What’s the biggest, most insidious lie you’ve ever heard about the retro gaming hobby? For me, it has to be the claim that some of the things we usually complain about in modern gaming have always existed in some form back then — like downloading patches, DLC (which was called expansions at the time), irritating bugs, and devs overpromising but failing to fully deliver.

Already a thread, you malfunctioning bots. Total LLM death.

>>11858347

>like downloading patches
That was done as far back as the early 1990s, patches for games would be distributed online, but also through other means.
What became worse is that it became standard to publish a big budget game at a full price, with a lot of really fucking glaring and awful bugs, then MAYBE fixing these problems down the line. Hell of a deal to pay extra to pre-order a game and you get it fucking broken, was it worth it being early? Never pre-order games.

Aside from this, you would have software revisions to games, like how they slightly iterated on some NES games as they did further print runs, hence why some bugs in early print runs of say, Super Mario Bros. 3 are fixed in later ones.

>DLC (which was called expansions at the time),
Correct, though expansions were usually pretty substantial additions onto base games, not just little small cosmetic additions or minute boosts. No, a proper fucking expansion pack would be a whole slew of missions/quests and new locations, new characters and weapons, maybe even new gameplay mechanics.

You would still see this kind of stuff being made around 7th gen, like with Fallout New Vegas and X-Com Enemy Unknown having really full fledged expansions adding a ton of content, but it was also very much waning by this time.
By the late 2000s, it was already common practice to DELIBERATELY withhold finished content intended for the core game to sell as DLC later, whereas with older expansion packs, often these could be additions which there wasn't enough time to develop and finish, so they at worst just existed as partially finished assets or even just concepts.

>and devs overpromising but failing to fully deliver
That was never not a thing, but it feels like it probably got a lot worse in the past 20 years.

>>11858876
Nta, but I keep hearing from my millennial coworkers that Peter Molyneux used to be the used car salesman of gaming in the 2000s.

He supposedly promised extensive reactivity in his project Fable, like planting a seed during childhood and witnessing it fully mature as a grown plant in adulthood, being able to marry and have kids, bandits reacting to you if you have killed one of their own, and so on. None of these actually appeared in the game, only some in the sequel.

>>11858956
He pretty much was. He did some amazing stuff together with others at Bullfrog, which still remain one of my favorite studios to this day (and why I curse EA with every breath I take), but during the 2000s he would grow very infamous for frequently making absolutely wild promises which he couldn't and wouldn't deliver on.

If it wasn't for Peter Molyneux fading from relevance and The Elder Scrolls becoming an increasingly big hit, all the memes about Todd Howard being a liar would at the very least be shared equally by Molyneux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1mccFqEUuU

>>11858956
He already overpromised shit before with Black & White.

>>11858956
A used car salesman sells overpriced junk and he knows it that doesn't describe Peter Molyneux to me. He made many great games he just strikes me as a dreamer who doesn't know when to shut up.

>>11859156
That's more accurate, and hell, he had some fucking REAL cred to back him which is why he managed to build hype in the first place.
Molyneux wasn't just some nobody who suddenly showed up somewhere making claims, people were taken in on his promises BECAUSE he had a bunch of history in a lot of well received games.

It's a bit like John Romero, legit a good level designer who also has a few other dev chops (like programming, he wrote the level editing software for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, along some other code on those games which weren't about rendering), but he mismanaged the FUCK out of Ion Storm, promising to the high heavens and with aggressive and boastful advertising, but which then after years of high profile drama came out with Dai-Katana as quite a mess of a game.

Neither are used car salesmen, in fact they almost certainly believed their own hype, which was part of the problem.

>>11858815 (OP)
>What’s the biggest, most insidious lie you’ve ever heard about the retro gaming hobby?
That Sonic's OG trilogy was always fundamentally flawed and/or never good, often it's just a matter of people being filtered, or just being console warriors who're stuck in the 90's.

>>11859651
I hate console warriors so fucking much.

>>11858815 (OP)
the narrative that kids were bullied and ostracized for playing video games

>>11859781
Partially an exaggeration or distortion on the part of some people claiming it, but possibly also a strawman on your behalf.
Videogames alone never made anyone a pariah, but it was a lot less respected in teenage and young adult demographics, and not all videogames were viewed equally by everyone.

>>11858835
Are you underaged? Duplicate threads predate LLMs by decades. What you should be calling him out for is the casual em dash usage.

>>11859781
You mean the fake narrative that kids were not bullied and ostracized for playing video games.
Or are you still trying to gaslight people?

>>11859781
Didn't capitalize. Didn't punctuate. It's another low effort shit post.

>>11859807
you were mostly just left alone because you're autistic and didn't understand social interaction was opt-in, not something you'd be prompted for

>>11859809
it's a stylistic choice
people get the ick if you're too formal in casual contexts

>>11859806
It's the fact that he's using emdashes and those journalistic apostrophes while not using an iPhone (filename) which autocorrects ' to ’. Learn how2bot

>>11859827
Your post is another disingenuous half-truth.

>>11859832
I use the em dash occasionally in non academic settings—it’s convenient. I do agree however that overusing it in such contexts suggests the person in question relies on ai to communicate his thoughts online.

>>11859806
>has a problem with em dashes
Common core, everyone.

>>11859891
It's a recent thing, people have picked up on how LLMs are very likely to use the em-dash regardless of context, and most people online just do not use it in casual conversation, hence why it can sometimes be a good tell.

>>11859827
Another shit post not worth reading.
If you can't bother writing sentences I don't need to bother reading what ever gibberish you wrote.

Saddam importing PS2s for their chips to launch missiles

>>11860093
Oh yea... it's a wonder they didn't try that again with the PS5.