Write Everyday Project #6, Retro Gaming

So I started to make a long reply to a buddy's post about Deus Ex: Human Revolution when two things occurred to me.  First of all, most of my reply didn't have anything to do with Deus Ex.  It was about what I was playing.  Secondly, that's what this blog is for these days: to unload my random thoughts on things.  So here are some thoughts on my sixth new topic in six posts, what I've learned about retro PC gaming.

Over the weekend there was a big sale over at Good Old Games.  You could get an escalating discount on the second generation D&D PC games, with the more you buy the bigger the discount.  I ended up laying out $20 to get Baldur's Gate II, Icewind Dale I & II, and The Temple of Elemental Evil.  I suspect that I wouldn't have been quite so eager to pick them up had I not played in that Pathfinder game over the weekend.  But old school D&D is where my mind was at, so I grabbed the PC games based on the 2nd and 3rd editions of D&D.

What's interesting about these games, and indeed many games from the '90s and early to mid 2000s, is the depth of mod support for them.  Temple of Elemental Evil, for example, is well known for the deplorable state it was released in.  Most of those bugs have been squashed in the intervening eight years, and the Circle of Eight mod adds a bunch of nice features and fixes to the already patched and repaired Temple.  I've got Circle of Eight installed and the game seems to be playing fine for me, which is a long way from the crashes and hassles I'd have had to deal with had I bought and played it in 2003.  What's more, with the sale I ended up buying the game for $3 or so, rather than the  $50 I'd have paid at release.

The story's similar for the Baldur's Gate games.  Not that either Baldur's Gate was buggy and broken the way Temple of Elemental Evil was, mind you.  But since both Baldur's Gates were excellent games in their own right, the mods for them have been focused less on repairing bugs than on adding content.  This has culminated in the BiG World Project where the two games are merged into one huge game with a ridiculous 400+ hours of content!  New quests, new characters, and the ability to walk from the game world of Baldur's Gate to the that of Baldur's Gate II and back is an amazing achievement.

(It's also a bitch and a half to install and, unlike the Circle of Eight mod which was pretty straightforward, I haven't managed a clean install of BiG World yet.  But I'll keep trying.)

Another game that was derided for its buggy release and unimpressive features was Microprose's Birth of the Federation, a Star Trek themed 4X game that failed on it's own but now has a number of mods available, including one that add the Dominion to the game and another where you start in the Enterprise era and evolve until you're using ships from Star Trek: Nemesis.

When I look at the games I've played in the last couple of years, I find that the ones I've played the longest and enjoyed the most are all older games with strong mod support.  Dominions III 2006, Civilization IV 2005, Sword of the Stars 2006, Birth of the Federation 1999, Master of Orion II 1996.  On the other hand, a lot of the games that I've bought new in the same time frame have been disappointing.  Starcraft II, Elemental, Civilization V...all of those games left me cold.  What's more, I paid $50 a piece for all three, where as I could get all of the older games (excepting Dominions III whose pricing is insane) for $100 or less.  Maybe a lot less.

Indeed, it's getting to the point that I'm becoming more and more reluctant to buy new games.  Not only are new games far more expensive, but they're more likely to be broken with the "release now, patch later" mentality that infects so many software developers.  And even if a game is released in perfect working order, it won't have the kind of mod support that can elevate a decent game into a great one.  

There are exceptions, of course.  The Mass Effect games have been pure win for me, and I don't regret paying full price for them.  World of Warcraft gave me a couple good years of play, much of it with my brother, so that was worth it too.  But then again, Mass Effect is a Bioware game, and as they proved with Baldur's Gate, Bioware puts out good games that work.  And World of Warcraft is essentially heavily modded.  After all, gamers who played WoW in 2004 will find the 2011 version literally unrecognizable.

If someone asks, "Have you played <Hot New Game>, yet?" the answer will almost certainly be "no."  I'll probably be playing something five or more years old instead.  Although Sword of the Stars II does come out next month, and The Old Republic is out in December...

So maybe not.