There has been a trend in the last couple of years. No, not VR or online-only $60 games. I’m talking about modern games that manage to achieve a return to form of sorts, successfully combining the old with the new.
The best example of this must be 2016’s Doom. It employed all the technical bells and whistles that you would expect from a 2016 id Software game with a base gameplay straight out of 1993. No fancy aiming down the sights or reloads, just endless gory killing. Would this strategy play out the same 10-15 years ago? Maybe not. But almost 10 years after the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, gamers finally got sick of ‘cinematic’ FPS games that follow the same trend instead of doing something fresh.
Another easy example is the release and popularity of the NES Mini. It even caught Nintendo by surprise just how many people want to play those classic titles from 30 years ago on a console that is basically a component board with a plastic shell, HDMI output and a 1:1 ‘remake’ of the original NES controller. That being said, it still is the best way to get the most ‘authentic’ NES experience without buying a used one. The picture quality and porting was done right and the nostalgia factor gave it the final push it needed to sell out worldwide.
Talking about NES games, we shouldn’t forget about titles like Shovel Knight that are built to emulate the difficulty of the late 80s-early 90s 2D side-scrollers and tap into that 8-16bit style of those days. Modern games are becoming increasingly disconnected and try to become interactive movie-like 6-hour experiences offering little to no challenge for the player and a heavy price tag.
We can only hope that this trend continues and developers continue to inject game mechanics from old games into new experiences, effectively moving the industry away from eye-candy cash grab games that can never justify their full price.