Fallout creator Tim Cain recently introduced a new blog. This time he spoke about the problem of modern games.
According to the creator, new projects suffer from an identity crisis. Old games could give modern developers "forgotten wisdom":
[Modern games] don't understand what they want to be. They are trying to be everything to everyone: the design [of games] is created by committees, they are aimed at pleasing the publisher, trying to guess the desires of the widest audience.
Tim Cain explained that old games were more focused because their authors simply had no other choice.
In the 80s, PCs were less productive, there were no common "hardware" standards, and the developers themselves were less specialized. For example, programmers also acted as artists and sound engineers, working without documentation.
Modern developers can learn an "efficiency lesson" from the experience of their predecessors. Previously, game creators worked within a rigid framework and had to calculate the display of pixels with millisecond accuracy or work with specific values in memory cells:
It wasn't that you wanted to write code efficiently or thought: "It would be great if we wrote it efficiently." It was about either you write efficient code, or your game just wouldn't work on the Atari console
This efficiency was also in the game design of those years. Modern games have acquired additional layers, for example, an "action" game may have a crafting system, puzzles and other mechanics. In the 80s, developers were focused on specific things:
You couldn't do everything. You had to choose: "What gameplay segment do I want to show?". And then you implemented it. The idea that you can make a basic gameplay cycle that includes a huge variety of actions simply did not exist then.
Tim Cain compared game development to cooking. Modern projects, whose authors succumb to the desire to add something, resemble a buffet. While old games were more focused — they have fewer "ingredients", but the final "dish" turns out to be delicious:
The difficulty is that when you start making a game, it's easy to give in to the desire: "I want to add this, and I like this thing, and I just played a game that had this too — I want to insert this too."
You need to strive for simplicity. You need to stay focused, and everything you do must be done at the highest level. And then your game will be like a good restaurant: there are few ingredients in the dishes, but they always turn out delicious.