We’re experiencing a very contradictory trend at the moment in gaming where the Xbox 360 is a “classic” system and the PlayStation 2 is downright “retro”. What does that mean? Well that, it’s been long enough for some games to be nostalgic, loving throwbacks to those eras of gaming. On paper, that sounds amazing, but I’ve noticed the reception to these sorts of homages is nowhere near as warm as it should be.
Sure, I get it, we all want cutting-edge experiences designed in ways that redefine what’s possible in a videogame. However, sometimes it’s great to just absolutely wreck some pixels or to navigate a world purely driven by your personal preference instead of following some elaborate, scripted narrative that runs longer than a prestige TV series. We have plenty of those. Sony alone has become the producer of almost nothing but “cinematic third-person open-world action” with a subgenre stapled on top. Not every game needs to be the biggest-budget project on the market.
That’s what the 6th console generation (PS2, GameCube, Xbox... Dreamcast?) was all about. You could have wildly varying experiences that played well, weren’t over-designed, and focused on a specific niche while remaining profitable. I’d argue it’s not even a specific aesthetic, but a design philosophy that defines that beautiful, wonderful era of gaming. Instead of trying to do a hundred things at decent levels, they'd interweave a few dozen interesting ideas, and we're seeing that repeated in games today like Blacktail, Evil West, and Saints Row.
Obviously indie games can be spontaneous and crazy, but it’s become exceedingly rare for productions aiming for a certain level of AA-to-AAA-tier quality to have this sort of wild creativity. Saints Row is a sandbox open-world game that actually is a sandbox, letting you frequently break its missions in hilarious ways that usually lead to in-game success. You're never punished for doing a mission in a way the designers didn’t count on.
In that same breath, Blacktail is technically a first-person shooter, but only so much in that you’re in first-person and can shoot a bow and arrow. You mainly engage with its world is through little moral decisions as you stock up for the moments where conflict actually arises. The better you get at Blacktail, the less often you have to fight, and it works thematically so you feel clever for reaching that threshold.
And then you have Evil West, such an unapologetically laser-focused bag of Action Videogame(™) clichés that it comes around again to leave you gobsmacked at the idea that a game could just be this focused on dumb fun without compromising itself. Just an honest, straightforward popcorn flick of a game that gets your blood pumping without hours of looter-shooter grind. I don’t think we’ve had this good a Van Helsing-inspired action game since the actual tie-in game to Van Helsing on the PlayStation 2.
Perhaps the most unexpected example of them all - love it or hate it - is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's very retro-minded if you think about it: vehicle levels straight out of 007 Nightfire? Open-ended setpieces that the player has freedom to engage with as they please? Check, check. If even the biggest FPS franchise on the planet is starting to look back fondly, then who can blame smaller productions in the AA and AAA space for doing the same?
These are just a handful among a growing resurgence in good old-school mentalities. Spiders’ RPGs - Greedfall in particular - have been tapping into the old school BioWare mentality for years now; Frogwares is crafting large-scale detective games with real consequences if you fail to make the right deduction; Armored Core is back! We’re finally breaking free of everything having to fit a particular mold and scale to be successful again in this industry, and that’s worth celebrating!