7 ms·

I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to men

by rndmio 10y ago

I know there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but in my mind this was a pivotal moment in gaming. The step up from Doom (and alikes) to Quake was huge. Not to mention how well designed and balanced the game was. I wasted so many hours playing it originally and even now it still thrills, in a way I just haven't had for a long time.

zorked 10y ago
That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...
  - jerf 10y ago
    Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust... And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...
    - zanny 10y ago
      It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.
      - animal531 10y ago
        I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      > Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. Clearly you've never played TF2.
      - jerf 10y ago
        Read harder.
        Nullabillity 10y ago
        Whoops. Too bad it's too late to delete now.
  - baldfat 10y ago
    Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally) I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet
  - HannibalLecter 10y ago
    WoW sucks now. It was great back in TBC but now? It's nothing more than a tech-improved facebook game. Garbage. If you want something awesome check out Path of Exile. Free to play, too. It's like what Diablo 3 should have been but couldn't because Bliz don't know how to gameplay design anymore.
- zanny 10y ago
  I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining-video-games/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining... Probably to coincide with the anniversary.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity. The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world. The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").
  - rndmio 10y ago
    That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444
- munificent 10y ago
  I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons. All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.
- noobermin 10y ago
  It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison. Of course, IMAO.
- Asooka 10y ago
  I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.
mstade 10y ago
It really was a distinct shift, wasn't it? And you could feel it then too, it's not like you have to look back 20 years later and go "yeah you know what, that probably was a pivotal moment" – it was palpable right then and there. Quake, as it turns out, was a really great name in more was than one. Me and some friends who played a lot together back in the day, some of us belonging to the same clans, are doing a re-union LAN later this summer as a kind of celebration. Can't wait! :o)
- nailer 10y ago
  The atmosphere still exists when you look at shots today - I think it's mainly the lighting: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19c4/576a68059de4bbf43633a24c/576a6808d482e96c76827deb/1466591242129/Q11.jpg http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19...
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    I suffer from poor vision, but surely I can't be the only one... there is no lighting in those pictures. It's black. I'm tempted to say it's so black you ask yourself how much more black could it be... Well, a little more black, but not much. I never played quake because I literally couldn't see it. I always wondered what it looked like to people who liked it.
    - Kristine1975 10y ago
      Apparently you can set the screen brightness in Quake's console by assigning a value to the variable "gamma": Less than 1 is brighter, more than 1 is darker: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.html http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.htm...
    - nailer 10y ago
      I closed the curtains, so the only light was coming from the monitor. I think id should have told people do do that too.
- 10y ago

by rndmio 10y ago

zorked 10y ago

That was a beautiful moment in time when the technology was starting to reach high levels of realism but the aesthetic of realism still hadn't become the oppressive norm of mainstream gaming.

digi_owl 10y ago
And then we got WoW and now things are tilting back towards cartoons...
- jerf 10y ago
  Yeah, but that's still progress in a way, progress away from the false goal of unconditional realism. Cartoons are generally cheaper, which means we can have more things, and also has more useful design space. Something like TF2-style "all characters must have distinctive silhouettes" is much harder if you're also trying to do total realism, because you end up so much more constrained with where the distinctiveness can be. (Color? No, nobody's running around on the battlefield in bright red. Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. A lot of guns look a lot like other guns. etc.)
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    Here's a presentation by Valve about the visual design of Team Fortress 2: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2007/NPAR07_Illust... And here's the paper for it: http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_IllustrativeRenderingInTeamFortress2.pdf http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/NPAR07_Illu...
  - zanny 10y ago
    It is not even just about the cost to produce. Realist games sacrifice gameplay itself, because if you are on the bleeding edge of fidelity you cannot have a lot of useful gamey aspects (speed, object density, environment complexity, etc). You can put more non-interactive polygons on the screen but only in exchange for gameplay quality.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Amen. I recently tried playing a MMORPG that seems to throw a insane polygon count at the player models (boob physics galore). End result is that my computer screams for mercy any time i set foot in a spawn zone.
    - animal531 10y ago
      I think there's room for both, and it's not that limiting. An Uncharted 4 looks amazing and has all the elements you describe, but is obviously a lot harder to implement than an Overwatch (which is great looking in a cartoon fashion, with vibrant colours etc.)
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    > Nobody's wearing crazy hats or has two-foot-tall bouncing hair. Clearly you've never played TF2.
    - jerf 10y ago
      Read harder.
      - Nullabillity 10y ago
        Whoops. Too bad it's too late to delete now.
- baldfat 10y ago
  Things run faster when not realistic and are cheaper to produce (Normally) I personally prefer the art style approach over trying to make it realistic/technical approach by making realistic representation as if it was real life. TF 2 > Crisis This is a BIG why the Indie Game movemnet
- HannibalLecter 10y ago
  WoW sucks now. It was great back in TBC but now? It's nothing more than a tech-improved facebook game. Garbage. If you want something awesome check out Path of Exile. Free to play, too. It's like what Diablo 3 should have been but couldn't because Bliz don't know how to gameplay design anymore.
zanny 10y ago
I don't know if this was intentional, but eevee just made a blog post about this yesterday: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining-video-games/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/06/22/graphical-fidelity-is-ruining... Probably to coincide with the anniversary.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Oddly one of the more interesting quake 2 mods i played around with was Brazen. It made the Quake 2 weapons have realistic ammo management and carrying capacity. The most intriguing part was perhaps that you could transfer ammo between magazines, and empty ones was thrown into the game world. The developer would go on to make a variant of this that was compatible with Action Quake, with a bit of Matrix influence thrown in (you could climb buildings by "wall jumping").
- rndmio 10y ago
  That's a great article that really articulates some of the feelings I'd had towards modern games, especially FPSs.
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  It was/is being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11959444
munificent 10y ago
I've been really enjoying Minecraft lately because it bucks that trend for all of the right reasons. All of its graphical simplicity both helps make the game world more modifiable, and encourages users to use their imagination to interpret the world, just like simple LEGO blocks do.
noobermin 10y ago
It's not just the graphics, it was gameplay too. Take a COD game and contrast that to a quake 3 1v1. No comparison. Of course, IMAO.
Asooka 10y ago
I know what you mean, but as someone who works on rendering tech (for CG not for games, but games are more and more using the same tech), I would like to clarify something. You do want realism in your graphics. You want realism in the way light is calculated, you want realism in the way materials interact, in short you want fully physically modelled materials. Watch Disney animated movies (or really any high-budget animated movie), notice that no matter how stylised it gets, the lighting is always as realistic as possible, or if the visuals are really trippy, still grounded in the usual physics, it's just the materials and geometry that get twisted in fun ways. Humans have a really good feel for lighting, so you want that to be top-notch. Now that we've practically achieved real-time physically-based lighting calculations, I'm seeing lots of games opt for a less realistic style of materials. I think the oppressive drive towards realism was a necessary step to build the tech that will allow for real artistry. You can cheat and take shortcuts as much as you want, but there is no substitute for having a real solid base for lighting and I'm pretty excited to see what will come out in the coming years.

mstade 10y ago

It really was a distinct shift, wasn't it? And you could feel it then too, it's not like you have to look back 20 years later and go "yeah you know what, that probably was a pivotal moment" – it was palpable right then and there. Quake, as it turns out, was a really great name in more was than one. Me and some friends who played a lot together back in the day, some of us belonging to the same clans, are doing a re-union LAN later this summer as a kind of celebration. Can't wait! :o)

nailer 10y ago
The atmosphere still exists when you look at shots today - I think it's mainly the lighting: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19c4/576a68059de4bbf43633a24c/576a6808d482e96c76827deb/1466591242129/Q11.jpg http://static1.squarespace.com/static/566d855a841abafcc8ed19...
- mikekchar 10y ago
  I suffer from poor vision, but surely I can't be the only one... there is no lighting in those pictures. It's black. I'm tempted to say it's so black you ask yourself how much more black could it be... Well, a little more black, but not much. I never played quake because I literally couldn't see it. I always wondered what it looked like to people who liked it.
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    Apparently you can set the screen brightness in Quake's console by assigning a value to the variable "gamma": Less than 1 is brighter, more than 1 is darker: http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.html http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/console/commands/quake.htm...
  - nailer 10y ago
    I closed the curtains, so the only light was coming from the monitor. I think id should have told people do do that too.
10y ago