Andy_Panthro said,

@Tom: Nicely put.

Firstly, I’d like to say that Ultima IV was my first cRPG. I’d played Sierra adventure games and the like before that, with various simpler action-y games as well.

I’ve never actually completed it, but love it all the same. It is a very special game in many ways, not blessed with decent audio/visuals, but it had a message. It had it’s own belief system and mechanics of how to achieve Avatarhood.

It challenges you to better yourself, rather than to best an opponent, which is rare in gaming.

Secondly, on the subject of combat flight sims, I’ve always been on more of the “arcade” style than the more serious sim. I’d guess that the market for “proper” sims is lower and therefore the bigger publishers are uninterested.

The only combat flight sim I’ve enjoyed since “A-10 Tank Killer” is “Wings of Prey”. But I do enjoy dogfights mostly.

Rolf Andreassen said,

I would suggest that some modern strategy games still have that possibility of investment. I am currently involved in a multiplayer campaign of Crusader Kings, by Paradox Interactive. Now CK is an old game, from 2003 I think, and honestly it’s rather buggy and in need of polish. (Happily there’s a sequel in the works.) And the combat mechanics boil down to having the larger army. Nonetheless people are willing to commit to a full year of playing this game every Saturday; and I think it’s because we also write AARs, short stories of what we did in every session. (There are some more at my blog.) Clearly this is a lot of work, writing 500-2000 words (I once hit 3000 words for a particularly important session) of fiction or description every week. And yet that’s what keeps me coming back; not the game mechanics, but imposing my own story on those game mechanics. My character Arkadios is not a collection of stats, Martial-Diplomacy-Intrigue-Stewardship, he’s a man with a story; he’s the instigator of the Antiochene Intrigue, the victim of tragedy in the Death of Ioannes, the architect of the Komnenos Restoration. The game takes on a life of its own when you tell a story about why your characters are doing as they do.

LateWhiteRabbit said,

The requirement for investment is probably a good way to look at it, but I don’t necessarily think that requirement is a good one.

Like many others here, I started PC gaming back before there were hard-drives, when you had to load the OS from a start-up disc each time you turned the computer on. Games did require a lot more “investment” back then, but I don’t think this was by some design – it was merely dictated by the technology available. When you had only kilobytes to devote to a game, you couldn’t very well spend some of that memory on just teaching people how to play it.

Many of these old games suffered additionally from just poor game design. It’s not really their fault, as without them, we wouldn’t have been able to develop good design eventually, but it’s true. Punishing ignorance with rampant death, or penalizing unfamiliarity of character statistics by forcing the start of a new game, failure to give good feedback, etc.

I don’t miss those days, even if I miss a few of the games. When I was younger, I had time to “waste” to spend mapping dungeons on graph paper, or making notes on the locations of food so I could maybe eventually survive a trip all the way to my goal. But I’m an adult now, and my gaming time is at a premium. I want to be able to have fun and make progress in the single hour I may get to game today.

And some food for thought, I believe games should be whole and complete as just themselves. We don’t expect movie goers to read a pamphlet explaining the world of the movie before they watch it. We’ve reached a stage where we can afford to have in-game tutorials, and explanations and that’s a good thing.

Also, we haven’t given up those neat “elaborations” or “fleshing out” of the game world that used to be packaged with games in pamphlet or map form. Those pamphlets and maps are now in the games themselves. Audio recordings that do nothing but expand the world, or notes and books that can be read in-game, etc. Think of the newspapers in Red Dead Redemption, where you can read the whole thing – even the ads. Or the radio DJs and commercials in the GTA games, or the TV shows in GTA4. Or the notes and audiotapes in the Fallout series of games old and new.

I get just as invested in new games as I did in old games. Brian says that “you stick with it more” because “you don’t want to admit those hours spent reading the manual and planning things out were wasted”. I would say that was true in the past, but it part of the investment came from the fact that I was kid. I didn’t have the money to go out and get another game. I had to find fun in the one I had. Also, there weren’t as many games competing for attention as there are now. As an adult, now I can afford to put a game aside if I’m not having fun or getting immediate satisfaction from it and go buy another one – or download any of thousands of free games from the internet.

Many old games artificially lengthened the game by making the player spend hours on fights, or experiencing every dull moment, or simply being so hard as to necessitate frequent restarts or continues. And as many people have said “they never finished the game”. That’s not good. If we think of games as an interactive medium, or an experience, or a way to tell a story the player is involved in, why would we not want players to experience the whole thing or never see the payoff?

I’ll wrap up by talking about Tom’s golf comparison above. I don’t think the comparison of real golf to miniature golf is quite right. Nothing is missing from modern games – you just have a really good caddy with you now, ready to suggest the right club, explain the rules, or give advice to ensure you can finish the course if you stick with it.

I guess it depends on what you want most out of a game – fun or challenge. Some people may find challenge fun, but not everyone likes to work for their fun.

Powercow said,

For me, the preparation and difficulty added to the immersion of the game. In a lot of old school games, because death was such a big penalty and so likely to occur, I was VERY careful about approaching situations. Imagine that the game is an RPG, and you are approaching an unknown location.
In a more difficult old school game I would probably research it well. Talk to npcs, read the manual about the critters they told me were in there, and gear up for specific problems. When I finally approach it, I know this is the lair of the deadly Baazelbulls, but I have flame retardant pants and a sprig of lilac so I’m going to be ok. I have invested time and effort, and as a payoff I both win and I’m immersed in where I am. In a newer rpg, I’d probably say “huh, some kind of tower/cave” and run in there and beat things until I got low on life. Then I would teleport back to town, grab more healing potions and come back until everything is dead and I have treasure. I’m in some kind of hole with fire monsters in it.

That said, I like a lot of the conveniences in modern gaming. Sometimes it’s just so easy it’s hard to get immersed.

Tesh said,

It seems to me that immersion is a choice that is dominantly in the player’s court. Yes, games can try to be more worldy, less gamey, but in the end, demanding investment of gamers isn’t likely to create immersion unless the player wants to play along.

Syl has a relevant article up thisaway, wherein I note in the comments that far too many old school “hardcore” gamers *want* to be punished and have grueling games. I’ll pass on the masochism, despite being a gamer since Pong days. In my book, that’s not good game design, and it never was. It’s just all that we had, once upon a time.

WCG said,

Lots of good comments here. I’m glad you mentioned Dwarf Fortress, because that’s a game that takes a huge commitment from the player, right from the start. It’s certainly fun, but it takes effort. And I really doubt if all Dwarf Fortress fans are old folks like me.

There are other games like that, too. Aurora makes DF seem like checkers. It REALLY has a learning curve. So does Europa Universalis. UnReal World takes effort to understand. And you mentioned Minecraft, which, yes, isn’t too hard to begin, but is filled with players who put a lot of effort into it. There is still a place for games like this, RPGs, too.

However, we can’t just copy those great old RPGs. They really weren’t perfect, you know. Graph-paper maps were fun back then, but they were also a necessity. They’d be just an annoyance now. I absolutely loved the combat in the SSI “Gold Box” games, but there was too much of it, and not enough exploration and discovery. Knights of the Chalice has that same problem. Well, combat is cheap, and a larger, more complicated world is not.

You CAN make a complicated RPG, an RPG that takes effort, but you have to move forward, not back, to be successful. You can’t just eliminate the automap and expect it to be anything but an annoyance to game-players. I think you have to look at Dwarf Fortress, at Minecraft, at all of these new, inventive games for inspiration.

Personally, I’d like to see an RPG that wasn’t all combat. I want exploration and discovery, I want construction or crafting or terraforming – some kind of creative outlet – and I want to interact realistically with NPCs. I want my actions to have a real effect on the world and to see the NPCs as real people affected by my efforts. Basically, I want to create my own story through my character(s) actions.

I’d like to see far more skills, useful skills, that would fit together in complicated ways, so that every play was different. I’d like to see a huge world, like Daggerfall, or perhaps a world generated as you explore, like Minecraft. I want a world that keeps me coming back, to see what I might discover next.

I want a game that takes real effort, but not because that makes the game longer or more difficult. I simply want the effort put into the game to be reflected into the enjoyment I get out of it. Ideally, you could jump into the game with pre-generated characters and just mess around. But with more effort, you should have even more fun, creating your OWN story, and pretty much your OWN game – and even your OWN world (or your part of it).

This would require a complicated world, and a huge world. But the graphics don’t have to be cutting edge. I can’t quite handle ASCII graphics, myself, but look at Minecraft, for example. Those are lovely worlds, but hardly state of the art. And you don’t have to create the whole world by hand. Again, look at Minecraft. Look at Daggerfall.

I really think mainstream developers took an unfortunate turn away from Daggerfall, years ago. There was a great idea there. They just didn’t go far enough. Creating a physical world isn’t enough. It needs realistic NPCs, too. In fact, that might be the most important part.

A complicated world – with complicated NPCs and all sorts of skills – is going to take a lot of effort to really master, but it could be based on relatively simple algorithms. The complication would be based on how they interact. Well, that’s not so different from the real world. People are all very similar, but we still end up with complications. Homes are basically the same, built for the same reasons, but they’re still quite different.

In Dwarf Fortress, losing is fun. You might need to encourage that kind of thinking in an RPG like this, too. Some situations would get out of hand, and you’d “lose.” But that would just encourage you to try again in a new world.

Oops! Sorry about the length of this. I think I need to write my own blog post about these things, instead of replying at such length here!