Do you think today's games can truly be appreciated in the future?

I have been thinking this for a while now. I tried to play Splinter Cell Conviction for the last few days and it's not properly optimized for my R9 200 card. It even says so when validating.

This brought up a question for me. With movies and music, all you need is 1 piece of equipment to play them on. I bought my dad Saving Private Ryan the other day on Blu Ray. All you need is a Blu Ray player to play it.

With these older games like the old Splinter Cells and stuff, you need precise machines that can play them and there's no guarantee that future technology will play them. So will older games just become lost as technology improves? And if so, how can we preserve these games so future generations 20 years from now can play Far Cry 4 or Batman Arkham Knight (my 2 big games I have my eye on)?

As you said in your example older games from the last decade already have all sorts of incompatibilities. Be it software or hardware related. Sometimes a simple compatibility switch such as "Run as [any older Microsoft Windows OS]" is all that's needed, sometimes it's more complicated. I'm sure games of today in the future will face these same problems too.

Also, I think you can blame game developers for not coding their games properly. If you do it right, it may still run on future hardware and/or software.

Also, I think you can blame game developers for not coding their games properly. If you do it right, it may still run on future hardware and/or software.

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Commercial games have a shelf life of about 6 months. Game producers don't much care if their product runs on a OS or hardware after that. They already have your money.

The future will bring what it brings. We can only guess what that will be. Even experts are often wrong.

Hey,

Many game companies attempt backward compatibility (BWC) but it can be difficult. PC can be easier I guess because it has more resources to draw from and various programs such as emulators etc. Consoles will suffer from this fate though, neither of the next gen consoles are able to play the last gen games and honestly I don't think they ever will. Sony are apparently attempting BWC on the PS4 but many people do not believe they will succeed. The PS3 had it to begin with but it caused a lot of problems and they ended up recalling them. On PC compatibility is also a factor, older games come across bugs on newer versions of windows and prefer to played on others. This was a problem that windows vista came across regularly. I think the only way to preserve games so they can be played on one system is to have them frequently updated to keep them compatible with newer hardware. I have found playing games such as Fallout 1 off of a disk resulted in crashes and bugs every few minutes, however playing the same game downloaded from steam was perfect.

I think digital gaming will be the future with no discs, game makers will have cheaper costs and not have to worry about space on a disc too. Plus no game cases clogging up your room and a game running from a hard-drive generally performs better than running from a disc. It is also easier to download both official and unofficial patches and mods (<3 mods) on PC then consoles. Unfortunately the gaming scene changes so rapidly that older engines and systems cannot keep up with it without upgrades or updates.

Either way the game makers are in control, so they decide the direction gaming takes. All we can do is hope they make the right choices to preserve some brilliant games to be enjoyed for many more years.

My 2 cents

Phill3990

Try inserting a Betamax videotape on one of those shiny new BlueRay players and you will have answered your own question...

But seriously though, I did install my copies of the Original Ghost Recon and I barely finished it, did not want to play the other 2 now... I don't know, perhaps we have been spoiled with great quality graphics, miracle first aid patches and adaptive camo that going at it old school is no longer fun

Kids now a day want to use a sniper rifle as a close quarter combat weapon and if they die to quick, they tossed the game away and no longer pick it up. Case in point, my 19 yr old son used to play MW1 & 2 on Xbox, he asked me to help him build a gaming rig for Wow and perhaps some shooters, so I installed MW1 on it for him to do the Campaign and he has not passed the first mission.

Phill3990 said:

Hey,
It is also easier to download both official and unofficial patches and mods (<3 mods) on PC then consoles.

Phill3990

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Please see attachment.

To everyone else, thanks for the input.

I'm sure there will be emulators or something in the future to run games from our time if they do not run on future hardware just like with dos games now.

thready said:

So will older games just become lost as technology improves? And if so, how can we preserve these games so future generations 20 years from now can play Far Cry 4 or Batman Arkham Knight (my 2 big games I have my eye on)?

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For the most part they will be lost. Or "re-made".

Realistically, the best way to preserve them would be to keep a "period specific" PC / OS if you want to play them natively.

Appreciated? Yes, definitely.

Able to run without tweaking on the newest hardware, definitely not.

Super Mario Bros. is still a fun game. It likely always will be fun. It may not be impressive or keep the attention of a new audience for long, but playing it will be entertaining and educational for most in the future.

There won't be a lot of games that stand the test of time that way. Probably only a small handful from each generation will actually gain that type of longevity.

That said, I can still play Doom on my PC. I just need to use DosBox to do it. There will always be emulators and workarounds to play older games on new hardware. I have all sorts of games from every generation of gaming, and they all run on a PC with up to date hardware. Stuff from the late 70s to games released within the last month, all of which run on my PC with no problems thanks to things like DosBox and virtual PC.

So, yeah. For the most part the games that stand out enough will be appreciated for generations just like classic films and music are. The audience might become somewhat niche, after all not a whole lot of people watch Marx Bros or Humphrey Bogart movies anymore, but they are still appreciated by a lot of people as great examples of the art of film making.

Simply put, yes they will, but you'll probably need emulation software and an interest in classic titles. The market will be there though.

Not only they will be appreciated in the future, right now the games of yesterday are being played, it's something that has already happened, and is still going on, I see no reason why it cannot continue to happen.

There are many ways in which old games (or any program, for the matter) can still be played in current hardware and software:

• Emulators, they attempt to simulate the whole environment programs run by recreating both hard and soft in a pure software implementation, often in disparate platforms. This often provides the best compatibility, even cross-platform, but at the price of speed. DosBox is probably the most famous.
• Virtualization, VMs help to some extent in providing an alternative operating system, but hardware incompatiblities can be more problematic (as the thing runs on the real hardware). They typically don't have good support for gaming, however.
• Clones, when a game is popular, some times an independient developer group just creates its own version, resembling the original or even copying it entirely, but under a free license and taking into account current hadrware, software and platform independence.
• Games becaming open-source, even more rare, the original developer may at some point decide to just give the code to the community, then someone else picks the project up, keeps on updating it and takes cross-platform into account.

Right now, I can say that I like more some older games than the most current ones, and I have got a couple of them, running mostly flawlesly on Windows 7 even though they were designed in a completely different age and under different conditions.

Alejandro85 said:

Right now, I can say that I like more some older games than the most current ones, and I have got a couple of them, running mostly flawlesly on Windows 7 even though they were designed in a completely different age and under different conditions.

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My impression is that when Microsoft developed Windows 7 they also had game compatibility in mind unlike Vista where there were more problems.

I'm curious, how much has Microsoft fixed the incompatibility issues in Vista with its SP2?