Orymus3, on 28 July 2012 - 03:38 PM, said:


This makes it a construct of their mind rather than an abstraction, and its very hard to adapt to that, thus, feel involved.


Really? Because I find it easy enough to immerse myself in games still and feel involved; I'd hesitate to say more so than in the past but certainly going back and playing a few games from the past (such as Deus Ex) I couldn't get into them as the quality of the graphics, compared to modern games, was just so poor to be jaring and keeps me from dropping in.

I think if you'd go past the visual letdown, you'd see what I mean.
In 2003, I've played System Shock 2 for the first time. Needless to say the visuals were more than out-dated. Add to that the creepy tutorial (creepy here standing for even worse graphics) but after 20 minutes of play, the immersion was total, and what once appeared as unappealing became one of the best playing experiences I've had.
This isn't some kind of 'well I played that in the 90s and its the best'.

I dare say if you could provide some kinda of normalised scoring of games over the years (taken at the time of release) you'd probably find that in general the proportion of 'good' to 'bad' games at the very least remains the same - now, there might well be more in numerical terms than Back In The Day but that's by the by.

I'd agree, but my very point is that the ratio of good:bad games has shifted. I get the feeling there were fewer good games per year back then, but that the delta between good and bad games was greater, which not only made more gems per year, but also increased the contrast between games. I agree that this has put these classics on 'pedestals' but they're still greater achievements than nowadays products.
In all seriousness, the only games released post 2000 that I can really put up there would be Skyrim and Batman Arkham Asylum. There's been other great games, but not necessarily classics-level, at least not for me.

Which leads back to the initial question: how much does additionnal visual tech really adds? It allows you not to suck, more than was possible back in the days, by giving you a solid baseline (it's hard to completely fail with engines where you don't start from scratch) but sometimes (and especially in the case of classics) starting from scratch would've added that extra something.