Everything post-Crysis pretty much has been the same thanks to consoles sucking and holding everything back. It's like 2006 HDR insanity graphics, but with added rather-outliney annoying screenspace ambient occlusion. Kinda like most PC games in 1998 were PSX ports, holding those mighty 440BX's back....

I like them if they contribute to the game being worthwile and somewhat unique. That whole overused Gears of War style with tons of motion blur, bloom and desaturated colors was and is absolutely barf inducing though. Not the fault of UE3, there are games with this engine that look amazing.

What I don't get are people that play old games with fanmade graphics mods. The games will look "dated" even with such modifications, so why even bother playing them if you have such a problem with the original look?

I don't like "HD" mods for older games either. The Quake steam community hub makes me weep.

I might sound hypocritical when I coded this enhanced software renderer, but it's the screenshots that turn it into some awful bumpmapped crap with 'hd' photoshop filtering that make your eyes bleed.

It's a different thing if new content is of constant high quality and at least somewhat fits into the game, but then there is stuff like "Duke3D HRP" where the models and animations look like utter crap and completely amateurish. Such a disgrace. This thing must be exclusively made for kids who want to brag about knowing this game 🙄

leileilol wrote:

I don't like "HD" mods for older games either. The Quake steam community hub makes me weep.

I might sound hypocritical when I coded this enhanced software renderer, but it's the screenshots that turn it into some awful bumpmapped crap with 'hd' photoshop filtering that make your eyes bleed.

It looks like someone commited a war crime on your renderer.

The worst thing is, when I tell someone that I play old games too not just the new ones, they say something like "on your i7 rig? are you crazy? and you say you have a PS1 too? and you play it? wtf" I am not crazy. I have a CHOICE. There are people who think the only reason why anyone would play an older game is because they have a shitty PC. I encounter this in real life (usually from people who play Most Wanted on their 12 year old Athlon at 18 fps and minimum detail instead of playing some good classic that actually runs well on their PC).

Same happens with "WTF this game is blocky is this for 3 year olds?". Yeah right, because Phantasmagoria, System Shock 1 and 2 or Postal 2 are totally kiddy friendly games 🤣 . Most of those people think that just because they played some shitty shareware Mario clone on DOS when in preschool that all old games are kiddy. Because apparently adults did not exist in the 1990s and early 2000s.

You know from who I get the biggest admiration of "latest and greatest" games? Those who don't have computers powerful enough to run them and didn't actually play the game, but they heard how awesome lifelike it is (or they played it for 20 minutes in their uncle/girlfriend/friends house, whatever). This extends to "console wars", one guy who I know hates the PS3 and loves the Xbox 360 while not having any of those, just because he plays Xbox in his girlfriends house and because a he played a PS3 for 15 minutes at the home of one kid he now hates.

I am not rich, but I guess those same people would say to a rich person "WTF, WHY ARE YOU EATING GOULASH/APPLE PIE/CHINESE TAKEOUT WHEN YOU CAN EAT TRUFFLES, CAVIAR AND CHAMPAGNE". Similiar to games, those people probably don't see why anyone would like anything but the most prestigeous things because they don't actually know how it plays/tastes. It is most expensive and hyped, it must be the best!

leileilol wrote:

Kinda like most PC games in 1998 were PSX ports, holding those mighty 440BX's back....

At least most PSX ports looked much better on the PC, up to 1024x768 instead of 320x240, texture filtering etc. And AFAIK, it was just as frequent that a PSX game was the port and PC version was the original. Consoles also had many awesome exclusives, unlike today. PC games today look very similiar to the console versions.

It was bound to happen. As real time PC game graphics near Pixar levels of graphical quality it becomes less about the rendering tech and more about the art style.

These days, the games that impress me are about how creative they are with the games art. Games like Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 2, and Skyrim have really impressed me this last generation. I look forward to the next generation. Both as the rendering tech improves, and how it will allow some creative expression to flow. Developers are becoming less hampered by system limitations.

Pixar quality? Are you kidding? Do you even realize how silly that sounds? I've never seen a Pixar movie that has awful, blurry textures, ugly bumpmapping and obviously fake HDR all over the place. You must be blind if you think that modern games look anywhere close to "Pixar quality".

This is not limited to console ports either. Even Crysis 1 has awful aliasing on the leaves and blurry textures everywhere. I am not complaining about the quality of the graphics, but rather the hype around it. There is no revolution like there was every few years until 2004, and it is definitely not because today's graphics "achieved Pixar quality".

Pixar movies actually take longer than ever to render, because of the requirements from the artists. Go actually watch a Pixar movie, then tell me that some POS game like Call of Duty: Modern Brofare 6 looks like it.

And Skyrim? Really, a DX9 game with many textures being original Xbox quality? It is an absolutely amazing game, one that I played 104 hours on Steam, but only someone with vaseline on their eyes would say that it is anywhere near (near being about 1 million light years) Pixel level quality graphically.

The 3D graphics still look fake.

By coincidence, this weekend's ADG game is a perfect example of a game riding on having an advanced 3D graphical engine... for 1988. It only took two years for the game's graphics to become horribly outdated and since the game is graphics first, audio second, gameplay THIRD... yeah...

The tech is always changing and what looked awesome when it came out will eventually look outdated or samey, so gameplay is what ultimately matters in the long run. Modern games can be just as fun as retro games and vice versa, so long as the gameplay's there. Beyond that, I really don't care what it looks like. ;)

A crappy game is still a crappy game regardless of how good it looks. You can't polish a turd. There's plenty of games from the DOS era that are a lot more engaging than some of the games that are released today and that's because at their core they are good games in spite of the primitive graphics standards that were in use at the time they were written.

I like great graphics but that is not what I fap too unlike the vast majority that are in my age group. I prefer story line and great music to go with those graphics. My only gripe besides washed out textures for most games is the blocky models that are lacking in natural form. I don't mind 90s era textures but the models got a long ways to go. As for modern games I don't play all that much as they are cheap rippoffs of older games. As for the TES series I don't mess with texture packs.

If anything, I think the problem with modern graphics is that they are too close to photorealism to improve much further. Back in the early 90's there was a lot of room for improvement over 16-color palletes and flat-shaded polygons, but today the fact that we're griping about specular highlights and texture resolution means that visual quality is fast approaching a practical limit. Things aren't improving by leaps and bounds because they simply can't get much better than they already are.

The question then becomes how to keep games evolving, and the only way I can think of is to make gameplay deeper and more intricate by enhancing AI, physics, and interactivity. Make materials behave like they do in reality - water should flow down hills, soil should be diggable, steel should flex, wood should splinter, and brick should crumble. Physical realism could bring an entirely new level of interactivity that could be cleverly incorporated into gameplay, particularly in shooters and MMORPGs. Minecraft hints at this, albeit with very primitive graphics.

But as far as graphics go, don't hold your breath waiting for a quantum leap. Those years are behind us.

leileilol wrote:

I don't like "HD" mods for older games either. The Quake steam community hub makes me weep.

I might sound hypocritical when I coded this enhanced software renderer, but it's the screenshots that turn it into some awful bumpmapped crap with 'hd' photoshop filtering that make your eyes bleed.

Can I have that software renderer without the coloured lighting but keep the transparent water? I always wanted to play in software WinQuake with actual working transparent water...

Let's generalize to the extreme for a moment, just to make a point:

"Modern" graphics are like mass-produced household items, no matter how visually complex and hi-tech they may be. They're produced by huge teams of artists, coders and modelers, aided by all the raw computing power they could ever need. The process of creating them becomes fairly mechanized, and they end up being mostly the products of quantity, not quality. The sheer computing power or man-hours involved may be impressive in themselves, but that's not the reason I LOOK at things.

"Oldschool" graphics in comparison are like intricate medieval works of art, made without any of the tools we take for granted but still capable of being extremely impressive in their sheer ingenuity. I get more of a "wow factor" when checking out artwork that manages to amaze despite being made on a low-res, blocky C64 screen or a color-challenged CGA. It's not just the technical side of overcoming a limited medium, though that helps too - it's also the fact that this requires more imagination and talent than just chasing some fixed and asymptotic goal (like photorealistic 3D scenes).

Naturally, "oldschool" graphics can be terrible (they often are), and on the other hand people are still doing fantastic and creative things with modern hardware. But as far as getting the "best" out of hardware, these days it all seems like so much visual overload through number-crunching.

I find it funny how modern games have textures that look like badly molded up clay where as if you look at the Savage 4 tech demos and the 2nd UT99 disc... those textures are amazingly crisp and detailed.

The bump mapping and parallax occlusion mapping only future to ruin the whole image of games today for me...

So I suppose I'm with the OP about being jaded... I think the whole concept of today's CG is stuck in a mudhole.

Nobody really does anything interesting with it because it either has already been done, or it just can't be done properly or with that charm applied anymore.

I know this is probably just sentimental BS but I like old games for what they are. The introduction of advanced* 3D in adventure games was especially disturbing to me. Still haven't played 3D versions of Monkey Island 😀

I guess that's the same reason why I can't get used to the 3D version of Mickey Mouse (I get to watch Disney Junior a lot due to having kids) - I'm used to Mickey being 2D and hand drawn! I enjoy modern 3D cartoons like Monsters Inc., Cars, Brave, Wreck-it Ralph... but I hope that the old cartoons never die out.

* advanced compared to Alone in the Dark. I'm totally fine with Alone in the Dark 😀

I'm just jaded by how shitty the 360/PS3 generation of console gaming was, and how it managed to corrupt even PC gaming. I wont lie, there were a few games from this generation that I liked, but for the most part the last good generation of console gaming was the PS2/Gamecube generation. Fortunately, I have a PC not only capable of emulating nearly everything made up to and including that generation, but it can also run pretty much every late 90s/early-mid 2000s game on the highest settings and resolutions. I don't bother with fanmade "HD" packs though, because the models and textures contained within usually look really amateurish and shitty. I will use enhanced engines for some games (like R1Q2 for Quake 2 or the various versions of ZDoom for Doom), but I do it more for things like online multiplayer and mod support. The original sprites, textures, and models suit the games they go with, so why bother changing them?

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I'm just jaded by how shitty the 360/PS3 generation of console gaming was, and how it managed to corrupt even PC gaming. I wont lie, there were a few games from this generation that I liked, but for the most part the last good generation of console gaming was the PS2/Gamecube generation. Fortunately, I have a PC not only capable of emulating nearly everything made up to and including that generation, but it can also run pretty much every late 90s/early-mid 2000s game on the highest settings and resolutions. I don't bother with fanmade "HD" packs though, because the models and textures contained within usually look really amateurish and shitty. I will use enhanced engines for some games (like R1Q2 for Quake 2 or the various versions of ZDoom for Doom), but I do it more for things like online multiplayer and mod support. The original sprites, textures, and models suit the games they go with, so why bother changing them?

The problem with the consoles is that in order to save on cost they are not upgradeable so whatever hardware generation they were created in they will stay in for the life of the console. 360 and PS3 are both stuck in the tail end of the DX9 era so if anyone wants to make a game that runs on them and PC then the PC version must have a DX9 render mode so that assets can be shared across platforms. 5 or 6 years from now when the PC world has moved on from DX11, we will be here complaining about how XBox One and PS4 are holding PC gaming back by being stuck in the DX11 era.