I genuinely prefer the graphics of older games…
This is because a lot of older games were going for an artistic style, the graphical fidelity of today’s games was too far out of reach. BioShock is a perfect example because of its beautiful art direction.
AAA games used to have character to them, now every person has to have 1200 individually rendered pores and a remaster every few years to make it look more realistic (cough cough The Last of Us)
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works might be of interest, if you don’t follow it.
But yeah…there are a lot of perks to playing older games:
Due to the ubiquity of Internet access today, a lot of games get post-release patches, and ship in a not-entirely-polished state. You wait a few years, you get a game that’s actually finished.
There have been wikis, guides, and sometimes mods created.
The games that people are still playing are the ones that have stood the test of time, so it’s kinda easy to pick out good ones.
If a 3D game supports a higher framerate — and many don’t, due to things like physics running at a fixed frequency — on modern, high-refresh-rate monitors, 3D games can be pleasantly smooth.
There are some downsides, though:
With multiplayer-oriented games, the community can have moved on, rendering the game not very playable.
The game may not leverage your hardware very well. You may have an 86 bazillion core processor, and especially older games are likely to be using one of them. I have a couple of games I like, like Oxygen Not Included, that really don’t use multiple cores well…and I’d guess that a similar game released in 2025 likely would.