in other media - like black elves in The Witcher?.

How did you go from video games to hollywood to black elves? Are you ok?

 

[Zarniwoop]

My main conclusion is this: I doubt modern gamers have read a book in their life.

Speaking like an old fags out of touch with reality.

These days the youths doesnt read paper books or official ebooks released by publishers, true.

But that's because those publishers are out of touch with reality, or full of their own political agenda. So the youths dont even want to read their products.

These days they read amateur or free novels on Net first, and if they like what they read, they would read official ebooks later. That way if they dont like author's agenda they can smear them full of shit, figuratively. Good luck doing that to official publishers' authors~

After a long time reading amateur writings, now when I read any official novels by official authors printed/sold by official publishers.... I feel like jumping up and down in their comment threads and listing all their sins, all their shitty agenda... and I cant do that because modders will shut me down, ban and blacklist me faster than light.

Case in point: RPG, books and games, are full of their own political agenda. That's fine and all, provided that we can jump up and down listing all their shitty points of arguments in public. But no, they wont do that. They will pretend that they are santimonious apolitical saints and god help anyone dare to prove otherwise~ THAT is why people no longer favour traditional RPG publishers or traditional book publishers.

In all honesty I am totally out of touch. Having said that - nobody told me about music from decades before my time and I still found the greats from the 1920s > 1980s. They can try to burn books or re-write and re-shoot films, but younger people should be able to disregard crap. What concerns me is that I don't think their brains can handle it, so they don't even give it a chance.

If the younger gamer's brain has been wired to the point where we don't even read manuals anymore, then they'll never play a game like PST. And if they lack the mental capacity to play a game like PST, then maybe that's why idiots in Hollywood and elsewhere are always saying they need to see themselves in characters in other media - like black elves in The Witcher?.

Fabulously optimistic. Shitlennials can't even into peak modern games like the Divinity Original Sins.


Neverwinter Nights is some boomer shit from before the first applephone and Planetscape Tournament? Fallout? You're talking about 4 right? Where you walk around with power armor for no goddamn reason because you're Worth It right?

 

[Dadd]

The truth is modern games are far more mechanically sophisticated than crpgs; zoomers get bored of quaint old games that don't sitmulate their much-evolved real-time strategic thinking and their highly tuned reflexes.

 

[Bad Sector]

This is an interesting point, but I think that the same people that consider the Bioshock graphics too outdated have no problems with modern games with pixel-art that resembles a SNES game.

Important bit: "modern games with pixel-art that resembles a SNES game". This modern game may look like a SNES game (though most likely with widescreen and completely ignoring any SNES limitations) but will control like a modern game. After all as i wrote (or really, quoted thesecret) it isn't with just graphics but also UX and controls.

If they think that about the Bioshock series (which is utterly stupid lol) they can simply play the official remasters in 2k/4k 60FPS. Problem solved.

TBH i don't think the Bioshock remasters change much visually (if anything i've read some parts are worse - though personally i can't really spot much of a difference). But my point wasn't about Bioshock specifically but about people finding even visuals of Bioshock's fidelity dated now.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

My brother is the same age as me. His favorite RPG is Divinity Original Sin 2. He also likes New Vegas, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Fallout 3. Since he likes Fallout and its world, I've often tried to get him to play the first two games. Every time, he says that the graphics are too "pixelated" and old-looking for him to play it. Recently, he played Disco Elysium. I tried to point out to him that Disco Elysium's visuals are barely any different from Fallout 1 and 2. He still refuses to play them.

I've had a similar experience with my parents. Even though they were born in the 70s, they refuse to watch black and white movies, or even colored movies from the 60s and 70s sometimes. Some people are just really stubborn about refusing to engage with something they consider too old. Who can say why? Probably conditioning from television. It's more profitable for consumers to constantly engage with the newest thing. Even though it's really easy to watch old movies and play old RPGs for free (which you'd think would be an incentive), people just won't. They'll spend their money on the newest shit instead. And you can't even argue them out of this mindset.
It's sad, but what can you do? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. At that point, all that's left is

 

[Not.AI]

People whining about graphics are on the wrong track.

... they didn't play Bioshock despite the good reputation it had because the graphics were dated. FFS, you can claim anything about how Bioshock is bad as an immersive sim (and it'd be true), but if nothing else the visuals were among its strongest points by far ....

The last time i had this sort of shock was some years ago when someone claimed that KOTOR's visuals were too dated for them.

So yeah, i don't think people whining about graphics are on the wrong track. Though i think what thesecret1 mentioned is way closer to the truth: "The games have outdated graphics..."

Bioshock really did have dated graphics and was bad an immersive sim, that's not wrong.

An issue is that lexicographic preferences are a thing for too many people. It's something that people who happen not to have any such strong preferences find difficulty believing.

Graphics is probably a misleading word. The real issue is probably later cohorts being more likely to find, as a dealbreaker, lack of style. Which is not graphics, but correlated with graphics. This can happen more and more often for later cohorts, in a medium with improving graphics, without any change in the distribution of tastes, even if people come and go. "Par" was lower long ago.

Nier: Automata had dated graphics when it came out, but oozed style. The intro to FFVI is stylish AF, for example. Even though it is basic 2D. The draw distance in Gothic 1 & 2 are huge. Gothic 1 & 2 happen to be stylish. Morrowind is stylish. (Oblivion is not stylish.) This is why N:A was successful when it came out; but also why it's tremendously easier to get people to play some old games than others.

Model

1. Better and better graphics can achieve "good enough" style accidentally.

2. Good style can also be achieved by careful artistic design, but then not accidentally.

3. Good style that is not accidental is rare in almost all media, however.

4. In the past, good style in context, in most cases, was often obviously impossible with the hardware.

5. Most people don't ask for the impossible. Yet they bitterly resent what is possible but not done. They are less angered by an earthquake than by somebody bumping into them whereby they dropped a snack they were holding.

Put those rules together emergently with a strict demand for style and old games with great gameplay, even something as famous as chess, are at a tremendous disadvantage.

A clue might be that more and more people today can like characters in some game, but might actually dislike the game itself. Seems to be the case often enough.

The more realistic consumer model is a two factor model: conditional lexicographic preferences with one or more exceptions.

They need either their main factor (e.g., style) to be above a threshold, which increases with a "par" value based on their "best" experience so far in life, but this need not be the case, if and only if some other factor is above its special threshold. For example, if the interactivity of an immersive sim is high enough, the strict requirement for graphics gets suddenly ignored. Example: Deus Ex.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Two things here from my own foray into the genre.

First, I think the idea that kids don't read enough, early enough is generally correct. I was blessed to have a grandmother who took my cousins and I to the library as a child. She wasn't some intellectual, she didn't even get to go to high school before WWII broke out and had to flee Pomerania, but she loved stories of all the royalty and nobility of Europe. She told me stories of how she used to play in what she called "hungraves" in the woods of northern Germany on school trips. She took my cousins and I and let us find what we were interested in, but to say her interest didn't have any effect on my own would be delusional. Because of her, I gravitated toward books about knights and castles and dragons. My love of video games came after that but that type of subject matter was what I always felt most enthralled by in games as well.

We talk about the idea of kids being "forced" to play games they don't like but immediately throw the baby out with the bathwater, in that maybe they want that push. Many of the CRPGs I played from the late 90s were introduced to me by my older cousin whenever he came up to visit. Among these, were Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale and Diablo II. He was kind enough to leave me his copy of Icewind Dale when he left one year because he knew I really liked it, or rather liked watching him play it. I could have just as easily never touched these games again once he was gone and continued to play the much visually superior games I had for my Nintendo 64 at the time, but I didn't. Over time, I left consoles behind entirely. I never owned another one until years later when I picked up a used XBOX when the 360 came out so I could couch co-op some of the games I already played on PC with friends. It's safe to say, it's because of my grandmother and my older cousin that I like what games I like now.

We in the older generations have neglected our duty to the younger generation. The era of older family members and friends fostering their young'ns to be like them is getting further and further away and many now are born to only-children with no extended family of their own, with grandparents they never see that are across the country. I don't know how this problem can be solved for others, but I have tried to rectify this with my zoomer cousin that was born 17 years after me. The other week he was randomly asking me questions about Guild Wars and Neverwinter Nights II because he saw I was playing them. Of late, I've been teaching him how to play Crusader Kings II after he asked me to. I don't expect miracles, but even at 14, well past the sponge-brain age of ~10, he's not hopeless yet.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

The Infinity Edge games suck anyways. Clunky ass gameplay. Play Dark Sun or Darklands or Temple of Elemental Evil instead, shit, Gold Box games aged pretty well with gameplay that's good as well.

They would be better if Bioware committed to proper real time gameplay or stuck with turn-based gameplay rather than compromising with the weird timers. BG2 was decline as well.

 

[bobocrunch]

im a zoomer
a lot of old games literally give you a fucking headache trying to parse the nonsensical (to modern standards) UI and controls, and then it's the whole struggle of playing a game made in 1991 when you could be playing Fortniteblox and grinding your daily dopamine reward

1. no bombastic modern hook and therefore drive to continue playing, intro lore is all frontloaded into a manual you wont have or a pdf you wont open
2. omg grafix / romance / setting is a lot easier to sell than your blobber letting you choose how much piss your party consumes in Defunct IP Wizard Land #48
2. spoiled by modern controls and conveniences
3. Old = Bad, Must Grind Batman Skin

My brother is the same age as me. His favorite RPG is Divinity Original Sin 2. He also likes New Vegas, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Fallout 3. Since he likes Fallout and its world, I've often tried to get him to play the first two games. Every time, he says that the graphics are too "pixelated" and old-looking for him to play it. Recently, he played Disco Elysium. I tried to point out to him that Disco Elysium's visuals are barely any different from Fallout 1 and 2. He still refuses to play them.

thats interesting to me because id agree with himand i think its part of the dissonance. it's like asking why someone isnt scared of that train silent film anymore, we're in the New Age now where a pixelated barely legible number on a kids halloween cop uniform is hard to be immersed by, and when it's a major point of RPGs they're worse off than thinking banjo kazooie looked better than it does because the wahooing and boing boinging is still solid. same reason myst holds up graphically, it has an art style that isnt just Gritty-FuturNow

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I recently saw people saying that they didn't play Bioshock despite the good reputation it had because the graphics were dated. FFS, you can claim anything about how Bioshock is bad as an immersive sim (and it'd be true), but if nothing else the visuals were among its strongest points by far.

I would point out a counter example, but even you acknowledge that people aren't exactly consistent about this. Its more about the perceived issue than the actual case. "Oh, its a PS3 game, its going to be mind-numbingly difficult, practically unplayable and I'll have to read the manual" (the rest of what you're saying is basically what I was saying anyway)

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

Boomer games boring af fr fr no cap. I be bussin playing fortnight no cap.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

People whining about graphics are on the wrong track.

I recently saw people saying that they didn't play Bioshock despite the good reputation it had because the graphics were dated. FFS, you can claim anything about how Bioshock is bad as an immersive sim (and it'd be true), but if nothing else the visuals were among its strongest points by far.

The last time i had this sort of shock was some years ago when someone claimed that KOTOR's visuals were too dated for them.

3D graphics age terribly in general, due to technical advances that prompt the player to compare the older graphics with those of recent games. Even if a game had decent 3D graphics at the time, they will inevitably become too polygonal (the number of polygons available for the meshes of 3D objects increased vastly over time), too low-resolution (technical advances allowed for higher-resolution textures for the surfaces of objects) and lacking in various other aspects (shading, shadows, anti-aliasing, etc.) that were added or improved later. Even within 3D graphics, the 2.5D type that relied heavily on 2D sprites within the environments has aged better than the fully 3D type, which is why Ultima Underworld's graphics are bearable and Daggerfall's graphics still look fairly good, whereas most fully 3D RPGs from the 1990s and first half of the 2000s look horrible. A strong aesthetic sense, as with Morrowind in 2002, retards the aging process, but it's only a delay. Even if Bioshock's graphics were incredible for 2007, the same would have happened, especially for younger players who have only known later, more technically-advanced 3D graphics.

From the screenshots on Mobygames, you can see that this enemy has low-polygon meshes compared with typical meshes in high-budget games 15 years later, these water effects are not so impressive today, textures considered detailed at the time are now lower-resolution than expected for a high-budget game, and so forth.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

3D graphics age terribly in general, due to technical advances that prompt the player to compare the older graphics with those of recent games. Even if a game had decent 3D graphics at the time, they will inevitably become too polygonal (the number of polygons available for the meshes of 3D objects increased vastly over time), too low-resolution (technical advances allowed for higher-resolution textures for the surfaces of objects) and lacking in various other aspects (shading, shadows, anti-aliasing, etc.) that were added or improved later.

Recently, early 3D graphics have been starting to be seen as "retro" in the same way as pixel art, and quite a few indie devs have intentionally used a low-poly aesthetic. This kind of stuff is ridiculously popular with zoomers, too, and it was associated with the "analog horror" boom that happened around last year. The "PS1 aesthetic", it's typically called. The analog horror meme is pretty much dead, from what I know, but the low-poly look continues to be used in just about every horror game since it was popularized by the dev team Puppet Combo. Whether or not this intentionally low-poly graphical style will escape the realm of indie horror games and "boomer shooters" is yet to be seen. For me, I actually think stuff like Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, and Deus Ex look better than Doom, Daggerfall, or Ultima Underworld, as long as you've got that shitty texture filtering turned off. Half-Life in particular holds up really well visually. Morrowind is pretty hideous but still looks much better than its higher-poly sequel Oblivion.

 

[Dadd]

Zoomers care less about graphics than millennials. It's the meme potential and prestige they care about the most in general. How many funny things can they do this in game, who will be impressed by them playing this game, etc. are what they tend to care about outside of just having fun. They are fine with playing Roblox and such awful looking games.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

your blobber letting you choose how much piss your party consumes

Sounds like something Kruno wants to do in a blobber.

 

[deuxhero]

In my experience, the number one reason I drop or avoid older games is a really, really shitty user interface. A relatively common one is the ability to fuck yourself over without realizing it by crippling bugs and or build traps you can't undo, though that really only matters for those not popular/modable enough to have gotten an unofficial patch and extensive third party documentation.

 

[Pink Eye]

Boomer games boring af fr fr no cap. I be bussin playing fortnight no cap.

This is what anime does to your brain. It makes you lose the ability to write coherently.

 

[0wca]

I don't think stupidity is generally to blame as I've known quite a few morons who enjoyed playing games of old. Granted, IQs have declined but you can still enjoy old games with a slightly lower intelligence.

I also don't think the technical aspects are the general culprit. It will turn some players off, but given the massive amount of remasters released in the past two decades, a lot of games have been made compatible with newer systems.

The main issue is, as it's already been pointed out, is lack if imagination and instant gratification. The younger gens are so used to getting their senses constantly stimulated that if they're not getting a 24/7 stream of dopamine, they grow bored.

That sort of ritual of enjoyment then leads to lack of imagination because if they want that dopamine hit, there's no way they'll read though lines and lines of dialogue text or figure out how to properly build a city.

The market of course knows that and constantly exploits it by making games that constantly assault the senses with cheap thrills that amount to almost nothing in depth.

However, I think the tide has started to turn a bit. I have a tabletop group running rn where 2 of the players are around 17ish and they tell me that more and more younger gens are giving old school entertainment a chance because current day entertainment has devolved into such decline that they're looking for alternatives with more depth.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I have a tabletop group running rn where 2 of the players are around 17ish

I think that the most interesting part here is that there are 17y old boys that plays ttrpgs.

 

[0wca]

I have a tabletop group running rn where 2 of the players are around 17ish

I think that the most interesting part here is that there are 17y old boys that plays ttrpgs.

Tbh I was surprised as well. But he really wanted to play and so did his friend so I let them both join.

Who knows if it's the start of a trend or just 2 kids who had enough of corporatism much earlier than most people, but either way it's good sign.

 

[TheSoul]

Because being popular matters more than being a good game. There's no curiosity or interest for playing things that are old unless it's nintendo or it got pushed by some internet personality. It's why SSeth brought more people to underrail than what I imagine being released for 5 years did.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Recently, early 3D graphics have been starting to be seen as "retro" in the same way as pixel art, and quite a few indie devs have intentionally used a low-poly aesthetic. This kind of stuff is ridiculously popular with zoomers, too, and it was associated with the "analog horror" boom that happened around last year. The "PS1 aesthetic", it's typically called.

There seems to be some group of people nostalgic for the 3D graphical capabilities of the original Playstation and desirous of games with similar graphics, but these are people who played PS1 games as children, and therefore millennials rather than zoomers. Since zoomers were born starting in 1995, even the oldest zoomers wouldn't suffer from nostalgia for the PS1 or its graphics.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

but these are people who played PS1 games as children,

Judging from the youtube let's plays, I don't think this is completely true. The old PS1 graphics is a modern meme.