Save Player One

The term "gaming" as become a whole new face of multimedia and has surely come a long way since its inception in the mid 1900s, just out of curiosity, like everything new that happens. I'm talking about video gaming, of course. With the newer hardware and the horsepower available, games have become more richer than ever, with stunning visuals, refined AI and troubling bugs and glitches. The world looks beautiful and ever, with volumetric effects, higher resolution textures, dynamic lighting and more poly count. The animations and expressions feel more natural, owing to the advancing technologies in the Silicon Valley and we're all witnessing this and it's nothing new frankly, but There's a reason hang on to certain old titles till now and discard certain newer ones even after playing heavily for a short span of time.

 

General Shepherd once said, that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and although I'm not a huge fan of the person, he got at least one thing right. All the technologies, visual Quality and Effects may have changed over time, but the powerful narratives and the exhilarating bunch of characters have remained mostly the same, only except it hasn't. Yeah, Shepherd's got this wrong too. 
There's a reason most gamers like myself take a trip down the memory like from time to time, quite often in the recent years, to pay homage to the titles on whose shoulders the games today stand on. GTA San Andreas, Spiderman 2, Rise of Nations and Project IGI may not have the greatest visuals compared to today's title, but still most of us go back to them quite often, even having access to the newest entries. Nostalgia? Old Connections? maybe, but another thing that was there, were the narrative and the characters themselves. The characters didn't have accurate animations or expressions or vividly detailed folds on their forehead, the dialogues might be just text, but the sheer narrative, the plot and the genius work of the screenplay writers compensates several times for these drawbacks, while there are good singleplayer titles today, the likes of Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which is one of my all time favorites and exceptionally well made, GTA V, Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, but the reason for my telling all these are games like Fallout 76 and Black Ops IV. 

"Dragovich, Krevchenko, Steiner, All must die"

"That random dude must die, and that, and that, for no apparent reason..." oh wait, there is one, Activision's gotta make some easy bucks!

Now to get to the point, the development of faster internet connections have facilitated in games going beyond one person on one system and being multiplayer. While there's nothing wrong with that, and there are certain very good multiplayer titles out there, which people have enjoyed over the ages, the likes of Counter Strike and Call of Duty Modern Warfare, but the current trends have been a bit disappointing. Around every now and then, a certain game comes out, like the one rolled out a while back, putting a hundred people on a map and making them curse freely at each other while blowing each other out wholesale without any apparent reason, now the problems are not in these type of games themselves, but the problem lies in the trend they create, and even though the hype is short lived and people forget these easily like a breath exhaled, what happens is that seeing their temporary success, a bunch of companies, reputed for creating good titles over the year, throws all the things that have made their franchise great in the first place, like excellent narratives, colourful characters out of the window, and blindly follows the hype, skipping all the hard work, chasing some easy money, which ultimately denies us of a year's worth of good game play experience, resulting in everyone hating the titles. 

"i'm the wanderer, I roam around, around around..."

"Hey, were all together in the wasteland! hell yeah"...uh ok, now what?

I have pumped hours into fallout 3 when it came out, and also fallout 4, and boy, was the experience outstanding! The incredible design, the varying characters and the well created narratives made fallout what it is, and now Bethesda decided to throw those very things out completely and we all know what happens. The world felt more lived in even with the absence of "real" players. While Call of Duty Black Ops IV is not terrible, but just try to remember the campaigns of the first two games in the series, and now look at this one, people meaninglessly chasing other people with some weird weapons, following a meaningless trend, which is far from anything royal, and even after investing several hours in a certain game and getting several virtual Dinners and nuggets, I have yet to get any meaningful experience out of it, and I'm mot even trying the Call of Duty knock off of that thing, YouTube is good enough for that.

In the end, as a gamer who got some chances to look the industry up close, it is really disappointing to see good names, which have spent years earning the reputation, just getting a huge smack by their own developers overnight, blindly running after temporary hypes and easy money. We keep going back to our beloved titles, even very old ones, but sadly, it only satisfies us, but doesn't put anything in the developer's pocket. While another disappointment comes in the form of the great business acumen of these developers and hardware manufacturers which prevents good titles from launching to certain other platforms, it's probably a topic for another day, and whatever happens, it's us, simple, peace-loving, dedicated gamers that gets betrayed all the time. I just hope that the companies try to be creative in more productive ways in the future which would benefit us all. 

that we here highly resolve that these old games shall not have died in vain -- that these developers, under God, shall have a new birth of wisdom -- and that good story line of the game, and interesting characters, by the Developer, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.