Something we rarely talk about is that almost all consoles used to ship with two controllers.
In the advent of online gaming, I feel like not only are we losing couch co-op for 4 player games, but even 2 player games are dying out. It was rare that games were just one player back in the day, but the new standard is that offline is entirely single player.
It seems this standard changed probably because of the advent of 3D gaming made a lot of 2 player 3D games difficult to make and it was a way to keep the cost of the console down a bit more.
I think the Sega Saturn was the first mainstream system to launch with one controller and I don't really remember anyone making a big deal about it. The PS1 and N64 followed suit.
While not a mainstream console the 3DO only had 1 controller port and required daisy-chaining controllers. The Jaguar also only came with one controller.
We often talk about the price of consoles as adjusted by inflation, but we rarely talk about differing feature sets. We don't get a second controller for example, but what we do get is built-in storage which we didn't get with the disc era games. A PS1 memory card allowed a maximum of 15 slots, and some games took up more than one slot. We also get built-in network capabilities (which we largely take for granted now), both wired and wireless. I believe the PS3 was the first console with both built-in. Maybe Sony should have sold that separately to reduce the price.
You could connect 7 controllers on PS3, but maybe Sony realized no one was ever going to do that and limited the PS4 and 5 to 4 controllers. You could connect two multitaps to a PS1 and 2 and connect up to 8 controllers.
You look at the feature set of the PS3 and you have to think Sony was trying to produce the most feature complete system of all time and it blew up in their face.
One place I hope VR really helps bring back is dedicated accessories for different games. I like that they're trying to bring back the guitars I'm so tempted to buy the PDP Riffmaster (which is was an official controller) and jumping back into Rockband 4. Hate that Epic owns Harmonix and Microsoft Activision (and doing nothing with it).
I think when a lot of people complain about the samey-ness of gaming it's because a lot of these unique experiences haven't carried on into modern gaming. We've lost two player and four player couch co-op, we've lost guitar hero/rockband, we still haven't gotten a new Ace Combat this generation. Games don't take the risks like Steel Battalion, coming out with a controller that you need to use to play it. And honestly this is because games cost too much to make to alienate anyone segment.
In the advent of online gaming, I feel like not only are we losing couch co-op for 4 player games, but even 2 player games are dying out. It was rare that games were just one player back in the day, but the new standard is that offline is entirely single player.
It seems this standard changed probably because of the advent of 3D gaming made a lot of 2 player 3D games difficult to make and it was a way to keep the cost of the console down a bit more.
I think the Sega Saturn was the first mainstream system to launch with one controller and I don't really remember anyone making a big deal about it. The PS1 and N64 followed suit.
While not a mainstream console the 3DO only had 1 controller port and required daisy-chaining controllers. The Jaguar also only came with one controller.
We often talk about the price of consoles as adjusted by inflation, but we rarely talk about differing feature sets. We don't get a second controller for example, but what we do get is built-in storage which we didn't get with the disc era games. A PS1 memory card allowed a maximum of 15 slots, and some games took up more than one slot. We also get built-in network capabilities (which we largely take for granted now), both wired and wireless. I believe the PS3 was the first console with both built-in. Maybe Sony should have sold that separately to reduce the price.
You could connect 7 controllers on PS3, but maybe Sony realized no one was ever going to do that and limited the PS4 and 5 to 4 controllers. You could connect two multitaps to a PS1 and 2 and connect up to 8 controllers.
You look at the feature set of the PS3 and you have to think Sony was trying to produce the most feature complete system of all time and it blew up in their face.
One place I hope VR really helps bring back is dedicated accessories for different games. I like that they're trying to bring back the guitars I'm so tempted to buy the PDP Riffmaster (which is was an official controller) and jumping back into Rockband 4. Hate that Epic owns Harmonix and Microsoft Activision (and doing nothing with it).
I think when a lot of people complain about the samey-ness of gaming it's because a lot of these unique experiences haven't carried on into modern gaming. We've lost two player and four player couch co-op, we've lost guitar hero/rockband, we still haven't gotten a new Ace Combat this generation. Games don't take the risks like Steel Battalion, coming out with a controller that you need to use to play it. And honestly this is because games cost too much to make to alienate anyone segment.
