Last week I went off on kind of a tangent about audio mixing, and completely ignored the original question about the progress of technology in video games. This week, I’ll take a stab at actually answering that. For a refresher, the question was “Do I think that the progress of technology has provided an overall improvement in video game quality.”
In short, no. Progress has given us major advances in how well some video games simulate reality, and made possible experiences that weren’t imaginable thirty years ago, but as I said about music, quality isn’t the same as quantity.
There are reasons why some platformers from the 8-bit and 16-bit era are considered classics. Why a game such as Final Fantasy VI is still fondly remembered for its story. Why TIE Fighter still shows up in annual Top 100 greatest game lists. Those reasons aren’t just because of nostalgia. It’s because the game design, the story (sometimes), and the world building, all applied within the technical constraints of their eras, all came together to craft an unforgettable experience.
Again, that’s not to say that all modern games are garbage. Ripping through a nearly life-like track in VR in Gran Turismo 7 or iRacing, is the kind of immersive VR experience that technologists promised us since the 80s. Wonderfully open world games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild wouldn’t have been possible two decades ago, and tell a great story while letting players explore a massive universe.
My point is simply that just because it’s bigger and shinier, doesn’t necessarily make it better. I feel like gaming went through a phase of this in the 90s too with most games going to full motion video. Is Wing Commander III a better game than Wing Commander II just because it drops the 2D pre-rendered ships and carefully animated characters in favor of blocky 3D ships and lo-res video of real actors playing the parts?
Spoiler, it isn’t. Wing Commander III is a perfectly good Wing Commander game, with some flaws of its own, although that’s a post for a far future day when my LP series gets there…
Now we seem to be at this confluence again, where seemingly every AAA title has to have RPG elements, open-world elements, a season pass for DLC, purchasable decorative items, and character customization, regardless of whether all of that makes actual sense. Meanwhile, smaller indie games, operating under fiscal, and sometimes deliberate technical limitations, manage to get interesting titles out the door. Those games may not be perfectly polished, or as pretty, as the big titles, but they bring something new or interesting with them.