Why nostalgia is this year’s most popular game mode

thesixthaxis.com:

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