[throwaway17_17]

I certainly appreciate the shout-out to the artists and designers from the era, These techniques were bent, twisted, and pulled in every way a development team could to produce artistic results that in some case genuine “moments” worth remembering while playing a game.

I remember being at a friends house while working on my masters thesis and him telling me to take a break and try out Halo. I had not had a console since the Nintendo 64 came out. I booted Halo and was literally mesmerized when I came out of a tunnel onto the Halo and saw the sky and the landmass. I can still remember that afternoon 20+ years later. Bought an Xbox the next morning.

Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses.

[anthk]

>The sky and the landmass

That hapenned for PC users in 1998, literally the same you described, but with Unreal. You got out from a techy base, and then open nature in front of your eyes, "open" compared OFC to the limited outdoors environment from every FPS since Doom. With the exception of RPG's of course, but:

- RPG's reussed assets like crazy. Cities were almost a copy of each other.

- Because of that, the details weren't as high as an FPS. Landscapes felt a bit empty because of that.

- "Open world" RPG's where a thing... in 2D/2.5D days because it was cheap. No first view beside of a fake 3D dungeon. Then 3D environments happened with Might and Magic and the like, but the worlds paled against the details from an FPS.

Unreal changed that a little, and the first Deus Ex (same engine) it's almost an open world game with slight gaps. Even more with GMDX, where they might be new doors between areas. Is not a secret that in DX you could jump between further sections from the game by exploring around, and even bypass complete sections (and the game predicted that too).

[jesse__]

There's a great deal to be said for setting an aesthetic expectation.

Take Minecraft, for example. The most successful game of all time along many axies, and it looks .. a certain way. It's definitely not realistic. It's not even pretty in a lot of cases. But it's consistent, and people have pushed it to the limit and created some truly beautiful artwork.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think visual fidelity can be a selling feature, but art-style and consistency is much more important.

[anthk]

The most successful and ported game of all time it's one even more reduced in graphics than MC. It's Tetris. But, as a middle example, there's Pokemon for the GB(C), from RBY to GSC.

[zokier]

> Current game devs, especially in the AAA space, spend a lot of time and effort looking for hyper realism and embracing new tech to achieve accurate PBR. I wonder whether the limitations of the older hardware force a more artistic stance on everyone, even down to technical artists, to embrace an art style and art direction and work to achieve attractiveness vs realism. Or I could just be seeing my early 20’s through rose-tinted glasses

I'd argue that during Max Paynes time (early to mid 00s) gaming was far more graphics tech driven than these days, especially on PC. It is far more common to see heavily stylized or non-photorealistic games these days than back then imho. When I think early 00's PC games, lot of it is shooter games pushing the tech envelope very heavily, stuff like HL2, Far Cry, Doom 3 etc, and I don't think we really see that sort of games often these days anymore.

[gary_0]

Early to mid 00's was peak Moore's Law. Every year left last year's computers on the curb. Graphics hardware acceleration and programmable shaders were expanding their capabilities in ungainly leaps and bounds. Every new piece of popular hardware wasn't just the marketing number going up, it was Christmas for software. You didn't need 100+ devs to compete in the big leagues. And yeah there were a lot of moody FPS games, but I can't describe the delight of first seeing a Katamari Damacy or a Portal. It was a time of untilled earth and unplucked fruit.

[anthk]

I remember the Geforce 3 and then Geforce 4 ti whatever. It curb-stomeped my Geforce2 MX.

For comparison, it was like stepping from a bit upgraded XBOX graphics to the ones from an XBOX 360 in two or three years.

For GenZ-ers: kinda like gap from the PS3/ (and high end PSP games even) to the first games for the PS5 in two years. Insane.

[NoLinkToMe]

Absolutely agree, that's why Zelda BOTW hit so hard; artistic vision that spoke to me hard, even though it was released on specs that are 1-2 generations behind.

[throwaway17_17]

BOTW hit me like a truck. I think that’s the only game as an adult, with a job and family, that I have over 500 hours in. I think it is also illustrative to consider the next closest game in play time for me is Elden Ring at ~400 hours. The similarities (and with FromSoft acknowledging world design inspiration from BOTW) to creating vast worlds with a clear and compelling ‘style’ absolutely carry the experience, even in spite of the less than technical cutting edge implementations and hardware.

[galkk]

> I booted Halo and was literally mesmerized when I came out of a tunnel onto the Halo and saw the sky and the landmass.

I had the same feeling when I exited starship in Unreal. Right now it is nothing, but then it was oh my god, this is beautiful. The bird in sky, the colors, the palm…

https://youtu.be/J4fJWvckmFQ?si=re-O4hVP-Jfm4Cj_&t=315

[__david__]

Oh yeah, Unreal was so nice looking. For me, though, that moment was in the Quake prerelease demo (“q1test”). It was clearly polygonal and you could look up and down with the mouse at a very nice high frame rate, which was pretty amazing in its own right, but then I walked up to a hole in the floor and looked down into a completely different but equally well rendered room. Suddenly the possibilities of verticality hit me and I just sat there mesmerized…

[anthk]

Ditto, I said the same about Unreal. Also, Deus Ex, it almost was an open world game, even more with GMDX where you might get new entrances to previously locked areas. As the game it's a clusterfuck of typical urban legends (not so legend with mole people, as they appeared in real life news) and conspiracy theories, interlinking levels and the like in Deus Ex it's almost mandatory in order to depict a network of secret societies controlled by a bad entitiy.