I just got into Dragon Age: Origins because I was looking for an RPG to sink some hours into and I’ve seen it praised as one of the best RPGs of all time and I must say, I might agree.
What are some of your favorites that time forgot?
Jesus fucking christ kids, i came here to say master of Orion. If its after the millennium it’s not old. No?
I preferred MOOII
Yes. MOO but better in all ways. Peak.
Believe it or not, Mass Effect is a retro game now
Half Life 2 is strong!
source engine games have held up so well! they definitely look lower poly / lower texture detail compared to new games, but the lighting is almost entirely ray-traced. It’s precomputed, which means nearly everything needs to be static. In the time since then, a lot of graphical advancement has been in the direction of replicating ray-traced lighting but in real time. So lights and the environment can’t move much, but it looks fantastic even by modern standards and runs on a potato. Great tradeoff for that type of game imo. valve’s art direction at the time was peak, too, and they made very good use of an incredibly limited lighting engine. so I think all those games will hold up for a long, long while.
Titanfall 2 (same engine!) still looks on par with shit coming out now, and it’s not old old but it is almost a decade old. (sorry)
Lechucks revenge
Nothing with realtime 3D graphics qualifies as “old”.
I think the original Command & Conquer: Red Alert still holds up really well. It has a good storyline, quality artwork and the gameplay is still fun 30 years later.
Hell March playing in my head now.
The remake is wonderful.
Ancient and wonderful and terribly addictive
Chip’s challenge. What got me into games
Yes I’m old
Wow, that’s a blast from tbe past. My cousin had this when I was a kid and I used to love playing it.
/me is old
Secret of Mana, and Chrono Trigger are two of the best games ever to come out of Squaresoft.
Island: A Game of Survival
old game
dragon age: origin
inb4 Witcher 3
When exactly does “old” start for you?
If dragon age was a person theyd be able to buy beer in Germany
In fact, you can’t even properly run it on modern PCs. You have to patch it to hell or use the GOG version.
In fact it is part of GOGs “game preservation” program.
do you also talk to yourself a lot irl?
And Witcher 3 would be entering secondary school this month. Your point?
I think there is a nebulous point where people collectively agree a game feels old. If I go back to the Witcher 3, it feels a little old graphically but otherwise it’s fine.
A friend of mine was once going to run a D&D game heavily inspired by dragon age, so I bought all the games in a sale. I couldn’t get through the first one, many hours in I realised that the dated mechanics actually blocked my engagement entirely.
Nostalgia also plays into this. I’ve replayed the assassins creed games before and I’m basically blind to the early jank because I played them when they were brand new, same with many wii games. But these games definitely feel old.
Not every game starts feeling dated, early mario games were so well polished that the intended experience still shines through playing them now. Minecraft came out closer to Quake than to today and even with updates, it’s pretty similar to when it was new.
At some point I’d place near the early 2010’s (although it didn’t happen overnight) innovation in gaming, particularly AAA games stagnated. Most genres: 4X, Multiplayer FPS shooters, open world adventure, survival horrors, etc found a formula which has largely only been iterated on since. Different genres found this at different times, there isn’t a huge noticeable difference between a 2009 Call of Duty lobby and a 2024 lobby. The Witcher series is a good example of this, the games are overhauled in almost every way in the 8 years since between their first and third installment, yet modern open world exploration games feel pretty similar to The Witcher 3.
Games from before this decline of innovation were far more wild west in their development, and sometimes you play a game from then which was beloved and it feels incredibly dated. When I think of an old game, I think of one which feels older, rather than a strict timeframe.
My point is that you’re probably old. I’ve played a lot of old games. Some older than me. I have struggled with but managed to get Diablo II to work from an original CD-ROM on a Windows 11 PC. I’ve played games in DOSbox.
If a game is so old, it struggles to run on modern hardware, it’s an old game to me. I didn’t say it was “retro”.
So “old” starts at “older than me”, got it.
Well, I guess my answer is Pong then.
It starts at “only able to run on a single processor”. So around at Dragon Age.
Me: “Dragon Age Origins isn’t old, it was released when I was in high sch-ooooooh…”
Guess this means I can just give you a list of some of my favourite games (😞), in the order in which I can remember them:
-
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War (+Winter Assault, +Dark Crusade)
-
Stronghold Crusader*
-
Sims 2 (with more or less every expansion)
-
BioShock
-
Arx Fatalis
-
The Longest Journey
-
The two Star Wars KOTOR games
-
Unreal Tournament 2004
-
Thief + Thief II
-
System Shock 2
Man, I never see praise for The Longest Journey. Did you play Dreamfall and Dreamfall Chapters? I love the world building in these later games.
I did play Dreamfall and I’ve been meaning to go through Chapters, too, but I need the proper headspace for these. The Longest Journey is one of my absolute favourite games/series, and I’m very invested in the story (still!), so I don’t want to just rush through it, y’know?
And, agreed, they don’t get nearly as much love and attention as they should, wonderful games!
-
The first Deus Ex game. Really fun FPS with some RPG elements, branching paths with multiple endings, cool augmentations, and the GotY edition came with the SDK so there were always a bunch of cool custom multiplayer servers.
I used to make custom weapons, like a shotgun that shot chunks of meat, or an energy sword that dripped acid or flames. Really fond of it and I should probably play it again sometime soon
Gunstar Heroes and Zombies ate my Neighbors.
Minecraft and FTL are probably the two games I most consistently keep coming back to, especially with mods.
Hexen! I have a kinda love/hate relationship with it: obscure puzzles, tanky enemies, less weapon variety than Doom/Heretic, devilish enemy placement…
But I still love it. Its’ atmosphere is just special, the feeling of exploration, and Wraithverge…
The first stage (not the tutorial one) is shit though. I almost dropped the game during it but fortunately I managed to stick to Hexen. The second and third stages are peak. That swamp…
mostly nes or snes, a link to the past, super contra, double dragon, castlevania iv, street fighter…
