Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20160623203125/@comment-1496755-20160628052513

Whoa, nice job, Death - I can almost hear the agonizing screams of Wikia's webmasters :D

So, to sum up - the gaming industry is a brutal and uncompromising world where being faster is sometimes more important than being better.

During the early 1990's it was very much like a race where everyone tried to pull out something to impress gamers (which were considerably fewer than they are nowadays). Doom had its great technology. Tom Hall's Rise of the Triad tried to compensate with huge levels, gameplay, and enemies based on real live people. Descent introduced full 3D and 360-degree freedom through its portal engine. And our friend Greg's team chose the path of objective-driven levels and an engine that is similar to Doom's but with more features (e.g. slopes, scripted events, etc.).

Everyone tried to pull something off, anything to draw attention. And not just the FPS genre - strategy games followed similar trends too. The C&C and WarCraft series were a success because of their more simplified and faster-paced gameplay. And again, each team tried to pull some gameplay gimmicks like more intense battles (Westwood) or larger and more detailed maps (Blizzard). Same can be said about RPG's like Diablo - simplified, yet a lot more attractive to players.

And yes, size did matter. One of the selling points of games back then was their sheer amount of material - be it graphics (Duke Nukum was advertised as having over one megabyte of graphics), play area (RotT was advertised as offering hundreds of square miles to cover in its maps) or amount of quests and side quest :P

Then the paradigm shifted from quantity to quality... and, curiously, this killed some of the old series. It just didn't feel the same anymore and the fans of the previous titles were disappointed. Then modern 3D-accelerated graphics turned the focus towards graphics and who would pull out the more impressive visual effects (as hardware requirements started to rise at alarming speeds).

As for nowadays - can't really say since I am not that much into modern games. From what I've seen, now the focus seems to shift towards completionism - games try to offer achievements, trophies, collectibles, unlockables, and other such stuff.