Have PC games generally become 'dumbed down' time?

[Kaamos_Llama]

As the title. 🙂

Myself I don't believe so. There have been games that have streamlined interfaces due to being designed with a controller in mind. And yes some RPG's have moved away from tabletop systems to increasingly favour a more action based system. However the more complicated games do still exist and are arguably as complex as ever, if not more so.

Maybe because I play quite a wide range of games I don't ever get to see a lack of depth in them before I move on?

What do you all think?

 

[Brian Boru]

Games have become easier to use, as have cars and food cooking—that's the general progress curve, as ease of use always brings in more customers.

Were there some super-smart games in the past? There were certainly more aggravating and annoying games 'back then', but that's dumb, not smart.

So I guess games have become smarter then, haven't they?

Back then, games were also far more limited in what they could do. So today's games are much smarter in that way too.

How dumb were the older games that were limited to a particular device? I mean, that's really dumb, right? Today sees the emergence of cross-platform games, which is just the smart thing to do.

Cars and cooking food being dumbed down is a nonsense position to take. So it's likely to be similar with games, beyond maybe a small minority of titles.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Games have become easier to use, as have cars and food cooking—that's the general progress curve, as ease of use always brings in more customers.

Were there some super-smart games in the past? There were certainly more aggravating and annoying games 'back then', but that's dumb, not smart.

So I guess games have become smarter then, haven't they?

Back then, games were also far more limited in what they could do. So today's games are much smarter in that way too.

How dumb were the older games that were limited to a particular device? I mean, that's really dumb, right? Today sees the emergence of cross-platform games, which is just the smart thing to do.

Cars and cooking food being dumbed down is a nonsense position to take. So it's likely to be similar with games, beyond maybe a small minority of titles.

Some individual series have become more streamlined and less stat heavy over time as they've become multi platform and less based on tabletop systems. The obvious ones being Elder Scrolls from Morrowind to Skyrim, and Fallout 3 vs the older isometric games that some people complained about at the time.

Around new releases of Civilization since 4 I've heard people say that its somehow grown more accessible and less complex over time.

Diablo 3 I've heard had less options for builds than 2? Again I wouldn't know from my own experience.

Perhaps sometimes larger publishers attempting to move their biggest franchises games cross platform to reach as wide an audience as possible have made those games easier to get into in order to reach as many as possible? Is it to their detriment for some who enjoyed the older games?

There's most definitely a lot of studios doing crazy stuff over a much wider range of genres than ever before if you look past those.

 

[Lutfij]

I think a little, dumbed down, learning curves being steep is something that I enjoyed. Being accessible to many is something that has favored the need for dialing things down.

 

[Zloth]

The average game is certainly dumber than in, say, the early 90's. A couple of reasons:

• As Brian pointed out earlier, the tech was lower. So was any kind of understanding of how to make a good game. So were production values. So, even if the game designers knew a good way to make the game more accessible, they either didn't have the time/money to do it or the technology made it just about impossible anyway.
• The audience, at least for PC games, was vastly different. You had to know the difference between extended and expanded memory, which video cards (when we finally got video cards) worked with what games, what resolutions your monitor could do, and so on. Somebody making an RPG could count on most players knowing the rules for Dungeons & Dragons and having some graph paper on hand!

Now you've got the wide appeal games, which typically get the biggest production values, trying to be fun for as many people as possible. (Well, as many people that are likely to pay for the game, at least - but that's another topic.) You've also got some games with really massive depth, though. There's also niche games out there for various hobbies and sports - some of which will have a lot of depth, some of which will be aimed at folks that just have an hour or two a week to play. It's all over the place!

The games you hear about, though, are going to be the wide appeal games. You aren't going to see an advertisement for an in-depth fishing game on broadcast TV. Magazines like PC Gamer can point out some, but there's only so much they can do in a day. With Steam releasing 100+ games a week, there's no way they could cover it all and no way we could read it all, even if they could!

 

[Zed Clampet]

I think sometimes people confuse the amount of work that you had to do to play a game with games being dumbed down now. Used to be, if you didn't write down a quest and who had given it to you and where you could find them then you might or might not ever finish that quest. While I was perfectly happy at the time making my own maps and journal notes, I sure as heck don't want to do that anymore.

Still, I've seen people be absolutely furious that quest markers exist. To each their own, I guess.

As far as complexity goes. I could name a lot of recent games that are far more complex than anything from the 80's or 90's. I mean, have you ever tried to play Kerbal or a modern survival game with thousands of crafting recipes and the opportunity to automate just about anything? Craftopia, for instance, which is a small studio game, has 19 crafting stations (if I counted it correctly). And just as an example of those, the cooking pot has 107 meal recipes. Each meal is completely different and has an impact on 5 or 6 different stats for a certain period of time. One the map, you can unlock 100 worlds. These worlds have different biomes, different animals, different dungeons, different bosses, different crafting materials. (There aren't 100 unique worlds, there are only about 15 unique worlds that are repeated at different enemy levels). There's farming, thralls, pets, building, etc. It's just a crazy ambitious game.

I do think that, on average, mainline AAA titles tend to get simplified and less complex over time.

And as difficult as the games I play are to learn, I still sometimes shy away from games (or put them in a perpetual holding queue) due to them having no onboarding, tutorials or explanations of any type. It's like they want to marry the complexity of modern games with the "good luck with this" attitude of the older ones. I like it when a game doesn't expect you just to experiment with everything, but tries to give you the info you need to be successful.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I just remembered something that drives me crazy. When a game is "dumbed down" but doesn't do it correctly. Then I find out how desperately I'm attached to some of these systems.

In Dying Light, it had the usual system to guide you to your objective, but a couple of times it was incorrect. I think I spent at least 30 minutes on one part where it had led me to a dead end, and I refused to give up trying to get through that way.

And Warframe has a serious, ongoing problem with telling you how to exit a map. The maps are very much like mazes and use repeating sections pretty extensively. Sometimes the marker you are supposed to follow to the exit just fails on you, and you have to start using your maze solving skills to get out. For some reason that just makes me angry these days. I really don't expect to be lost anymore.

 

[Brian Boru]

sometimes people confuse the amount of work that you had to do to play a game with games being dumbed down now

This. A good example is digital versions of physical board games, which make the playing experience so much more enjoyable. You don't need to hunt for missing pieces, spend half a hour setting it up, another half hour explaining the main rules, have a math professor on hand to keep score, argue over interpretations, another 15 minutes tearing it down and packing it away.

While this is at the expense of in-person interaction and the tactile pleasure of handling all the pieces, it makes the games more accessible to a lot more players. It's not easy to get a game night together—lucky to manage once a month—whereas with AI opponents it's a few minutes away.

Work is for horses and machines—playing games is for enjoyment.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I think a little, dumbed down, learning curves being steep is something that I enjoyed. Being accessible to many is something that has favored the need for dialing things down.

There are definitely still games that expect you to learn them but the average big budget release has to reach as many as possible to make money, as Zloth says most people want to just pick up and play.

• As Brian pointed out earlier, the tech was lower.
• The audience, at least for PC games, was vastly different.

It's all over the place!

Youre right, there definitely are still many games that you can go deep on, but there are also many more games you can pick up and play. Like you say back in the 1990's the audience for those games was split between PC and console with PC having most of the more system heavy titles and consoles heavier on the action. Nowadays every type of game comes to PC, and you don't need to have both to play nearly everything. Also there's just more games in total.

Still, I've seen people be absolutely furious that quest markers exist. To each their own, I guess.

For me when quest markers are overdone like in many open world games they become a case of following the minimap and ticking off a list. I know to many people thats their catnip, so its unlikely to change.

Markers are good, but shouldn't be too obtrusive and result in following the minimap rather than the world IMO. I really liked Zelda BOTWs solution of marking the map yourself.

As far as complexity goes. I could name a lot of recent games that are far more complex than anything from the 80's or 90's.

I agree from my experience. But I was a kid in the 1990's though so its hard for me to judge what was complex to me then vs now sometimes. Also I didn't have much money then so didn't play as wide a range of stuff.

And as difficult as the games I play are to learn, I still sometimes shy away from games (or put them in a perpetual holding queue) due to them having no onboarding, tutorials or explanations of any type. It's like they want to marry the complexity of modern games with the "good luck with this" attitude of the older ones. I like it when a game doesn't expect you just to experiment with everything, but tries to give you the info you need to be successful.

Work is for horses and machines—playing games is for enjoyment.

Modern tutorials are mostly great, and definitely a quicker way of getting into a game than thick manuals and cut out tech trees were (Although sometimes I miss those too).

I have appreciated some games that make you learn them without much explanation. Cultist Simulator did this well and it suited the game setting, of figuring out arcane rituals by reading cards for clues and combining them to see what happens. OTOH I didn't yet get into Europa Universalis 4 somehow despite watching tutorial videos and quite liking Hearts of Iron 4 and Crusader Kings 3. But I do like being confused sometimes by a game when its done well by design.

I also think action games have been increasingly incorporating RPG elements and gotten both bigger and more complex than before. They've gotten a lot better at drip feeding mechanics into those games as you play. Also they are sharing a common design language and getting closer to universal control systems that allow players to more easily transfer between them from game to game without feeling too uncomfortable.