Reloading Nostalgia: Classic Modes in Online Gaming
Every great artist has to remove their brush from the canvas at some point. Eventually, the world sees your art, and you receive feedback as you move on to a new piece, taking what you learnt and making something new and hopefully better.
Except in game development, where stopping the work isn’t possible, not if you want your game to survive. New content needs to drop regularly to keep the metagame from becoming stale, and games can be updated to the point of barely resembling what they launched as.
But recently, there’s been a recognition of how wide-ranging these changes can be. With the launch of ‘classic’ modes from across the industry, it feels like artists are peeling back the layers and showing the original piece we all forgot laid underneath.
How did we get here, and what does it say about the ever-present nostalgia that fuels so much of the games industry?
Fortnite, Apex Legends, Destiny 2 — these games have become so entrenched in the online space that breaking through as a new multiplayer shooter takes a small miracle. World of Warcraft and Runescape both maintain large player populations, while new MMO releases are being sent out to slaughter — maybe being lucky enough to achieve large opening numbers before a player population collapses.
For these games to stay relevant in the modern multiplayer climate, they need to change, regardless of the quality of those changes. Each week something new is happening in Fortnite, or a balance patch adjusts a weapon or item that has become particularly oppressive in the metagame. Oxygen hogging live-services and MMOs suffocate their genres, for these games endless content treadmills a necessary part of retaining as many players as possible.
Even single-player titles can’t entirely avoid this constant drip-feed of content. Patches fundamentally alter the experience for new players as well as those returning to an old favourite. My favourite games of last year; Alan Wake 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 have had either DLC or consistent updates which would dramatically change my experience of them if I played them for the first time today. Sure, I love many of these changes — but the game I played barely over a year ago doesn’t exist anymore.
Sure, addressing bugs and balance issues is important, but over time you have a cumulative effect. If you’ll excuse the obvious Ship of Theseus analogy, each of its parts is replaced until it becomes something new. Nowhere was that clearer than the release of Overwatch 2 — a game that while in many ways changed everything for Overwatch, also changed nothing at all. Whether it was the much-maligned change to being a 5v5 game, the lack of the promised PvE, or the shift to a free-to-play model — Overwatch 2 felt wholly undeserving of being a numbered sequel while also making certain large and controversial changes
And then, this week, Overwatch 2 launched a classic mode.
Overwatch 1.0 in 2024, the return of 6v6, the reversion of eight years of content additions and balance changes. If the search time alone is to be believed? This has been a massive success.
This isn’t the first ‘classic’ version of a game that has experienced massive success. World of Warcraft Classic (Blizzard are the masters of this), Old School Runescape, and even Fortnite permanently bringing back the OG mode with their recent update that returns us to the original state of the battle royale.
We’ve entered this recursive era of gaming, where everything is a remake, a rerelease, or now — a classic mode of a live service that has been updated beyond recognition.
Because ultimately, people crave both the novel and the familiar. They want to be reminded of the first time they realised they could stack six Winstons on one Overwatch team to break the enemy front line. They want to hot-drop Tilted Towers. They want to go home again.
How did these games go from beloved to needing to leverage that nostalgia to stay relevant?
Before the last few years, with some notable exceptions, multiplayer games just didn’t change this much over their lifetimes. They had updates, sure, but the drastic changes to basic mechanics, reworks of various characters, and entire map redesigns wasn’t something we dealt with in the days of Halo 3 multiplayer in 2007.
But when I am nostalgic for Halo 3, I can launch it. The pieces are in place, and the experience remains the same. If I miss those opening days of Overwatch, I must rely on Blizzard’s time machine to take me back.
In devouring constant updates for games, we’ve created a climate where no work is ever truly finished. If you treat games as ‘content’ this might not sound so bad. There’s always something new for you to play, to experience, to grind for. But if you’re viewing games as art, then you’re facing down a reality where an entire artform is becoming more ephemeral than ever before.
Last year, The Video Game History Foundation found that “only 13% of video game history is being represented in the current marketplace.” We’ve lost media since the beginning of time, but in the information age, it feels like it should be a problem of the past.
If game preservation is important to you, you likely already know classic games are in dire straits, but it is bizarre that so many games with massive populations are still erasing entire versions of themselves to feed the beast — all to satiate the endless demand for more content.
Changes for the sake of changes, additions to please a hungry player base, fan service, DLC. Is any of this truly additive to the experience? Is any of this improving the game as a work of art? Or is it just more, for the sake of more?
It does, of course, depend on the game.
Minecraft wouldn’t be where it is today without constant iterative changes — even if I miss the days before a hunger bar. Fortnite, for all the insanity contained within, is far more interesting as a cultural touchpoint now than when it was a basic third-person shooter. Baldur’s Gate 3, while some of its changes are controversial, benefitted immensely from a refined ending compared to the one that it launched with.
But for each of these, I wonder about games that lost their way. Helldivers 2 spent many of its first few patches nerfing the most enjoyable and powerful strategies in the pursuit of ‘balance’ in a cooperative game. Meanwhile, each time I launched Overwatch it felt like they were pursuing a more competitive crowd at the expense of the casual audience.
At the end of the day, this is the way video games are made, distributed, and updated. While many lambast the technical state of modern games on launch (which is often deserved, albeit rarely the fault of developers) I also don’t miss the days when games included unfixable bugs.
In all other periods of history, there was a part of the artistic process where the artist was separated from the art. Not in a philosophical sense — but physically. The artist had to let it go, sending it out into the world as is. Now? Anything can be updated, changed, altered, improved, even deleted — just push another update.
Is this where our obsession with existing worlds and stories comes from? Is this why we can’t move on because even the creators of those worlds don’t want to? I don’t know, never before has so much art been consumed, altered by audience reactions, and re-consumed — all before the process repeats.
But I do miss the days when the game I loved was frozen in amber. Instead, the artists keep painting, unearthing older layers. If I’m lucky, they add a throwback mode for the community down the line.
I guess I can go home again, but only with permission.
