The other night I was playing Sigerous (SGM) mod for the game Stalker: Call of Pripyat. Ran into a bit of a thing and wanted to talk a little bit about it.
For those that may not know what the game is about, in short it’s a post apocalyptic, first person role playing, shooter type of a game. The game is set in the Chernobyl zone in Ukraine. The games setting and story are inspired by a book Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky brothers. The book is worth a read, I highly recommend it.
So the game itself is very interesting, but somewhat basic, and that’s where the modding community comes in. There are a ton of different types of mods for this game, think Half-Life 2, Unreal Engine, types of modding communities, with total conversion mods or just some tweaks here and there. SGM is a total conversion mod, with better graphics, more quests, more weapons and all of the locations from all 3 games, and many other little tweaks as well.
So as I was playing this game on stream I noticed that the quest givers kept sending me back and forth between different locations on the map. The amount of time it took to go from one place to another was very jarring.
So I pointed it out on my stream that games nowadays don’t do that. We expect a single player game to be linear, meaning if you go somewhere it’s with a purpose and any place that you leave behind is no longer in existence. In case of an odd necessity to travel back games would provide you with quick travel option.
This is what the modern games have trained us to think. Keep moving forward.
Back in the day when games like Stalker were being made and many other RPGs, you went back and forth between places all the time. And there were very few games that spent time taking you to a place quickly.
This, back then, was not considered a bad thing, it was just the way things were. Games lasted you at least 40 hours of gameplay. It was a repetitive 40 hours but they were there. With the current generation of games we are trying very hard to move away from the repetitive, which consequently is shortening our games. For example Tomb Raider: Rise of the Tomb Raider. I think I got through that game in about 12 hours.
It was the best 12 hours of gaming I had in a long time, but that’s all that it was – 12 hours. The game could have used all of places and areas it had and sent me back and forth without letting me progress in the story until I finished the necessary grind.
So the question is: Is this good or bad?
And the answer is: I don’t know.
On the one hand you have games like Dark Souls making bazillion dollars, and that game has you going to the one spawn point a million times and you have to grind until you are ready to die, in real life. Not to mention the mobs all respawn… if you decide to rest!
So are old school type of games bad? Or is there a good way of doing it? Maybe, that’s exactly what Dark Souls hit on, the fact that players went to bash their brains, but fast travel is still in the game to a degree. So there are some modern features in the game.
If for example you look at the current MMOs in development like the games Shroud of Avatar, Camelot Unchained. You will see that we are going back to how games used to be. Without actually having played those and judging from what I have read, the good things from back then are being left in the games. Things like complicated systems for crafting, player ran economy, housing that actually means something. Those things are being left in. But the annoying things like killing the same ten rats for ages are being modified to fit better with the current gen of players.
There is of course the anomaly of WoW Classic… which just kind of left all the old things we were told we hated in game, but now for some reason love and adore them. No new features are being added to WoW Classic, it’s still too early to tell how that will pan out.
So what am I trying to say here? The fact is that games are different, and I should not complain about an old game for being what it is, an old game.
Eventually I found a fast way to travel in SGM, the thing that started this whole rant in the first place, but even with the fast travel there is a lot of tedious grind in the game, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want from you play session, is mindless, repetitive grind.
Thanks for reading let me know what you think about old games versus new. Were the old games harder thus better? Is it better to have an easier game to advance through the story faster, or is how much time I spent playing the game more important (Return on Investment type of deal)? Maybe the mix of two is really what it’s all about?
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