Fair enough. Guess the same thing could be said with some of the 3D games on the website. Some of them are finished, but dear gods do the models look likep lastic compared to some of the never ones... I think Seeds of Chaos would hold up better in that regard though. The art style will never be ugly because it's not limited by technology, it's following a style. And then there's the fact that you actually get some decent story too... Though who knows, maybe in 10 years we'll have hyper-realistic VR games
.
I agree that the art will likely hold up for the rest of our lives - but as far as story goes, that's one thing that I think future technology might help with. It's probably not actually something that will change in the next ten years, but imagine if they didn't have to worry about event conditions or changing variables - if instead, they could work with a system that could automatically parse the relevant conditions from the text, decide whether it "should" update a variable, and automatically advise the developers as to how many events are likely to fire in a given phase of the game? How much time would that save in coding, testing, balancing, and bugfixing? How much easier would that make it to focus on the story they want to tell, rather than messing with the code to tell it? I could easily see that resulting in more overall content, which is why I wondered if it might make earlier games seem more sparse by comparison.
I mean, when convenient, easy to use engines like Ren'Py and RPG Maker were introduced, we saw the complexity and length of games explode compared to their predecessors. I don't
think we'll likely see anything on the same scale happen in the foreseeable future (unless AI starts writing scene variations on their own), but there are still ways for technology to make game creation go more smoothly.
Though to be fair, you need only look at any sci-fi book written in the 80s to see how rarely these fantasies of "New technology will fix everything!" pan out in practice - and my speculation there seems particularly fantastical outside of fairly advanced AI. I should stress that it's only one, fairly extreme, way that I could imagine it becoming easier to write
Seeds of Chaos in the future.
That said, even without that, a hypothetical
Seeds of Chaos 2 would presumably have a lot more polish than the original; they'd know which systems worked and which did not, and could build them from the start with that in mind instead of having to work with the old code; for characters as well, they could choose to expand on character types that they felt didn't get enough time to shine in the first game, quietly drop ones that they felt didn't work out after all, and include more options for character types that ended up becoming a hit. They'd have a clearer picture of the game's pacing, so that character arcs more readily fit the overall pace of the game. Theoretically, their next game should avoid a lot of growing pains, and just offer a better experience overall, even if it's fairly different from the original.
I'm not saying that older games necessarily become less appealing, I must stress - just that future games are likely to be as good or better, and so we'll continue to find ourselves wanting to see what comes next. The human heart always craves that which it cannot yet have, after all.