I agree that promotion videos are far better than the actual products. But this is a common marketing strategy that is affecting each and every field including gaming.
Yes, realism and the the story have had amazing advances through the years, but it also made game devs more reliant on DLCs and even so far as creating Day 1 DLCs just to extort the most money out of customers. Think about it. Games before had no way of completing their games outside of expansion packs, so they had to really make the game count on release day. Now, it's just a bunch of incomplete games that they charge you to complete. It's a mess.
The graphics may have sucked but as kids we kinda made up for it with our imagination. We also didn't have to compare it to anything better, so graphics back then were mindblowing and was the best and most realistic look we've seen. Now when we remember those games, our memories are coated with a ton of nostalgia so of course, in comparison, newer games will be inferior.
Yeah, replay value was a thing back then for a lot of games. I swear I could have played Tekken 5 and Marvel vs Capcom for days or months even, but when I got Tekken 7 last month I just played through the stories and stopped. Maybe there was so much replay value back then because we didn't have a lot of options, since games are all at full price? And now we have a ton of heavily discounted FULL games when Steam sales come along.
There are times when all the money spent ends up in a disaster and nothing else. This is all because of the fake illustrations in the advertisements. I get really disappointed when I end up in such deals.
Hmm.. well, I would probably play them for nostlagia purposes, but if you show a kid our old games they would probably think they suck. Graphics were basically cubes, there were so many physical limitations to games, and no voiced dialogue for the most part. I'd say it's still better growing up with today's games, but we did make the most of our childhood ones.
I have to disagree that games today are more challenging. People have speedruns all the time in most games today. Someone even exploited a glitch in Fallout that made you finish the game in 24 minutes or so. It's not about linear gameplay or patterns; it's about people really obsessing over a game and having to beat the game at a certain time limit for bragging rights.
I agree that graphics and storylines keeps getting better as time goes but there are old games that still outshines the newer ones when it comes to storylines.
I think that's because most games these days are reliant on proven formulae from older games. That's why the groundbreaking ones, whether for the story, graphics, or game type, would rise to the top and set themselves apart from the rest. That's why there's so many games these days, and even though the AAA games are more popular, indie games can still get recognition via a high rating because of their uniqueness and appeal.
