Hater Depot wrote:The first game to really blow me away was Space Quest IV, because it was the first VGA game I ever saw. After that I had similar reactions to Doom, 7th Guest, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
Since then the only game to similarly impress me was No One Lives Forever, which was the first 3-D game I saw which didn't look blocky and chunky with uninteresting textures. After that, although games became far more advanced, I feel jaded. Going from EGA to VGA was transformational. Going from NOLF2 and UT2003 to any modern game just feels like a predictable progression.
Quoting an old post for truth. For me, the biggest jump was from my dad's 386DX 40 Mhz to a Pentium III based Celeron 633 Mhz. I was just 7 and hearing real music from the computer (our 386 only had the beeper) and seeing non-blocky graphics in 3D just amazed me. A bit later I was really impressed by Morrowind (first truly openworld 3D game I played) and I wasn't impressed much by anything since. There are many people who say "zomg graphix improved so much since 1999", but I just don't see it that way. The jump from pixelated 320x200 16 color graphics to 3D models in 640x480 and more has occured in 5 years or so, what significant leap has been made since? Sure shaders, effects... but the newest attempts at "realism" seem honestly cheesier than mid-90s 3D graphics. The problem with new games is that they either look "too good", too clean and shiny in ways the real world simply isn't and have reflections on things that don't usually reflect light mirror style (like wood) or go the opposite extreme and make everything dull brown. Same with "HDR lighting", I often find games with HDR turned off more realistic as HDR just looks like an overexposed scene. It "looks nice", but is no more "realistic" than the simple 90s style colored lighting. In fact I see the trend here - HDR is overused just like color lighting was in the 1990s like for example it was in Quake 2.
I think the issue here is a different variant of Uncanny Valley. Modern graphics really pretends to be "realistic" even when it really ain't. Older graphics don't suffer from this as much as low poly models and low res sprites are quite clearly not real.