It's not just nostalgia. There was objectively an ethereal quality to games before 2005 that made them feel special. I don't know how to describe it, but the best description I can come up with is transcendent. Games felt like a trip to another dimension. Matter of fact, everything had that quality to varying degrees, not just games, but I digress.
This is what I mean when I say games have soul. Comparing the unique, beautiful designs in pic related to the generic realism of modern games like The Last of Us and PUBG makes it clear that something has changed.
The main reason is simply this: you could see a line of progress. Technology was evolving fast, worlds were getting bigger, more ways of storytelling, interaction and PHYSICS. Mario64 is the prime example of this, and new games meant newer possibilities for us.
Nowadays you barely have physics in games, aside from...you guessed it, Myiamoto games like Zelda BOTW (I don't own Nintendo products btw). The world of gaming is mostly stagnant, especially during what was perhaps the worst generation for gaming, the PS3/360 gen. Thank god for Demon Souls.
Parker Rogers
We've lost a lot of effort to create art styles in favor of going for hyperrealism. Even japanese games are suffering from this.
Julian Barnes
It's the grainy textures
Nolan Ortiz
this, everything be in perfectly crisp resolution means there's less room for the viewer to fill in the blanks it's the same reason why archaic imagery or impressionistic paintings are evocative of things that are not materially present
Devil May Cry V, Doom Eternal, Tekken 7 and the Final Fantasy 7 remake all look like liquid shit fart doodoo garbage art direction-wise. Tekken 4 is one of the best games aesthetic wise of all time. Shame it's disliked though. It has the exact quality you are describing in spades. Tekken 7 stages are so fucking BORING and the ost leaves a lot to be desired.
Everything now is designed to look good by some kind of scientific measure. This is what makes it soulless.
Jace Fisher
the stages were cool but way too much janky shit going on for competitive play. it would be neat if they included some weird stages in a separate playlist though
Jaxon Rivera
That and the obsession with realism. Why the fuck does everything need to look HD and shit? Why can't games just look like they used to? It fucking worked.
Cooper Price
Tekken 4 was godlike, If it was more balanced and the stages weren't so janky it would be the best one by far
Dylan Brown
man when I booted up tekken 4 my mind was blown, I could not believe at how realistic the graphics looked, now even tekken 7 looks like plastic to to me
Anthony Wood
One of the biggest issues nowadays is sound fidelity. Everything is too crisp or clean, and stock sound effects are even used in high budget games. I can hear the pictures you posted, innately, especially the older ones. As well. It's not just the fact that I've replayed them throughout my life either; I've replayed tons of more recent games just as many times, but the standout artistry goes to the older gens when things couldn't be perfect so they made stretches to make it as close as they could.
Levi Hill
bump
Isaiah Rodriguez
> VC > beautiful design it was literally a rushed expansion for III that they released as a standalone game to get more shekels, boomers are absolutely delusional
Dominic Diaz
RockStar isn't Israeli.
Ian Diaz
Tekken 4 embraced realism in an interesting and amazing fashion. Almost all the stages were areas you can imagine a fight taking place in. >the beach >parking lot >airport >the streets >a mall/hotel >the top of a skyscraper And those fucking blue hues man. The ost that goes along with it too. It all adds up to this "cool breeze" feel I get from some games. As in Tekken 4 makes me feel the cool breeze I would feel if I were actually at where the games stages were. An essence that makes you feel like you are really there. A small detail I liked a lot in 4 is how the attack sfx would straight up make an echo. Made each hit feel so powerful.
Blame raytracing, it's a crutch technique that's used all the time now. Particle effects too.
No it isn't. There's games from the same era that I haven't played until recently, and I get a similar feel from them. How do you explain that?
Asher Torres
If you haven't played them recently, go play the Legacy of Kain series. They evoke that same style of esoteric vibe like the OP describes.
Mason Allen
bump
Camden Jackson
that magick still exists, but it’s mostly hidden now.
Camden Diaz
Yeah, as much as Yas Forums likes to piss on it, Undertale has that feel. Undertale is genuinely one of if not the most soulful games of the 2010s.
Matthew Fisher
The answer is very obvious. Soul and Soulless is a real thing, but not the way people believe. Games long ago used to just be about making the things that the very devs themselves loved, the reason they became game devs. It was always about looking for new game ideas, trying to come up with new and interesting things to spice up and make players want more.
2006 is where it hit, when xbox 360 and ps3 were coming in, and it became more about how impressive the game was, how realistic it was, how did it push the hardware. became less about trying to make new things and started drifting towards doing what worked and what was safe to make the payout. it didn't really take full effect until like 2011/2013 really.
The ability to create something new is gone, and if there's an attempt, it's shaken by fear of failure, so why attempt to do something new and creative and take players away to actual game worlds and instead, we can just try to be impressive for money. games are actually too mainstream now, if that makes sense. The last game I think that actually made me feel like I was looking at a game from the old that was genuinely something new and interesting was Splatoon honestly, also one of the last games with Iwata's name on it, as a fun fact.
Play Undertale. Or watch someone play it. It has the same feel.
Angel Young
>Melee FD Yeah it looks pretty cool >Useless room in OOT A pointless room with literally nothing in it >Head boss Wind Waker is a really cool game, but this is the worst boss in the game >Pool from 64 Yeah it looks cool >GTA I've never played a GTA game so I have no opinion on it >Bonus Stage from Sonic Heroes I like the way they look, but hate the way they play >Metal Gear Snake is hot
Christopher James
The point is visuals you idiot.
Aiden Young
Why not just get a bunch of SGI Indy workstations and N64 development kits if you want to make N64 tribute games that feel authentic?
Lucas Morris
RE4 ruined it for everyone. Every developer for the next decade and a half took their best IPs and tried to make them the next new timeless 3rd person action game.
Brandon Gutierrez
I appreciate you guys making me dig through over 800 images to find this representation of OP's ideas. Not memeing either, I genuinely appreciate it. Knowing why certain aspects of a work resonate with people is important, especially for creatives like (some of) us.
A lot of horror games from the late 2000s and early 2010s had a ton of soul. Until mainstream publishers looked at Amnesia and started ripping it off until they killed the horror genre for good.
Austin Thompson
Super Mario Bros. ruined it for everyone. Every developer for the next decade and a half took their best IPs and tried to make them the next new timeless platformer game.
Andrew Kelly
Games made before 2005 you say? Go ahead and look up when pic related came out. That was the beginning of the end.
I'm glad I'm not autistic and can enjoy classics and new games alike. DMCV, Sekiro, Hollow Knight, Doom Eternal all visually evoke feelings of wonder and excitement. They would have blown me away as a kid even thinking about them. Also the goal post for "soul" or whatever the kids will call it in 5 years is going to keep moving up, soon ps3 games will have "soul" when the ps5 is on it's way out the door and so on. At the end of the day it just boils down to old thing good, new bad, and it always will, the truth is just upsetting because you cannot separate your personal, subjective feelings from the reality of the situation.
Eli Robinson
>the dawn of the golden age of gaming was bad Kys zoomer
David Parker
>being derivative and learning from your peers is bad kill yourself, absolute retard.
The Crash racing game is like everything wrong with today's game.
>Subtlety out the window >NPC's crawling all over the track >Explosions and easter eggs on every turn
Ironically though the character selection has been nothing but handpicked besides the haha so fanny chickens XD and the babies
Henry Lee
Something so harmless; so cosmetic...
John Perry
and don't forget forcing console players to 30 fps just to push graphics, I didn't understand it in crash nsane trilogy, even more in spyro but in a fucken racing game stupid actiblizz
Levi Campbell
Who are you quoting?
Hudson Martin
Rayman has always retained its soul throughout the years and it's really impressive. Michel Ancel is a perfect example of a developer who you can tell is passionate about his work.
The faggot claiming one entry in a good series of games that did something different was the fall of games. How Resi 4 did in gaming is beyond me, and without Mario we wouldn't have Rayman at all.
Daniel Wright
>It's not just nostalgia It is exactly nostalgia and that's why you can't describe it. Just fucking admit it.
Oliver White
the line between "soul" and "soulless" isn't a time thing. There are Ps3, 4 and eventually 5 games that have and will have soul. It's just there are a lot less of them. It has to do with how the industry is changing.
David Gonzalez
It's not just old games vs modern games, or Nintenbro vs snoy. It's any series, no matter how new. For example Dark Souls. DeS and DS1 where exactly as you described, Soulful and handcrafted. Then, Fromsoftware piggybacked off of that and made the same exact game again and again. Making no new leaps, just another soulless clone after clone. Each new game trying to appeal to more and more mass appeal.
Jaxson Davis
I disagree. I haven't played Dark Souls, but from what I've seen of it on YouTube, it looks soulless. At least in my opinion. I don't understand the hype.
Christian Cooper
But I haven't even played most of these games until I was like 20.
Charles Murphy
>The faggot claiming one entry in a good series of games that did something different was the fall of games It was >without Mario we wouldn't have Rayman at all I don't even know what point you are trying to make.
Grayson Cruz
so basically
shitty weird textures and early 3D crap and warped polygons and stretched textures over limited models is "soul"
Cameron Turner
>shit shit alright >shit shit idk not out yet
Samuel Ramirez
That you have no point, given there's no lootboxes or other abhorrent shit in Resi4. And the games trying to ape it being bad is on them. Otherwise all the B-grade platformer that failed was Mario64's fault. You have no point.
Austin Bailey
Like old programmers who had to come up with crazy clever ways to do animation or simulate having layers in an image, shit like that took some skill and technique.
Kevin Walker
Played Undertale, didn't get the same feeling that OP's talking about.
Brayden Nelson
I mean, I get what you're saying, OP, and I'm totally with you, but >but the best description I can come up with is transcendent. Games felt like a trip to another dimension. Matter of fact, everything had that quality to varying degrees, not just games, but I digress. Is literally describing your memory of how you experienced things as a kid. That's literally nostalgia.
Caleb Hall
I hope your joking. Shovelware and trash games have existed since the Atari, I would say even more so than now. In the current industry the standards have been raised tremendously despite a couple egregious examples of malicious design. Back in the day there was a 50/50 shot the game you would pick up was straight up unplayable with nothing you can do about it other than feel ripped off,. The further we get away from an era the less we remember the chaff like Quest 64 and the cream like Mario 64 rises to the top.
Justin Long
Because games from a particular era tend to look and sound similarly, you know what games from a given era look and sound like, and you can associate a given soundfont, or pixel judder or art style with a given era.
The only way to play an old game totally and completely without nostalgia is to play a game from an era you have no association with, which is basically impossible if your baseline is the 6th gen.
Bentley Foster
Yeah, no shit. Nothing I'm saying conflicts with what you're saying. While the mechanical standards of games have risen, the artistic standards have basically been completely forgotten.
Jack Nguyen
They were definitely more expressive with a dash of personality back then. Games were designed to be unapologtically individual, themselves, and have a sense of identity. They were treated as a actual creation. Now, everything is just focus tested beyond belief to point where that actual essence is removed and all you're left with is another gray, sterile, artificial, mundane replica product of something else on the market.
I honestly miss edgy games because they gave me a feeling of something obviously otherworldly and incapable of existing within reality. Now all we get is reality, and all the uninteresting traits that come along with it.
Michael Reed
It's the concept of the "virtual world" as it's own unique aesthetic Tron is sort of the quintessential example but early video games really make up the meat of it It's no different from things like 1950s retrofuturism
Thomas Young
Lootboxes had absolutely no impact on the current state of gaming where every AAA game is now aaln over the shoulder single player action movie.
Resi 4 didn't pioneer 3rd person games, 3rd person isn't the devil and lootboxes/cosmetic dlc in fully priced triple A games are way worse. If your grip is that we aren't stuck with tank controls with controlled camera angles, that's a you problem.
Alexander Rivera
DMCV and Doom Eternal have none of this visually. It's max realism to the point of obnoxiousness and the faces border on uncanny valley for DMCV.
Luis Sanchez
They had limitations which drove them to try harder. Maximum realism is nothing but tripe.
Xavier Hughes
Nope, feels just like the 20xx indie sjw shit it is.
