Backwards Compatibility, the Developer Dilemma

It seems strange when so many new games, new techs and new ideas have been launched at E3 that the thing that has caught the eye the most for me surrounds games already gone, but one of the most telling contributions this event season seems to have arrived in seven simple words from Microsoft.

"Play Xbox 360 games on Xbox One." Backwards compatibility, the holy grail of gamers.

Of course, it's not totally open. It's "select 360 games" and uses a digital download of the same kin as Sony's classics range. It is, however, free and a very good start.

However, it might not be such good news for developers and it's not just because free games means a partial end to the eternal screw-job of making us pay for a new version of games we already have.

The desire for backwards compatibility, combined with the huge hootenanny created by the trailer for the Final Fantasy VII remake, inevitably leads to the question of why people want to play older games instead of new ones, and to answer that question I am going to say something a little shocking...

On average I don't believe games are as good these days.

Don't be fooled into thinking I'm sitting here in rose tinted specs harking back to the days of 8-bit graphics, electronic blingy music and clashing primary colours. There are a number of games I am anxious to play, Arkham Knight and Hitman being top of the list.

However, the amount of games I see as a definite purchase is much lower than in previous years because game for game, I believe the quality of gaming has dropped in inverse proportion to the quality of tech.

More and more recently things seemed to be tipped in favour of what the tech can give us, about high res textures, lighting effects, motion capture, audio... and less about what really makes a game a game, the play features, the characters, the story and immersiveness.

I recently read an article that suggested developers shouldn't be spending time on backwards compatibility and instead should be looking at why they're failing to make the most of new tech. To me that's an entirely backwards way of looking at it.

People aren't returning to older games because they make better use of engines, lighting effects or textures, they're playing them because they make the most of things that tech CAN'T give us, storyline, characters, immersiveness and gameplay.

Too often these days developers seem to care more about style than substance, we hear all about how this engine will give us realistic sunsets or that the characters have the most lifelike movements, but we rarely hear about what actually makes a game good.

When is the last time we got a really iconic and memorable character? Over the years I've seen so many of them, Ryu, Mario, Sonic, Agent 47, Link, Samus, Lara Croft, Scorpion... but recently all the major new personalities either haven't stuck or simply never existed, with the possible exception of those from The Last of Us.

These days characters don't get built to last, they get rehashed from old games, taken from popular culture or are simply dislikeable or uninteresting (Connor in AC3 and Pearce in Watch_Dogs being examples of that).

Equally, worlds rarely drag you in and keep you interested. Some like Bioware and Bethesda still manage it and suck you into a storyline and a world, but that's still a rare occurrence. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fallout, Skyrim, all brilliant but all the exception, not the norm.

It's that failure developers need to fight against, instead of worrying about something being shiny and new, perhaps making the game fun and interesting might be the priority. The question is not "how can we better use the tech?" it's "how can we better use our brains?"

If they ask themselves the latter and start to bring us games with next gen tech but old-gen gameplay, perhaps we might finally enter a second golden age of gaming instead of what is increasingly feeling like a dark age.