This article was published in the January 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here.
The strong pull of nostalgia in games
Nostalgia is a sweet, sweet drug. It screws with our perceptions and judgment, but pays us back with a warm feeling and a sure sense that, once upon a time, things existed in an ideal state.
The power of nostalgia is that there’s almost always a solid truth at the heart of the myth. In gaming, for example, design tends towards the mean. Publishers spending lots of money on an A-list game know they can hedge their bets on a success by shooting for the mushy middle rather than pushing into new territory. Thus, once-complex tactical shooters like those found in the Tom Clancy series lose the prickly bits—the tactical planning and go-codes—that made them challenging. Strategy games get reduced to simple point-and-click affairs. Role-playing games become, essentially, first person shooters with stats and skill trees.
It’s this last change that has hurt the most. I logged over 100 hours on Skyrim, and I think it’s a rich and satisfying game. But is it really role-playing? Computer RPGs grew out of Dungeons & Dragons, and D&D was always a party-based, character-rich, stat-and-skill-driven experience.
MMOs return the party and thus the social element, but again: most modern MMORPGs are just action games with leveling.
The first game I ever wrote about was Eye of the Beholder, and through my nostalgia goggles it’s The Best RPG Ever. All subsequent games, for me, are measured against it, as well as Gold Box games, Ultima, Wizardry, Dungeon Master, and Might and Magic. And by those standards, a lot of contemporary role-playing games, while offering their own pleasures, come up short.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with an Eye of the Beholder nostalgia act lately: Legend of Grimrock II. Like both the original LoG and Might and Magic X, it brings the grid-based, multi-character old school RPG into the 21st century.
Legend of Grimrock II harks back to “the best RPG ever,” Eye of the Beholder.
If you have no experience with the old grid-based system, in which movement is stepped rather than free, the restriction will just feel bizarre. There’s a good reason for that feeling: it is bizarre. It was done at the time because they couldn’t render the world freely. When Ultima Underworld came out and you could move and look anywhere, it was like the clouds parted and the angels sang. It was wonderful. And yet… in the 20-plus years since, I’ve always thought fondly of Beholder, and Grimrock returns that warm feeling, all nicely packaged for my 46-year-old frame.
There is no earthly reason for an RPG in 2014 to tie movement to a grid. It works like haiku or genre fiction or a sonata, using certain restrictions of form and style to create a particular kind of art that embraces its rules and limitations. In doing so, it shows us that we don’t always need to seek out realism in our game worlds. Sometimes, artificiality has its own charms.
Thomas L. McDonald is editor-at-large of Games Magazine.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1LAJNri
