Memes

'Member buying a game, and getting the whole game?

I 'member.

A guide to modern open world games;

The trailer: great footage of an open world game, interesting plot, etc.

The first cut scene: meet your character that beheads a dragon using an epic display of super human athletics and strength.

The tutorial level: do a twelve button combo in 2 seconds to perry.

Open world: you can't jump over a 2ft fence, you cannot bust open a wood door with your battle axe, and any drop over 3ft will kill you.

Side quest: Install mods to fix poor performance and graphics, get rid of repetitive character lines, fix the wired UI, fix fall damage, and cheat through the unlock puzzle that was only fun the first time, not the 300th time.

When you get to the "major city": buy this mount, buy this armor skin, buy these resources, buy the mission table resources, buy a map to show all the useless collectables, buy this different money that you can convert to the first money for a conversation fee using a third money you can only get by doing dailies.

patch day; install a giant patch that fixes some bugs, makes more bugs and breaks the mods that fixed everything else.

Someone dies in a cut scene; you can do nothing despite carrying a bag of heath and revive potions that are so common even your car sells them.

End of game: you've spent hours preparing, endure an epic 30 minute battle to get the final boss to 1 heath only to be defeated in a cut scene. He runs and the credits roll.

buy dlc go chase after the bad guy in a new zone, but first completely upgrade your gear because your old stuff can't hurt a fly. Then finally catch the bad guy and defeat him using an all new bejeweled inspired fight system rendering all your equipment and combat skills pointless.

just replay modded Skyrim and have a completely new experience every time

Its so easy to forget all the garbage games that got churned out 20 years ago. Even the good games - your FF7s and Warcraft 2s - had their share of notorious glitches.

The ability to patch a game after release has definitely not improved first-iteration releases. But you can go out and get a copy of Skyrim or Resident Evil 7 or Dragon Quest 9 and play it with a very reasonable degree of confidence that it will work end-to-end as intended. You can't say the same thing about Super Mario 64 or Mortal Kombat 3. Hell, the whole speedrunning community has to distinguish between "glitched" and "glitchless" runs, precisely because finding glitches in classic games is such a pivotal part of beating them in record times.