I disagree about the old games, though. They werent much more professional than any of us. Its just the immersive factor playing you. Try running Quake 2 or Unreal, or Doom, and you'll notice you're used to good graphics now, and the old games just look horrible.
, yes I said in my post that nowadays fps get the graphics better
, but my point was that most of the other elements are worse. I sometimes still play an old game and sometimes I am still amazed, like the level design (e.g. the clever secrets of Jedi Knight 1 that give that "ah that's how you get to that place" feeling). Though I must say with graphics I find art direction more important than on technical level; e.g. I still like the graphics of Deus Ex.
As for Killing Floor, I commented it to point out the weak design in MP gaming.
, and that's what I disagree with, even if I would want the same features as what you suggested for Killing Floor 2. I think its just a smart focus of them; lots of people don't want all those skills and rpg stuff, they just want blow away some zombies without to much thinking. So I can't really call it weak design, I think its more like shallow/repetive design which attracts some people.
but it's also a balancing act these days , developers still need to sacrifice a bit of one thing to improve another thing , I have noticed this a lot , as soon as something in a game is pushed up like graphics , the rest of the game suffers from some scaled down version of ai or whatever , it seems we can never have it all .
, my quess is that's mostly a budget questions, atleast for big companies. Also to reach a larger audiance they don't want to make games to complicated and not-knowable/strange/new (== death to innovation).
in my opinion theres a lot of things multiplayer games can get away with , like no need for ai no need for pathfinding no need for complicated story line development no need for hordes of enemies no need for cutscenes , and well non linear gameplay comes as a bonus , basically sp and mp is apples and oranges
, yeah, mp only has some big advantages if you can tackle the mp part.
