I reinstalled "Dungeon Siege II" recently after not having played it for several years and was pleasantly surprised. A Jeremy Soule soundtrack is always good to hear, plus the gameplay isn't as old as I had expected. This time, I'm noticing the "Diablo II" influences on armor drops, armor sets, and so on.

Are there games in which you've noticed things with different eyes after being away for a while?

Deus Ex - just when I think there couldn't possibly be something new I missed the last hundred times... yet there always seems to be everytime I play it again.

Noticing how much more repetitive many games were in the 90s. Downright boring, actually. Makes one realise what friggin' ash tray lensed nostalgia goggles some folks must have acquired.
Also the simple fact that nowadays, I can play most of previously extreme hardcoe games with ease. Which shows that I've just gotten better and not the games easier. Again, the goggles.

True. I recently played Halo CE for the first time in a while and was surprised to see that the graphics don't look that great now, though maybe it's also my PC. In its day Halo was famous for its graphics. I uninstalled it after mostly finishing the infamously hard Library level. (This was the first time I played the Library level correctly -- clearing it room by room -- instead of tagging along with Guilty Spark and getting shot down early. I should have consulted the walkthrough sooner.)

I know, playing Halo is sneered at by many. But when I first played it I was impressed with the level design.

Even the devs were, it would seem. And if you're proud of something, you show it off as often as you can.

Yes, the Library was frustrating and repetitive enough that I uninstalled the game just before the final Index room. When a game becomes a chore rather than a pleasure, it's time to move on.

Cpt Joker: I was looking at my box of "Deus Ex" recently and considering replaying it. I probably will this Spring.

I wouldn't say that you're better at playing the games just because your skills have increased. I'm also good at most games I play, and I rarely play games anymore. They have definitely lost a lot of complexity.

For sure. I've been pretty thorough in my last few playthroughs, but even on my very last one I found some new things.

I also run into dungeons in Morrowind that I haven't seen before sometimes.

I know for sure that Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape Torment have lots of content that I missed on my first 2 playthroughs.


It doesn't really have anything to do with seeing things differently though. The games just have a lot of interesting stuff in not so obvious places.

I think there are less than a thousand people who have seen everything in PS:T. That is still the game with the most options to go through.

Complexity, some. Difficulty, not so much. But any loss of complexity enables you to get into the game faster, and even more so if you already have the basics of a genre engraved into your brain. I automatically max my harvesters, hide in open fields, salvage anything as long as I can stuff it into my backpack. Those things.

When replaying older games, I often find that the graphics don't look as impressive as they did when I first played them, though this is more because I've been exposed to better things since than anything.

Of course, it's not just with graphics, sometimes when playing older games in a series again I find my enjoyment diminished by the lack of features added in sequels, obviously, this usually only works if the sequel improved on the previous game.

On a more positive note, there are also times when I notice some interesting little details that I might have missed the first time that really make me appreciate the attention to detail the designers put into the game, unfortunately, it can also go both ways, as sometimes in later playthroughs I'll spot lapses in logic or plot holes that I missed the first time, and then I'll think "How did I not notice this before?" though sometimes, it's enough for me to take the time to really think about what I saw afterwards and I don't need to actually play the game.

I'll often end up finding content that I didn't experience playing the game before, sometimes it's secret things, or sometimes it's things that I didn't experience because of choices I made previously, such as an alternate ending. If I replay say, an RPG, I'll often try to make different choices from the ones I made with my first character. And in some games, particularly open world games, there are things which aren't strictly hidden and which I could have seen in one play-through, but missed, this happens in the Elder Scrolls a lot, of course.

I have the same exact experience, I never knew about Jacobson's secret compartments until my friend told me there was one and I looked for an hour.