Modern gaming is so much worse than the old retro days – Reader’s Feature

Just the other day I was chatting to a friend who remarked how he felt that gaming today was the very best that it has ever been. He pointed to the huge success of the PlayStation 5, the Nintendo Switch, and the resurgence of PC gaming (mainly thanks to online gaming platforms such as Steam). I must admit though I could not disagree more!

Case in point the recent launch of Bethesda’s first person shooter Redfall. The game was released in an appalling state! The performance of the game was totally shocking, with dreadful glitches, frame rate issues, and some of the world examples of poor AI ever seen. Naturally, there is an entire army of hardcore fans defending this mess online but, really, is this OK? I mean, could you imagine Sonic 2 on the Mega Drive being released with glitches like this? What about Super Mario 64? How about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time?

Now, I do realise that games these days are more complex than games of previous generations but, seriously, can the publishers and developers not do better than this? How about maybe bug testing the game a bit more or maybe even delaying the launch of the game until the game has been 100% fixed. Sadly, the truth is that most modern day publishers simply do not care about issues such as this and simply exist for the bottom line.

Sadly, though, this is not the only problem facing the industry. Another major issue is the sheer toxicity of a section of gamers today. Back in my day I had plenty of harsh words with children in the playground about the merits of the Super Nintendo over the Mega Drive, and later the PlayStation over the Nintendo 64 but today the level of hostility is off the charts.

Granted, I think that social media plays a large part in this but only in gaming circles do you get such huge levels of hate for largely trivial reasons.

Another problem area of gaming that has helped to kill off my interest, and it was something that I was initially excited about, was online gaming. Way back in 2003, when I first heard about Xbox Live, I was really intrigued by the idea of playing against both friends and strangers online (being a huge football fan, the idea of playing Pro Evolution Soccer over a network was remarkable) and at first it was really great.

Then a few years on the bad stuff started to creep in, I’m talking about downloadable content. Now, at first this also sounded great; extra cars or tracks for a racing game you had not played for several months or new maps and weapons for a shooter.

But not long after DLC was being made available on the very day the game was released, which for me is a shocking insult to gamers.

Last but not least, how could we forget the awful Xbox One launch in the spring of 2013, when Microsoft tried to stop gamers buying pre-owned games and insisted that even though you were not playing an online game you still had to be connected to the internet at all times (this was later dropped but, for me at least, the damage was done).

All this and more makes me yearn for the good old days of gaming when developers and publishers actually cared about their customers and innovation and creativity were both rife. Anybody else feel the same?

By reader Eric Bowden

The reader’s feature does not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.