Sit back in your favourite armchair, brush down that dusty controller, and put on your glasses – no, not the ones for far away, the ones for reading – while I tell you a story about the days of yore. In my time, and probably your time, games came out that were ground-breaking, earth-shattering and occasionally even fun. Lots of people bought and played those games, and they became cemented in our psyches, like a good book, or that random interaction with a stranger seven years ago where you said “Hurgle” instead of “Hello”.
Seemingly, those games are better than the ones we’ve been given subsequently, and so we’ve been inundated with remasters and remakes over the past decade and a bit… but now even live service games are getting in on the action, making Sony’s trend of remaking PS4 games look like they’re unearthing great lost wonders of the world. Can you really pine for the good old days, when those are barely 5 years ago?
And yet, we do. In the past month alone, the nostalgia levels have hit an all time high. On the one hand you have Blizzard weighing up whether or not to undo the format changes of Overwatch 2, bringing back test modes with the original 6v6 battles – aptly branded as Overwatch Classic – that made it an instant hit, and cemented it as the multiplayer shooter to beat. Given that everyone has argued that its shift to 5v5 ruined the game – “In my day sonny, we could have two tanks” – it’s strange that it’s taken this long, but Blizzard are never one for doing things quickly. Even when they make mistakes in a hurry, they’ll take their time to fix things.
But multiplayer gaming like it’s 2016 would feels like Ye Olden Days when compared to Fortnite and Apex Legends. Here are two of the biggest multiplayer shooters in the world, and they’re rolling us right back to the original maps, trying to recapture the point in time when they were at the cutting edge. It’s almost like they’re admitting that years of development, patches and updates have resulted in a creative cul-de-sac, where you’re faced with an array of familiar looking battle passes, meta tweaks, and over-the-top cosmetics.
Is this the result of creative bankruptcy? It’s been over half a decade since their respective launches, when they burst into the public consciousness, riding the wave of new and groundbreaking development, and it takes a lot to cling onto someone’s attention for that long. The fourth or fifth time that you blow up the map and launch a new one isn’t quite as exciting as the first.
These games are on very different paths, though. Blizzard and Respawn both seem to be trying to find or reimagine that original magic, but while in Overwatch 2’s case that’s potentially reverting its core, Apex Legends’ Launch Royale is a limited time mode, while the game as a whole looks to push forward. EA aren’t looking for Apex 2.0, but ways to keep players hooked with things like the mid-season battle pass cuts. Fortnite, meanwhile, has grown into something else entirely. It now supports user generated content, plays host to a whole LEGO experience, Fall Guys and a Rocket League racing mode, and regular live music events. Bringing back the original battle royale map, reviving the earlier battle passes and unlocks is sure to rekindle FOMO in anyone that missed out first time around, but it’s also kind of just another mode.
But while their goals are all somewhat different, they’ve all ended up at the same place: nostalgia. People loved all of these games in the beginning, so why not bring elements of them back? Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, a keen draw, and as we enter a time where older players have been gaming their entire lives, there’s a lot to draw on. Further to that, those older players are the ones with money. I can afford a good few Overwatch skins as an adult, while my children have to weigh up whether that’s a useful way to spend their pocket money. That’s a hard choice when Kinder Eggs exist.
Arguably, there are also players out there who won’t have experienced these things. For whom 2016, 2018 and 2019 was actually the distant past – especially given how 2020-21 felt like a decade. Will they find out that things were better? Or will they miss the changes, miss their version of the game? In some ways it’s a dangerous road to travel, appeasing part of the community while annoying another.
What is certain is that this era of nostalgia in gaming isn’t going to disappear. World of Warcraft, a game that’s never released its grip on the MMO genre it dominated from the moment it launched, is another one looking to the past in order to secure its future. With WoW Classic now five years old and with its impending shift into becoming Kung Fu Panda the MMO again, Blizzard launching new servers to WoW Classic to let players start from the very beginning all over again – WoW Classic Classic, if you will.
So who’s next on the nostalgia list? Are we going to see Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Un-Reborn? Fallout 76 roll back to a pre-Wastelanders version? Halo: The Master Chief Collection bring back the broken matchmaking from launch? No Man’s Sky launch edition? Call of Duty reintroduce jet packs?
I’m obviously being flippant, but the problem with leaning on nostalgia like this is that it’s typically very fleeting. You can’t truly recapture that magic of experiencing something for the first time, or playing through it with a group of friends who you likely don’t see online anymore. Maybe you’ll raise the banner for a brief weekend or two, but people have moved on, things have changed, and you aren’t the same person you used to be. And when developers trot out their limited time nostalgia event for the third or fourth time, it’s not going to be anywhere near as impactful.
Does that hurt? Are we being emotionally manipulated? Of course we are. But no more so than a movie being re-released, or a book re-printed with flashy new covers. There is a comfort to be found in returning to the past, even if it’s only for a short while, and when game development is so cutthroat and competitive, this is one way for developers to keep the lights on, while feeding and pacifying a community that they’ve built over many years. Hopefully, it gives them time to look at what’s next, building characters, games and modes that will spark the same powerful emotions that the original ones did. It’s smart, it’s sustainable, and it sure as hell makes a lot of money.
So, for the moment, nostalgia is the best game mode, but we’d best drive back out of this creative cul-de-sac before we run out of petrol. Now, where are my glasses?
