Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20150204202730/@comment-3547390-20150321154039

Trust me, I go crazy when I see people writing how the entire detriment to the game was due to terrible graphics. Hey, being a massive fan of Thief, I stand against everything in new school titles.

There is one thing that bugs me to no end. There are many like us, people that insist that they love old school gaming and that graphics aren't the problem. Then they create mods to make the graphics high definition, which everyone appears to use and say the original is outdated (even though the original is what turned them onto it and graphics don't matter). Personally, I don't need specular lighting and all the flashy effects of Dark Places. Even FitzQuake, which is the "vanilla" recommended engine, has specular lighting on the walls which makes them look over-bright. Then we get blood effects, which usually look terrible in these "improved engines" and make the game feel more cartoon-like.

I am happy our Wikia can pride itself on focusing on vanilla Quake in a day when basically everybody would otherwise focus on "improved stuff" that tends to either break gameplay or make the game look terrible. Thief Wikia loves to use HD pack screenshots, which I am an extreme advocate against. If features are added, it usually changes something in a way one of the developers didn't intend and thus people can do things they couldn't do. To me, that just feels like cheating. Source ports aren't the evil, they can be used like any other mod to have a different spin on the world, but I don't feel people should be so reliant on using them to play old school games in most cases. Quake is extremely generous, giving multiple official versions so that you can find one that you like and one that will work on today's hardware. I have heard stories of GLQuake not working on computers, but I have a pretty modern computer and graphics card (plus, it is OpenGL, a lack of support of that is a problem). DosBox is pretty easy to get working and shouldn't pose any limitations. The only one I feel is perhaps weaker today is WinQuake, but you play with it all the time and enjoy it, so it can't be too difficult to fix up. Fraps and similar recorders only work with games with OpenGl or Direct3d. If they can sell that product to the point of its great popularity, that means that neither of those renderers are that obscure in today's market. DirectDraw? I can see what you are talking about, it can be frustrating to get to work properly. OpenGL? Almost everyone should have that on their computers if they play any games (especially as it has support for a broader range of platforms than its competitor).

The irony is that Quake is "all brown" and made up of corridors while today's games have pretty backdrops. Perhaps a lot of it had to do with the intuitiveness, the fact that we specifically were not grounded in some realistic setting. Personally, I play games to escape reality, so why do I want to do stuff that is grounded in it? Nobody reads a novel and gets upset if the setting is too unrealistic, they take it to be part of a different universe where rules are different from our own. Yet in games we have to make them real, we have to make them relatable.

Also, because of how extreme Thief is in terms of being different from today's market, I find it no surprise that the remake had to change so much. I just can't imagine an audience for Thief due to the impatient nature of today's gamers.

Then we have Telltale Games, where the entire point of the game is to create a linear environment where you get a few choices and otherwise get hand fed information as you listen to a story. Perhaps a big problem with today's games is that we focus too much on story, on trying to explain every last detail so that no mystery exists. We didn't need story in Quake, we basically got a rehash of Doom and we were good to go. If I wanted story, I would read a book. Story is a nice fluff, but shouldn't be the sole thing that makes your game at the expense of everything else.

Perhaps the least limiting games in today's world is Minecraft. Sure, it has the freedom, but it is designed with algorithms and seeds. We can't exactly have a memorable level when none of will matter the next time you load a world.