Better Games Today?

[Slothy]

The only thing I really need to say to represent other consoles is Super Metroid, anything else would be redundant.

Final Fantasy VI came out in 1994.

I'm of the mind (and some of you are here) that there was far more crap, truly bad games in every sense of standards, back then that were utterly unplayable and an insult to the medium.

However, there's far more mediocre games that we have to sort through today.

I agree with this general sentiment, but that doesn't explain why the bar on crappy titles has been raised, and I don't agree that it's simply publishers and media trying to convince us that the next big thing is a must have that you will die if you don't play. There was plenty of that in 1994 too. It may not have become as prevalent, but odds are thsoe of us who were heavy into gaming back then sought out as much gaming media as we do now.

The largest reason I think there are fewer crap games and more mediocre games is simply that developers and publishers aren't total morons and have learned a few things in the last fifteen years. We can take the FPS genre as probably the easiest example. People were nuts over Goldeneye when it came out, and I'll admit that I still love it. But to say it is by any means good by todays standards would be a joke. It's easily one of the worst controlling shooters I've ever played and it's filled with slow and stupid AI to help make up for it. No one would ever make an FPS that controlled that poorly these days, because everyone knows how to make an FPS that controls well in general. They may try some new things that don't quite work, but it'll be pretty rare that any developer will put out something that's literally unplayable because it's pretty well known how to do it well.

It's much the same as with 2D games way back when to be honest. There was an unbelievable amount of crap in the early days of 2D gaming. No one had a clue how to make a game well early on. Even during the days of the NES things could be of questionable quality. At least until some people figured it out and some pretty general genre conventions were established. Same thing happened with 3D. In the late 90's it was largely crap by today's standards.

So as a result of everyone seeing how it's done right over time, we've mostly seen the lower limit of game quality raised up. At least that's my take on it. Sure we still have the occasional game that's utterly abysmal, but it's usually the result of either an inexperienced dev team, a publisher pulling the plug and shoving it out the door, or a new idea gone horribly, horribly wrong.