Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20160623203125/@comment-3547390-20160628111240

Hahaha, yeah, I showcased just what Elder Scrolls Arena is, a really long thing that feels like it never ends. I also think I set a record for Wikia post size, unless someone just spammed a bunch :P

Pretty much. One team makes a game, another team sees it and makes something faster than team A. Even though that product was rushed and inferior, it was around before team A's product, meaning it got all the reception meant for Team A. Team A continues forward to release their game, but Team B is spamming out games and quickly learning how to make them better while requiring a lot less time to make since they weren't exactly inventing the wheel like Team A was. They waited for Team A to do the hard part, then quickly designed their own specification and got the credit for said wheel.

Yep, Elder Scrolls Arena is indeed a game where they try to impress you with the sheer size of it. It may be extremely buggy and quite terrible, plus highly repetitive, but it is also extremely massive and has hundreds upon hundreds of cities to explore. There are also possibly an infinite number of randomly generated dungeons, you actually need to fast-travel to different towns because the game will just keep drawing new stuff if you try to walk from city to city, it is impossible to ever actually make it somewhere else.

Looking Glass Studios was focused a lot more on innovation and quality over that quantity. Their design documents were all about limiting the player in ways that weren't frustrating, but instead would make it more fun and allow for more depth. For example, Thief doesn't have maps like most other games, it just is a picture of some rooms which are pretty vaguely thrown together. Every level explained how you got that map, why you would have the info you would have, and left off anything that you couldn't possibly know. It knew really well how to keep things from the player.

Yes, I feel a big selling point these days is for casual gamers who work and "don't have the time to play a lengthy game". So instead of 30 hour titles, they try to promote stuff that can be completed very quickly and won't waste your time while feeling cool for the length of time that is needed to do it. If there is a real reason why things have been dumbed down, that is it, trying to cater to casual gamers that are too busy to actually play a lengthy game because they want to complete said title over the course of a weekend or something. I have never understood that argument, wouldn't it be better to spend a longer period of time on a game you like, even if said title takes a while to beat due to real life? I don't think most are torturing themselves to get through the endless repetition of Elder Scrolls Arena, we have a bit more disk space to do stuff than we did back then and companies often create billion dollar titles instead of however much Arena cost.