So on retro games, kids are usually split on being wow'ed by all the possibilities of my collection, or confused why I don't like new things. (I do, but you know, kids.) That makes me think about what I share with nephews and nieces, what I can still point to and say "There's still nothing like this, or nothing quite as good."
This isn't about nostalgia, I think a lot about how to avoid letting that color my decisions. Nothing I hate more than someone telling me "kids these days" or "they don't make 'em like they used to", and that's a different conversation.
What I'm curious about are elements of play or story that y'all feel have never really been touched on, or revisited or iterated upon. Here's some examples.
Suikoden, particularly Suikoden II, uses a massive roster of recruit-able characters to build out your HQ. Basically, everyone you add has a place back at home, with some of them adding services, shops, skits and mini-games. Some of them band together to put on shows on stage, and they actually change and expand your castle town of North Window (or whatever you name like). Something like two-thirds of them are also party members to battle with, if I remember right. For as many games as I've seen come and go, I can't think of anything that really builds on this as a concept. There's shades of it in Mass Effect, with the party members carving out spaces on the ship. Hades I/II has evolving interactions between characters at home, but you don't really add more to the mix. I'd love to see something new explore the concept, like imagine a Pokemon game where you maintain a reserve, with terrain and zones building out as you catch different types with different needs, and the people you recruit to help all interact with each other in different ways, adding new elements to HQ.
(I know Eiyuden Chronicles came out, I backed it, but depressingly I wouldn't call it an evolution, just a HD skin of an old game.)
A looser example is Vagrant Story, with it's semi-turn based combat and weapon forge. Ironically, I think this game was so ahead of it's time that I think these ideas are finally being built upon in the FF7 remakes, which use a faster (better, really) version of it's combat, and a small degree of weapon customization. The difference was in the sheer depth of building weapons and gear that you had in VS, allowing you to customize any item against any kind of opponent, requiring you to slowly build a small arsenal of specialized gear. It was all too clunky, too much menu usage for a system that couldn't do that quickly, I mean you had to save your game just to use storage. I wouldn't inflict that kind of tedium on someone new, but a modern game could smooth out all that with faster transistions and hotkeys and radial quickmenu's for switching gear.
That's just what comes to mind right now, anyone got more?
(There's probably a million good ideas from older computer titles, when they didn't know what they could or couldn't do, but we didn't get a computer till the late 90's, which I mostly used for X-Com and Fallout.)
((Oh, X-Com, that's kind of a good example too, though Xenonauts and Phoenix Point might have that covered. Maybe not well, I don't hear people like them all that much.))
This isn't about nostalgia, I think a lot about how to avoid letting that color my decisions. Nothing I hate more than someone telling me "kids these days" or "they don't make 'em like they used to", and that's a different conversation.
What I'm curious about are elements of play or story that y'all feel have never really been touched on, or revisited or iterated upon. Here's some examples.
Suikoden, particularly Suikoden II, uses a massive roster of recruit-able characters to build out your HQ. Basically, everyone you add has a place back at home, with some of them adding services, shops, skits and mini-games. Some of them band together to put on shows on stage, and they actually change and expand your castle town of North Window (or whatever you name like). Something like two-thirds of them are also party members to battle with, if I remember right. For as many games as I've seen come and go, I can't think of anything that really builds on this as a concept. There's shades of it in Mass Effect, with the party members carving out spaces on the ship. Hades I/II has evolving interactions between characters at home, but you don't really add more to the mix. I'd love to see something new explore the concept, like imagine a Pokemon game where you maintain a reserve, with terrain and zones building out as you catch different types with different needs, and the people you recruit to help all interact with each other in different ways, adding new elements to HQ.
(I know Eiyuden Chronicles came out, I backed it, but depressingly I wouldn't call it an evolution, just a HD skin of an old game.)
A looser example is Vagrant Story, with it's semi-turn based combat and weapon forge. Ironically, I think this game was so ahead of it's time that I think these ideas are finally being built upon in the FF7 remakes, which use a faster (better, really) version of it's combat, and a small degree of weapon customization. The difference was in the sheer depth of building weapons and gear that you had in VS, allowing you to customize any item against any kind of opponent, requiring you to slowly build a small arsenal of specialized gear. It was all too clunky, too much menu usage for a system that couldn't do that quickly, I mean you had to save your game just to use storage. I wouldn't inflict that kind of tedium on someone new, but a modern game could smooth out all that with faster transistions and hotkeys and radial quickmenu's for switching gear.
That's just what comes to mind right now, anyone got more?
(There's probably a million good ideas from older computer titles, when they didn't know what they could or couldn't do, but we didn't get a computer till the late 90's, which I mostly used for X-Com and Fallout.)
((Oh, X-Com, that's kind of a good example too, though Xenonauts and Phoenix Point might have that covered. Maybe not well, I don't hear people like them all that much.))
