However, before I could begin on WoW, I suddenly got a revelation of sorts about the general pattern here. WoW is not the only one, there is also Heroes of Might and Magic, that I already wrote on, Legacy of Kain, old Fallout, Diablo II, Doom and many-many more. Why gaming community so consistently reject sequels and keep asking for remakes and remasters of the original titles they fell in love with. Is it just nostalgia, or there is more to it than that.
There are many theories that fundamentally miss the mark. It's not, that games were harder. Neither it's the pixel art.
The real reason why gamers keep coming back to old titles is because old titles were smart games made by smart developers and were played and understood by equally smart audiences. Modern games are dumb entertainment made for normies and casuals. That is why old school gamers cannot find enjoyment in modern games and keep coming back to old titles.
Back in the days video games were seen as something nerdy, Mainstream people shunned both games and gamers. Gamers were somewhat of an outcast.
Nowadays video games are much more mainstream and socially acceptable, fashionable even. Game stores sell game merchandise and people wear clothes with game characters.
At first glance its good, finally the society have seen the light of gaming and embrace it wholeheartedly. Now we are no longer nerds and outcasts, we are the core and center, right?
Turns out not so simple.
Influx of the normies and casuals into gaming brought with it change to games themselves. Average normie is much less smart that average old school gamer. The do not even understand, much less appreciate complex narratives games like Max Payne or Legacy of Kain had to offer. The only entertainment they understand is basic and simple.
In order to appeal to normies and casuals, game developers started to dumb down their games, both in game mechanics and in narrative. Complex long stories give way for simple episodic content that even a 6-year-old kid can get.
From getting at precipice of philosophy and existentialism, games went on to be interactive Looney Tunes. After all everyone who can get Thus Spoke Zarathustra will get Looney Tunes, but hardly 0.00001% of those who get Looney Tunes will get Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
For dumb normies Thus Spoke Zarathustra is boring, as is Lord of the Rings, or Classic WoW. All these works require you to think to understand and appreciate them. Normies are either too stupid or too lazy to think.
Game developers do oblige. After all there are a lot more normies than old school gamers so there is a lot more money to be made from normies that from hardcore games.
Normies did not get any wiser and ascended to the level of enlightened games old school gamers enjoy. Instead, developers came down to the level of common pleb and dumbed down their products so that plebs may enjoy them.
Old school gamers did not turn mainstream. They simply went from being nerds because they play games to being nerd subset of the overall large pool of gamers.
Now normies shit on old titles that old school gamers hold dear, while most developers either cater to their views or go out of business.
Fundamentally this dissatisfaction with modern game industry is because games just stopped being a highly intellectual entertainment for highly intellectual people they used to be.
We are sick of being treated like idiots. We hate that our medium is being taken away from us and dumbed down for plebs. We are puzzled that playground that was once ours no longer feel this way.
Because of that old school gamers complain that new WoW is worse than Classic, modders keep refining HoMM III even when developers released 8th installment, well-made remasters fly of the shelfs and get huge critical acclaim and many more.
Many feel that things are not right but consistently fail to pin down the root cause of the problem. People like Ben Yahtzee Croshaw tries to express these feelings in his Fully and Semi Ramblomatic. He became very popular essentially complaining about modern game industry. His many videos about many individual aspects he finds issues with.
However, Yahtz and many others fail to see the forest for the trees.
We want our highly intellectual entertainment back.
Occasionally some developers oblige and do a remaster or even a true to core gameplay Doom 2016. However, for every good remaster that captures what people liked about the original, there is another that fucks everything up and earns record low scores on review sites.
Fundamentally however this is not a solution. What about new games that are as good as old ones were? Why cannot writers write as good as they used to? Is there a hidden censorship that prevents the same level of creativity? Even if there is money to be made by making games for filthy casuals, there are still robust old school community that wants more titles in the spirit of their beloved classics.
Possibly the answer is indeed that studios simply do not understand what made 90s games so popular. Because of that they do not understand what went wrong in 2010s and by extension have no idea how to fix it.
If studios really want to recapture the appeal of games of the past, they need to employ people like me as consultants and/or writers to make sure games they make can recover from the dark ages they plunged in 2010s.
Things I mention above are general observations. They do apply to every game, but each individual game also has other unique to itself issues that needs a dedicated article or even series of articles to fully explain. I plan to eventually cover other games like WoW, just like I covered HoMM III in a separate article.
