Their target consumer now is as high a percentage of the population as possible; they aim for the lowest common denominator being able to play and thrive in the game. Hence, needing insane levels of handholding and guidance in the game.
In the past, it was mostly just geeks/nerds playing video games, and so things didn't need to be dumbed down to that level.
Plenty of my friends who were less than geniuses enjoyed these same games I did.
Games now just focus more on lower engagement players. It's easier than ever to get into a game but, easy come, easy go. Frustration just serves to get someone to move on rather than buckle down and persist. Previously, when gaming was less easy to get into, the population of gamers self selected to people who had already significantly invested in the hobby and were much more dedicated to it.
I think the ability to solve the obtuse puzzles and deal with unexplained mechanics had a lot more to do with lack of alternative options and the sunk cost fallacy rather than superior intellect.
I remember playing Myst as a not-particularly-bright grade schooler and banging my head against puzzles for weeks without making any progress. It wasn't some great intellectual challenge -- I was just bored and didn't have any other games to play. I can't imagine I would have stuck with it if I could have watched YouTube or played Fortnite instead.
This just isn't true. I was there in the 80s and 90s. To an approximation, everyone played video games. The limiting factor was wealth more so than nerdiness; games cost a lot more in real terms back then.
Some specific games, like CRPGs, tended to be aimed at nerds. But that was about fantasy RPGs more so than video games - it goes along with tabletop RPGs and Dragonlance books. But you also have people who went out and bought a new computer with a CD-ROM drive just so they could play Myst, because that game was legitimately a pop culture fad that summer.
And then in modern media we have some selective retelling because a lot of the history is being told by people who themselves are deep into geek culture and also have a case of main character syndrome.
This doesn’t touch on one key difference between games now vs. games then: there were some secrets in games that you just didn’t ever know about unless there was a (printed) walkthrough, or through the word of mouth of friends. The Legend of Zelda is a great example.
Nowadays, many games can be 100%’ed without even having to jump online or ask someone for help. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing.
I’m playing the Metroid Primer Remaster on the Switch 2 (originally for the GameCube), and even it can be 100%’ed without having to look much up or without even a manual.
At a base level, it tells you about abilities that you have from the beginning of the game but don't know the buttons to press to trigger them, but it goes much deeper.
Great game, 100% recommend.
Shoutout for the Chris Houlihan room.
Moreso than needing handholding due to game mechanics or "too much" anything, I've always felt that it stems from a developer need for players to experience what you made. Or even just convincing the accountants that each additional cost of development will directly impact the majority of players (aka they don't get stuck or give up halfway through.)
That's why I think novelty and 'old AAA game' richness has a ceiling development_cost : unit_of_content ratio.
There are things that were feasible for Fallout 1 to do that accountants would lose their shit over today, precisely because they were relatively cheap then and astronomically expensive now.
... the real travesty is the corollary of that though: that gameplay/difficulty must ensure a maximum number of players see all the content.
Which has led to the 'impossible to fail' gimmicks that make modern AAA games feel less satisfying.
Honestly, it feels like Rockstar and Valve are the only ones making truly great AAA games these days...
(But mostly because they're on stable financial footing and willing to take as long as it takes)
So I wouldn't pull in questlog with rest of stuff. You need history if you have any sort of side quests.
I enjoyed the exploration, the setting, the cryptic writing. Even some of the more obtuse game design decisions appealed to my tastes, such as the lack of a quest log and a map that is just a geographical representation of the world, with minimal markers. It forced me to pay more attention to the world, recognize the terrain, learn the paths to navigate, etc. It was a game where I really was ready to lose myself in.
But it ultimately failed to have minimal respect for my time, and for that I hated it.
First when I accidentally killed a boss that could be spared. I didn't want to kill him, I just happened to be too strong and failed to react mid combo when he surrendered. The game fucking auto saved and I had to start over from scratch.
Second time when I was in the middle of a conversation when I was interrupted by my wife. I couldn't load a game to watch the cutscene again. It fucking autosaved again. I had to read a transcript online to understand what was going on. Total immersion killer.
Lastly, I remember a boss that took me like 40 attempts to kill. I am okay with the challenge. I am not okay with having to go through a mostly boring gauntlet of enemies for each attempt. It offered no challenge, I just felt like I was filling a form before each attempt. A long, 10m long form.
After killing that boss I uninstalled.
Rant over.
Maybe 4 things in that game are what I would describe as quests and mostly they don't matter if you do them or not
I am, however, very with you when it comes to not paying attention to AAA games despite being the kind of person who plays games every day. I agree that no one is offering deep experiences anymore outside the Soulsborne genre, which just isn't fun for me, so I end up focusing on novelty more than anything. My favorite game of all time is a top down roguelite stealther called Heat Signature that I've put hundreds of hours into and done at least one thing that the developer believed to be impossible based on the tutorials (kidnapping someone using only a lethal weapon). The last game I was truly excited about was a quest 1 VR game that was called Help Yourself at the time. Its changed its name since, but the idea is still really cool: it's a puzzle game that involves shooting targets with a gun. It's a bit hard to explain but the tldr is that you have to orchestrate multiple copies of yourself across multiple runthroughs until you shoot all of the targets. A typical level might have to targets with a wall between them such that there is no place where a player has line of sight to both targets, but there is a gap between the wall and the ceiling. On the first runthrough, an instance of you shoots the target on the right, then throws the gun over the wall. On the second runthrough, an instance of you is recreating the action of shooting the target on the right and throwing the gun over the wall, and another instance of you that you're currently in control of walks over to where the gun will land, waits for it to be thrown, then picks it up and shoots the other target. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GENqINO7pXY has some gameplay footage. I haven't had my brain bent by something like this since Portal came out.
The big difference she observed is that older games don't hold your hand the way modern games do. They expect you to think hard, work hard, use trial and error, and generally, in her words, "use your brain." She spent a while talking about how old games have a manual where new games have a lengthy tutorial, automap, quest log, helpful companion constantly telling you what to do next, etc. etc. etc.
She didn't quite get there herself, but the juxtaposition really brought it home for me: the reason modern AAA games hold your hand is because they have to. Because they're just too big: too many game mechanics, too many locations, too much story, etc. etc. etc. If they tried to just sit back and let the player play the game for themself, nobody would would even scratch the surface of the game before they get bored and leave.
It was a little liberating because I finally realized I really can just stop paying attention to AAA games in general, and I don't have to feel weird about it. I'm not going to say they're bad. Plenty of people enjoy them enough to support a company the size of EA. But I'm now prepared to recognize that the kind of gameplay experience that I grew up on and continue to find most compelling is fundamentally incompatible with a AAA-sized budget.