@Wyvern, Morrokain: I know just what you mean. That feeling of, "oh, wow, I didn't expect that" and where it really makes you feel like there's a world in there. It's magical. I do wonder, though - was some of the effectiveness of that is due to all of us being younger at that point, combined with having lower expectations of games? Not to say that shooting for that isn't worthwhile, just that nothing might ever match those highs, because we aren't the same.
Yes, some of it is nostalgia, and we are like the old men, "to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."*
On the other hand, gaming has become much bigger; to recoup huge graphics, art, etc budgets, 'big' games have to be widely appealing, while small games, to make any kind of splash on the "App stores" take the 'skinner box' approach someone mentioned earlier: the scientifically, blandly calibrated blend of challenge and reward designed to fill the time on a bus ride.
The former tend to be flashy quicktime-events not different from the rail-shooters of the 80s/90s. (e.g. God of War) All the rough edges are smoothed out, and no serious challenges or problem solving skills are required lest they eliminate potential customers. Even 'sandbox' games like Assassins' Creed pointlessly squeeze playtime with "collect 100 marmoset eyeballs" type quests: barely rewarding, but also barely challenging (as precalculated by men in white lab-coats, it often seems).
Meanwhile the cel phone timewasters are addictive not because there is anything intrinsically good about these games, but because they are chemically designed for that quality alone.
The fumbling quality of chancy innovation, creativity, and desire to challenge players is rarer now than in the past. It led to many abject failures then, but it also created masterpieces we seldom meet** in this latter, degenerate age.
So despite the potential of improved technology, today's games are
as a whole in many ways objectively inferior to those of the past on a number of measurable axes.
The nice thing about Starsector is that it doesn't seem to be going this way. It's trying some unusual approaches to design challenges. Don't know how it will all turn out in the end, but at least it will be interesting.
*Faulkner
**as a ratio of interesting games: all games. Now the ratio of interesting games: all games is lower that it once was. It is possible (or not) that the absolute quantity of interesting games may have increased.
