Art Doesn't Expire

[ghoulmouse]

So there's a thing that kinda bugs me about a lot of the criticism/discourse/whatever surrounding older games. Namely, there's this tendency to chalk way too many things up to either hardware limitations or the developers simply not being "advanced" enough at game design. Not to say that hardware limitations aren't real or anything -- obviously they're still a factor even now, and maybe if big developers actually acknowledged that we wouldn't get shit like the most recent Call of Duty being over 200gb in size -- but people are extremely quick to attribute design choices they don't like, or that don't fit in with modern sensibilities, to some kind of arbitrary limitation, as though the devs didn't WANT to use random encounters or limited inventory or whatever, they were just FORCED to do so by circumstance.

The other thing, that game design is a linear progression we are steadily getting unilaterally better at, is of course bullshit.

When the Super Mario RPG remake was coming out, it was pretty faithful to the original but added a few things that people called (ugh) "quality of life" and widely regarded as just straight upgrades. One of these things was making items stack in your inventory rather than each individual item taking up a slot. The thing is -- I liked that the game did that! A lot! It made you stop and consider what you were carrying around, if you really needed all those healing mushrooms or if Mallow was going to be enough, if those old accessories were REALLY worth hoarding. It meant you had to go into a dungeon WITHOUT a completely flooded inventory prepared for every eventuality, because if you did you wouldn't have any room for cool stuff hiding in treasure chests. It also made the game feel a little more cozy, a little more like going on an adventure with your friends, because it sort of encouraged you to imagine the characters ACTUALLY stuffing these items in their backpack for the road, since 20 bottles of syrup don't condense down into a single item in real life. Earthbound also used a strictly limited per-character inventory, presumably for the exact same reason.

Maybe you disagree with me on this, maybe you do agree but think the effects aren't worth the hassle, maybe you think the new inventory does something even better, maybe you don't give a shit at all, but I really think it's uncharitable to the artists who made some of the most widely beloved games of all time to relegate certain design decisions to, essentially, the realm of "mistakes". Making the inventory something you needed to kind of grapple with does run counter to modern game design sensibilities which favor making menus as fast, frictionless, and invisible as possible. Changing it to be more in line with that might be a good move (clearly a lot of people who aren't me think so) but it's not an objectively good move, because it's a different artistic decision that doesn't sit on a binary of good to bad.

So much of the rhetoric surrounding game design revolves around hashing out what constitutes "correct" or "incorrect" design decisions rather than looking at it in terms of what it might be trying to accomplish, and as someone who loves older games and also a lot of the ASPECTS of older games that people tend to consider dated, I think it's very frustrating.

I intended to post something about Final Fantasy 5, but somehow got sidetracked talking about design philosophy and also Super Mario RPG, a game I'm not even particularly invested in, but I guess maybe it constitutes important backstory for my thoughts or something. Anyway I'll just put the FF5 stuff in a later post.

I guess the other thing that's important to establish is: Video games are art, and not just the writing or the visuals or the music or whatever, I mean like everything. Tetris is just as much a piece of art as any RPG with an intricate story. I also do not think it's possible to divorce the "narrative" of a game from its "mechanics" -- it is always a complete package.

(This is also why I dislike the current trend of calling easy modes "Story Difficulty" or whatever...first of all it sounds weirdly euphemistic, like they're trying not to offend people with the suggestion they may prefer the game be easier, and second I'm sorry but I don't think reducing the amount of friction in some areas of the game results in more focus on the nebulous "story", it just provides a slightly different way of experiencing it.)

Comments

[kradeelav]

you're not alone, and it's a thing that frequently bugs me about game remakes/remasters (my example would be 3DS Majora's Mask textures being infinitely subpar to creating the eerie mood of the N64 one). It's something cool to notice in a lot of JP websites where the UX is very ... granular? deliberate? in ways that gets easily glossed over.

[ghoulmouse]

OOoogh yeah, low-poly N64-PS1 aesthetic is super popular in horror right now for a reason I think. If you worked WITH the texture limitations instead of against it, you could create some really evocative stuff that made effective use of player imagination. (IIRC they also kind of deliberately nerfed some of the famously creepier visuals of the N64 Zelda games for the remakes lol.)

UX design is such an under-appreciated aspect of atmosphere. If I had a dollar for every remake that meticulously matched the feel of the game in every respect EXCEPT how the player like, actually INTERACTS with it (UI, menus, "system" sounds and graphics, etc), where they made a bunch of thoughtless-feeling decisions, I'd be able to buy a nice dinner.

[speperteristico]

I have no opinion on either FF5 or Super Mario RPG, but I do agree, broadly, that not all systems in a game are designed with the intent of being "correct" or "as painless as possible" and to try and smother those might change the experience as a whole. (I keep thinking about SMT IV Apocalypse and how bonkers is the map for the last dungeon/boss encounter, full of teleports and it's not like I liked navigating it, but I remember feeling truly lost and directionless the first time I played it blind and I think that was exactly the point! I don't know if a remaster in which the minimap showed you where each warping spot lead to where would achieve the same effect.)

I have recently (re) played Flower, Sun and Rain which is a mechaincally a horrible game by today's sensibilities and even back then it wasn't acclaimed for it's gameplay. There's a lot of walking to and from - a lot of walking around in general. It'd probably be more pleasant with less jerky camera controls, but I thought about the game getting a re-master, and how you kind of can't do away with all the walking. Introducing things like fast travel or even the use of a bike would just kind of break the game and the story it's trying to tell. Which is to say, I do agree that it's impossible to divorce the narrative from the mechanics - it truly is a package deal.

[lassarina]

This is fascinating because I've been slowly playing through some of my oldest backlog games, and the difference between a game designed in 2000 versus now is astonishing. Sometimes I run into the sort of thing that I absolutely just rolled with then and now I am so frustrated by it that it makes me give up on the game, like basic random encounters being able to oneshot party members when I shouldn't be underleveled because it's literally the second battle. No patience for that anymore.

But at the same time, limitations are responsible for some of the most fascinatingly creative ways to get around them, while bad decisions are responsible for frustrating things.

[sleepyquail]

I saw some complaints today about Eiyuden Chronicle keeping the old Suikoden random battles and not implementing various other QoL stuff (I think inventory maximums was also mentioned, funnily enough) and had to laugh as well. It's a design choice!! They didn't do it because of limitations in the system! Bugs me no end.

[ghoulmouse]

The thing that drives me nuts is that non-random encounters have existed basically since video games we could remotely call "RPGs" have existed...As I understand it, the thing that kind of IS a system limitation is having them take place on a separate static "battle screen", since you can use the transitions between to and from battle to load in more field assets (obviously its not the only reason to have a separate battle screen, but it DOES accomplish that). I think the actual randomness was at least partially an attempt to emulate tabletop games of the time, and thus totally deliberate. Inventory limits seem even more obviously deliberate to me -- like, ok yes the NES probably can't process the fact that you have ten zillion different items that easily, but also...your inventory represents items you are carrying. Having a pretty strict limit on that seems uhh kind of an obvious move.

Also Suikoden was a PS1 game, right...? Any processing limitations that would have affected the average RPG inventory were WELL in the past at that point, lol. Come on.