Video games have changed a lot since we first started playing them decades ago. The medium has grown, evolved, and in many ways, improved, since its humble beginnings.

But it's also taken a few steps back in certain ways. Yes, modern games are, in so many ways, better than retro/old games. Which only makes it all the more mind-boggling that there's a number of ways in which modern gaming went backwards on things that older games already had down pat.

3 Efficient and impactful design

Limitations can be helpful.

The fact of the matter is that back in the day, game developers had less to work with due to technological constraints of the time. There were just fewer pixels to work with, less memory, and plenty of other technical limits game developers just don't deal with today. That meant artists had to really push every pixel to its limit, to get the player to understand what they were trying to express.

Did those limits mean that game artists weren't able to create expressive, vibrant and bright worlds for players to explore? Absolutely not. There are examples from every era of games, and every console generation, where the artists were able to create amazing images that still resonated with players. Game developers nowadays have many more tools at their disposal to make games look graphically better than we've ever seen.

They can add as many details as possible, and make things look as stylized and/or as realistic as they want. And yet, so many modern games fail to have a visual design that has as much of an impact as an older game in the same genre. Horror games are a great example of this, exemplified by the resurgence of horror games being made today that feature original PlayStation-era graphics.

Or to take another example, that's a little less drastic of a comparison between original PlayStation graphics and modern graphics, the original Demon's Souls game versus the Bluepoint remake from 2020. Sure, Bluepoint did a wonderful job of bringing FromSoftware's original Souls' masterpiece into the modern gaming landscape. But there are still elements of the original that, frankly, added more to the atmosphere of the game, and expressed more with less.

2 Game ownership

What happened to buying a game?

I understand that, technically, we were always buying licenses to play games. The copy of the game we took home on a cartridge or on a disc in the days before downloading games was what the majority of players did, was always just buying a license to play a copy of that game on our respective consoles. But at least the whole darn game was on that disc or cartridge.

You could play the copy of the game you bought, for as long as your game console and the copy of the game you bought work, without an update being pushed that shuts down the game's servers or stopping you from playing it in any capacity. Of course, during this same era, if you bought a game that had any kind of progression-blocking bug, then that did mean you had to live with that bug forever.

At least you still had the rest of the game around that bug, or any of the other bugs that games still shipped with, most of them thankfully not progression-blocking, and instead just ones that you'd exploit to cheese the game in some way, or make some of your own fun.

1 Big studios and publishers took more risks

Innovations in game design and gameplay didn't used to only come from indies.

With any kind of artistic medium, the artists that are just making something for the purpose of making something, not concerned with the financial gain it might bring them, are the ones more likely to be innovative, and bring something new to the table. That's why we see new gameplay ideas and innovative works in gaming come almost exclusively from indie developers, who are just trying to make the game they want to make.

One they think will be fun to play, and that they hope other people will like. But whether people like the game they're making or not, or whether people would pay for the game they're making, does not come into the process of making that game. I'm not trying to say big game studios used to not care about making money on the games they developed and published, but they definitely took far more risks that aligned with the kinds of risks indie developers take all the time.

It didn't used to be that we'd only see video games pushed forward as a medium through indies. Games from big studios used to push things forward all the time, and not just by using whatever the latest and greatest technology for the time was. Big triple-A publishers and developers are better at canceling games nowadays, than they are at getting them to the finish line.

When publishers try to make a game that's for everyone, they end up making a game for no one. Or at least, a game that quickly bores even the players who like it at the start. That's how we get games like Marvel's Avengers or Concord.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

Of course, video games have, and continue to, improve over the games that came before them all the time. Unfortunately though, modern video games have gotten lost along the path of evolution, and left behind a few things that, whether by necessity or choice, older games had nailed down a long time ago.

That's why it's important to know and understand your history. The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future. Good game developers and studios that truly know what makes a good game, learn those fundamentals from the games they grew up with, and everything that came before the game they're trying to make today.