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Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me,

Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it. You know, sometimes less is more, if the game world is just about detailed enough that you can make out what things are supposed to be, you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, which ultimately gives the final product that your consciousness consumes a more personal note, since it's filled with your fantasy. Maybe this is part of why Minecraft is so successful. Everything is so chunky and rough, you have to imagine what things are. And your crude buildings and creations easily fit in with the rest of the game world, there automatically is consistency in detail, so your mind accepts it. I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff.

b0rsuk 6y ago
Most FPS games were literally consolized. Until Halo came around, no one could make a FPS work because a controller was too slow and imprecise. Halo's trick was to sloooow the action down. The chunky thing was why making levels for DooM was so easy. Prodeus (early access) also has easy to use level editor, but currently the game has some design problems - such as dumb and slow monsters. Those in DooM were also dumb, but their AI was functional. They could swarm and surround you well enough. I honestly think Prodeus looks better than Doom Eternal, the art direction especially. But I don't need as much ketchup. I think games like these (Dusk, Graven, Ion Fury etc...) will sell in part because players' expectations have changed. Players have also realized that if they want action reminiscent of old FPS games, they can't look towards AAA games because no AAA game will imitate the experience. It's too much risk. You need to give smaller studios a chance, and the only way smaller studios can make it work is by limiting visual detail.
- jldugger 6y ago
  > Until Halo came around Goldeneye and Turok would like to have a word, if you have a moment.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    I can't speak for Turok (I only played it once, and don't remember anything about it other than something something dinosaurs), but Goldeneye probably doesn't have much of a word here; its controls were clunky as shit. And sure, that was part of the fun, and it's still an iconic game, but I'm very much glad that modern FPS games have adopted more sane control schemes.
    - jldugger 6y ago
      Goldeneye had a Turok-style control option that I largely used: move with the arrow keys, aim with the stick, trigger to shoot, shoulder to aim. Circle strafing is simple, as is aiming up or down. Goldeneye's shoulder aim allowed players more precision, at a cost of mobility, which has a certain logic to it. Overall it's fairly similar to Halo, without the extra buttons for crouch, jump, grenade, or melee. Halo's golden triangle would be functionally dead without them. But... the pro controllers exist for a reason -- you can't use a fleet of thumb buttons on the controller face if your left and right thumbs are dedicated to moving and looking.
  - b0rsuk 6y ago
    Which games imitate Goldeneye and Turok? I mean I guess you have a point that these games work, but the fact they've been ignored by game designers is telling something.
    - kuu 6y ago
      Perfect Dark is a clear descendant of Goldeneye I would say
      - bluedino 6y ago
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
>you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, x100 this. Quake 1 was terrifying for me even though the pixelated graphics are poor by todays standard because my imagination would fill in the blanks making things feel way more scary. Just take a look at these pixelated creatures. Coupled with the soundtrack from NIN and Trent Reznor and the gothic atmosphere they feel way scarier to me than what came after like Doom 3 or even Dooms of this decade. I don't now why but the recent Doom games just look a bit too cartoonish for me and not scary at all. http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-creatures-of-quake.html http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-creatures-...
- phaus 6y ago
  I think you are on to something about the impact being forced to use your imagination has. Quake 1 had amazing art direction and each chapter had its own feel because each of them was designed by a different dev following his own ideas. I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you. Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad. They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me. I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it. Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games. Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.
fiblye 6y ago
My current game dev project is being done with relatively low poly models and non-realistic textures. I've tried adding higher levels of detail to the game, but gave up pretty early on. Unless it looks great and stylized, highly detailed art that's just okay ends up looking cheaper than intentionally simple and under-detailed art. I ended up settling on something a little bit above Sega Saturn style and I'm feeling immersed in my own test levels. Whenever I see a game with super detailed forests and houses and human models, it's almost impossible to get interested in it. It's too real and bland. Maybe it's a mental association from seeing a bunch of cheap Russian and Chinese games on Steam that use premade assets.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Speaking specifically about FPS games, after the heyday of games like Quake and Unreal, a new generation of FPS games came up, iirc starting with Half-Life (focusing more on story, platforming than shooting), then moving on to Medal of Honor and Call of Duty (realistic shooters); the more 'arcade' shooters fell out of grace, and probably more when other game categories became big in e-sports. But, then Id started to make a comeback; games like the Wolfenstein reboot which were more about over the top violence again, and Doom which made FPS games fast again (if it wasn't for the constant scramble for ammo it really would've captured the 'old' feel even better I think). That one's criticized for having too much platforming in it though, but other than that it's still a fun / fast paced FPS games. Alongside there's been the Serious Sam franchise which never stopped feeling outdated, lol. It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting. Kiting works artistically with rocket launchers! From the older days, it's one of the big reasons teenage me preferred Unreal Tournament over Quake III Arena. In the former, the rockets had a nice exhaust plume and were slow enough that if you were strafing while shooting, you got to see a nice view of a missile in flight[0]. In Q3A, the rockets were just glowing blobs with a small trail behind, rarely giving you nice visuals. I always favored railguns because of a nicer trail. Serious Sam, back in those days, also had a very nice missile trail visual, and coupled with the outdoor gameplay (giving rockets many seconds of flight), I just loved kiting and unloading rockets at the coalescing piles of enemies. -- [0] - Let's ignore for a moment that real-life rockets would be much faster.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    did you play tribes back in the day? spinfusor + skiing would definitely have suited your aesthetic.
thom 6y ago
It’s interesting to think about the constraints that bring about a level of self-narrative in games. Here you point out the graphics, and I think mostly textual games like the Football Manager series also evoke these feelings. But on the flip side I think a lot of modern open world games are a response to the very constrained paths and mazes of the some eras of first person shooter, giving players back the ability to follow their own story to an extent. I think RPGs especially have paid a big price as fidelity has gone up. The move to voice acting lost us rich, broad textual interactions with every NPC, the waypoints-and-cutscenes that give us almost film-like narratives mean that role play is now largely limited to a small number of paths (good/evil or strong/stealthy). The complexity of these games has really gone down overall, and while they’re often wonderful storytelling experiences you’re right it’s far less _your_ story in many modern games.
- slothtrop 6y ago
  Voice cutscenes everywhere is the worst thing to ever happen to rpgs. It slows the pace down to a crawl. Granted, there was some archaic gameplay design from the old days that felt slow too and has since largely been dispensed with, but I think it pales in impact. Even AAA action-adventure games are now like watching interactive tv.
stared 6y ago
When there is a lack of information, our imagination works. It is taken to the extreme with roguelikes (with ASCII graphics) such as ADOM. Even now, Jupiter Hell (the successor of DoomRL) is less attractive for me because of its polished graphics. But I think that there is another aspect - polishing gameplay & pace. Contemporary shooters often have too many cutscenes, too many things to add to the story (and equipment, and everything) that distract from instead of complement the experience. The minimalism of games like Doom, with a fast, uninterrupted pace, is still a masterpiece. Fine-tuning mechanics is hard.
- pizza234 6y ago
  Which games do you use as reference for "Contemporary shooters", and did you actually play them? A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage). To answer the parent: > Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it. This is the nostalgia lens, and there are a couple of reasons. The first is that today the gaming landscape is considerably wider than it was, because the barrier to entry is considerably lower, but one instinctually considers just the AAA games, and additionally, the noisier ones. There has been "one" Doom and Quake for some time, and with reasons - there was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty. Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. From the article: > But not everything from the past is being included in Dusk. “I want to avoid unintuitive navigation and overly obscure puzzles,” Szymanski said. Not everything transfers so well into the present day.
  - stared 6y ago
    In my experience, after Doom, the pace of shooters started going down. Even Doom 3 was (IMHO) a cutscene horror. For me the only game in the spirit of Doom (with enemies attacking en masse, with meaningful weapons, without pretending there is some interesting story) was Painkiller. Otherwise, games got slower, even ones I otherwise enjoyed immensely (e.g. Half-Life). Doom 2016 & Eternal are back to the game - with fast-paced mechanics, and (though, I cannot bear Doom Eternal demon piñata glitter, vide https://medium.com/@pmigdal/doom-2016-vs-doom-eternal-ui-side-by-side-8058e996baae https://medium.com/@pmigdal/doom-2016-vs-doom-eternal-ui-sid...). Dusk has a nice, gloomy mood, fast (and respecting players - in terms of challenge and difficulty). Ultrakill has g(l)ory kill mechanics, IMHO better than from Doom Eternal (even if not as visually appealing). > Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. Mechanics is hard. Kudos to Szymanski for polishing the mechanics, not the story or graphics glitter. > [T]here was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty. Well, Carmack is unique. His focus and attention to detail are second to none. Plus, there was another John - Romero. In Doom, he was designing and obsessively tweaking all parameters. (To the extend, I compare these Johns to John Bell, and Albert Einstein. No, it is not a joke: https://crastina.se/theres-no-projects-like-side-projects/ https://crastina.se/theres-no-projects-like-side-projects/.).
kranner 6y ago
> You know, sometimes less is more, if the game world is just about detailed enough that you can make out what things are supposed to be, you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, which ultimately gives the final product that your consciousness consumes a more personal note, since it's filled with your fantasy. Scott McCloud made the same point while discussing Abstraction in comics in his book 'Understanding Comics'. The more abstract the representation of a character is, the more easily a reader can project themselves onto that character and identify with it.
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  My school teacher also told us that anonymous, blank slate characters are often used to represent everyone, or the reader. This is what most people don't get about the Doom Guy or Gordon Freeman. If you try to fix it, you're actually breaking the quality. This is highlighted in this video: "I Hate Immersive Sims" a.k.a. "Why is Half-Life 1 so compelling". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc
vansul 6y ago
David OReilly wrote a nice essay covering the 'less is more' philosophy in 3d art ('Basic Animation Aesthetics' -pdf can be found here: http://www.davidoreilly.com/downloads http://www.davidoreilly.com/downloads) He's done a bunch of great animations (eg The External World, The Horse Raised by Spheres - youtube) and games (Mountain, EVERYTHING - steam/consoles) that epitomize it imo - very worth a watch/play
torginus 6y ago
I have so much to write on this, sorry if it comes off as incoherent rambling. The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling. I'll try to list what came to mind. - Just like the 60s-70s in music, product people had no concept of what a marketable game looked like, and were willing to fund much more riskier ideas. - Video game team sizes and budgets were smaller, allowing designers much more leeway, as well being able to personally oversee the production much better. - Although Moore's law was a thing before and after the 90s, It's the advancement during that time meant that games went from pixelated abstract bleep-bloop affairs, to being able to render and simulate complex 2D and 3D worlds. - Feeding in to my previous point, people were literally writing the book on modern game genres, like RTS, Sim games (who thought that managing a city could be fun?), FPS, etc. - John Carmack, I literally cannot overstate how impactful his contributions were to the FPS genre. With the introduction of Binary Space Partitioning in games (first in Doom in 2D, then a fully 3D version in Quake), he elegantly solved occlusion culling, collision detection, and 3D level editors in a masterstroke, while allowing 3D games to run on the meagre hardware of the times. Almost literally every FPS game used a BSP to represent its levels for more than a decade (Unreal, Quake and Source sure did). Unfortunately, the console era which came after, has put a brake to this breakneck pace of development.Console games, especially in the PS1-X360 eras, were dumbed down for both technical limitations, and gameplay: - Studios sought to appeal to the masses, who didn't always appreciate the complex mechanics. - You just can't make as sophisticated UI for gamepads as for keyboard/mouse. This killed of multiple PC genres on console, the RTS most prominent among them. - Due to the primary storage medium being DVDs/CDS in the console space, developers had to contend with their limitations, such as slow transfer speed, and abysmal seek times (yes even compared to HDDs). This meant that levels needed to be more linear, and player freedom had to be restricted. RAM sizes were also tiny compared to PCs of the time, further increasing the problem. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that I missed.
- taneq 6y ago
  > The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling. I don't think it'd be exaggerating to say that the 90s were, for 3D gaming, the equivalent of 1900-1910 for aircraft. The decade started with a few barely-functional attempts and ended with relatively polished and widely available products.
klmadfejno 6y ago
> I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff. A lot of this is probably lighting. Lighting is hugely important for things to look good. Not just photorealism high-res whatever. Dynamic raytraced super expensive lighting looks good. Old school, fake lighting where everything is automatically lit is also good. Poorly configured lighting is very bad. Minecraft has good enough lighting by default. Unreal does not. I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley. If you want the 1 minute laydown on good enough unreal light: * Put a directional light in the scene * Set it's property that says its a sun * Set it to mobile (so it doesn't try to bake things) * Add a sky atmosphere and set all of its light scattering colors to black (so it gets its colors realistically from the sun) As a non artist, the lighting and atmosphere functionality of unreal is probably my favorite feature: https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA?t=932 https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA?t=932
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  > I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley. Hmh, not sure. I agree on lighting being very important, but RTX-Quake looked just weird too. But imagination probably plays a role in games like doom where enemies are barely more than a couple pixels. It's like horror movies are scary because of the stuff that is only implied through storytelling and sound, as these things then happen directly in your brain and not on the screen.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    I'm only watching the trailer but I think RTX Quake looks pretty good with the glaring exception of big polygonal visual effects. The explosions in particular don't work. Certainly ray traced lighting isn't going to be good if the logic of what makes, blocks, and transparently passes light doesn't look good.
breakfastduck 6y ago
Games in this era were also ultimately designed to sell copies and be fun. No micro-transactions, no limitations by console platforms, no huge worldwide marketing campaigns and TV adverts. Just developers trying to make the games as fun as possible so more people would buy a copy when magazines gave it a good review or people showed their friends when they were over.
meheleventyone 6y ago
Don't worry we're on the cusp of getting loads of PS1/N64 aesthetic games. It's been bubbling in some niches (notably horror) but it feels like we're about to see it as the next indie thing. I personally am looking forward to a return of the wobbly skin model skinning from Kingpin!
mecha_love 6y ago
I think how the game plays is very important. Counter Strike 1.6, Minecraft, Wolfenstein etc. These games had a lot to offer as an experience, almost an arcadeish feeling. With CS:GO or the new COD games there is just so much to take in it just takes away the arcade feeling and makes it more of a movie experience rather than a game
- leetcrew 6y ago
  whenever I go back and play 1.6, I'm always amazed at how crisp and direct the controls feel. it's hard to describe the feeling precisely, but modern fps games (even csgo to an extent) just seem clunky in comparison. it's almost like the feeling you get when you forget to turn off vsync. not sure if this is just my nostalgia kicking in or if there's a technical reason for this.
  - mecha_love 6y ago
    I totally get what you mean. The gameplay itself is just.. different. Not the story or whatever but strictly the movement. What you wrote about vsync just hit me on another level. I remember playing CS Source (don't ask) and that was just awful, I still played it for hundreds of hours, but it just was not hitting it like before. I think there is a technical reason for it, because I turned on CS 1.6 in between these comments and the difference was noticeable immediately

b0rsuk 6y ago

Most FPS games were literally consolized. Until Halo came around, no one could make a FPS work because a controller was too slow and imprecise. Halo's trick was to sloooow the action down. The chunky thing was why making levels for DooM was so easy. Prodeus (early access) also has easy to use level editor, but currently the game has some design problems - such as dumb and slow monsters. Those in DooM were also dumb, but their AI was functional. They could swarm and surround you well enough. I honestly think Prodeus looks better than Doom Eternal, the art direction especially. But I don't need as much ketchup. I think games like these (Dusk, Graven, Ion Fury etc...) will sell in part because players' expectations have changed. Players have also realized that if they want action reminiscent of old FPS games, they can't look towards AAA games because no AAA game will imitate the experience. It's too much risk. You need to give smaller studios a chance, and the only way smaller studios can make it work is by limiting visual detail.

jldugger 6y ago
> Until Halo came around Goldeneye and Turok would like to have a word, if you have a moment.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  I can't speak for Turok (I only played it once, and don't remember anything about it other than something something dinosaurs), but Goldeneye probably doesn't have much of a word here; its controls were clunky as shit. And sure, that was part of the fun, and it's still an iconic game, but I'm very much glad that modern FPS games have adopted more sane control schemes.
  - jldugger 6y ago
    Goldeneye had a Turok-style control option that I largely used: move with the arrow keys, aim with the stick, trigger to shoot, shoulder to aim. Circle strafing is simple, as is aiming up or down. Goldeneye's shoulder aim allowed players more precision, at a cost of mobility, which has a certain logic to it. Overall it's fairly similar to Halo, without the extra buttons for crouch, jump, grenade, or melee. Halo's golden triangle would be functionally dead without them. But... the pro controllers exist for a reason -- you can't use a fleet of thumb buttons on the controller face if your left and right thumbs are dedicated to moving and looking.
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  Which games imitate Goldeneye and Turok? I mean I guess you have a point that these games work, but the fact they've been ignored by game designers is telling something.
  - kuu 6y ago
    Perfect Dark is a clear descendant of Goldeneye I would say
    - bluedino 6y ago

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

>you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, x100 this. Quake 1 was terrifying for me even though the pixelated graphics are poor by todays standard because my imagination would fill in the blanks making things feel way more scary. Just take a look at these pixelated creatures. Coupled with the soundtrack from NIN and Trent Reznor and the gothic atmosphere they feel way scarier to me than what came after like Doom 3 or even Dooms of this decade. I don't now why but the recent Doom games just look a bit too cartoonish for me and not scary at all. http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-creatures-of-quake.html http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-creatures-...

phaus 6y ago
I think you are on to something about the impact being forced to use your imagination has. Quake 1 had amazing art direction and each chapter had its own feel because each of them was designed by a different dev following his own ideas. I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you. Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad. They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me. I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it. Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games. Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.

fiblye 6y ago

My current game dev project is being done with relatively low poly models and non-realistic textures. I've tried adding higher levels of detail to the game, but gave up pretty early on. Unless it looks great and stylized, highly detailed art that's just okay ends up looking cheaper than intentionally simple and under-detailed art. I ended up settling on something a little bit above Sega Saturn style and I'm feeling immersed in my own test levels. Whenever I see a game with super detailed forests and houses and human models, it's almost impossible to get interested in it. It's too real and bland. Maybe it's a mental association from seeing a bunch of cheap Russian and Chinese games on Steam that use premade assets.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Speaking specifically about FPS games, after the heyday of games like Quake and Unreal, a new generation of FPS games came up, iirc starting with Half-Life (focusing more on story, platforming than shooting), then moving on to Medal of Honor and Call of Duty (realistic shooters); the more 'arcade' shooters fell out of grace, and probably more when other game categories became big in e-sports. But, then Id started to make a comeback; games like the Wolfenstein reboot which were more about over the top violence again, and Doom which made FPS games fast again (if it wasn't for the constant scramble for ammo it really would've captured the 'old' feel even better I think). That one's criticized for having too much platforming in it though, but other than that it's still a fun / fast paced FPS games. Alongside there's been the Serious Sam franchise which never stopped feeling outdated, lol. It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting. Kiting works artistically with rocket launchers! From the older days, it's one of the big reasons teenage me preferred Unreal Tournament over Quake III Arena. In the former, the rockets had a nice exhaust plume and were slow enough that if you were strafing while shooting, you got to see a nice view of a missile in flight[0]. In Q3A, the rockets were just glowing blobs with a small trail behind, rarely giving you nice visuals. I always favored railguns because of a nicer trail. Serious Sam, back in those days, also had a very nice missile trail visual, and coupled with the outdoor gameplay (giving rockets many seconds of flight), I just loved kiting and unloading rockets at the coalescing piles of enemies. -- [0] - Let's ignore for a moment that real-life rockets would be much faster.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  did you play tribes back in the day? spinfusor + skiing would definitely have suited your aesthetic.

thom 6y ago

It’s interesting to think about the constraints that bring about a level of self-narrative in games. Here you point out the graphics, and I think mostly textual games like the Football Manager series also evoke these feelings. But on the flip side I think a lot of modern open world games are a response to the very constrained paths and mazes of the some eras of first person shooter, giving players back the ability to follow their own story to an extent. I think RPGs especially have paid a big price as fidelity has gone up. The move to voice acting lost us rich, broad textual interactions with every NPC, the waypoints-and-cutscenes that give us almost film-like narratives mean that role play is now largely limited to a small number of paths (good/evil or strong/stealthy). The complexity of these games has really gone down overall, and while they’re often wonderful storytelling experiences you’re right it’s far less _your_ story in many modern games.

slothtrop 6y ago
Voice cutscenes everywhere is the worst thing to ever happen to rpgs. It slows the pace down to a crawl. Granted, there was some archaic gameplay design from the old days that felt slow too and has since largely been dispensed with, but I think it pales in impact. Even AAA action-adventure games are now like watching interactive tv.

stared 6y ago

When there is a lack of information, our imagination works. It is taken to the extreme with roguelikes (with ASCII graphics) such as ADOM. Even now, Jupiter Hell (the successor of DoomRL) is less attractive for me because of its polished graphics. But I think that there is another aspect - polishing gameplay & pace. Contemporary shooters often have too many cutscenes, too many things to add to the story (and equipment, and everything) that distract from instead of complement the experience. The minimalism of games like Doom, with a fast, uninterrupted pace, is still a masterpiece. Fine-tuning mechanics is hard.

pizza234 6y ago
Which games do you use as reference for "Contemporary shooters", and did you actually play them? A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage). To answer the parent: > Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it. This is the nostalgia lens, and there are a couple of reasons. The first is that today the gaming landscape is considerably wider than it was, because the barrier to entry is considerably lower, but one instinctually considers just the AAA games, and additionally, the noisier ones. There has been "one" Doom and Quake for some time, and with reasons - there was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty. Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. From the article: > But not everything from the past is being included in Dusk. “I want to avoid unintuitive navigation and overly obscure puzzles,” Szymanski said. Not everything transfers so well into the present day.
- stared 6y ago
  In my experience, after Doom, the pace of shooters started going down. Even Doom 3 was (IMHO) a cutscene horror. For me the only game in the spirit of Doom (with enemies attacking en masse, with meaningful weapons, without pretending there is some interesting story) was Painkiller. Otherwise, games got slower, even ones I otherwise enjoyed immensely (e.g. Half-Life). Doom 2016 & Eternal are back to the game - with fast-paced mechanics, and (though, I cannot bear Doom Eternal demon piñata glitter, vide https://medium.com/@pmigdal/doom-2016-vs-doom-eternal-ui-side-by-side-8058e996baae https://medium.com/@pmigdal/doom-2016-vs-doom-eternal-ui-sid...). Dusk has a nice, gloomy mood, fast (and respecting players - in terms of challenge and difficulty). Ultrakill has g(l)ory kill mechanics, IMHO better than from Doom Eternal (even if not as visually appealing). > Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. Mechanics is hard. Kudos to Szymanski for polishing the mechanics, not the story or graphics glitter. > [T]here was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty. Well, Carmack is unique. His focus and attention to detail are second to none. Plus, there was another John - Romero. In Doom, he was designing and obsessively tweaking all parameters. (To the extend, I compare these Johns to John Bell, and Albert Einstein. No, it is not a joke: https://crastina.se/theres-no-projects-like-side-projects/ https://crastina.se/theres-no-projects-like-side-projects/.).

kranner 6y ago

> You know, sometimes less is more, if the game world is just about detailed enough that you can make out what things are supposed to be, you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, which ultimately gives the final product that your consciousness consumes a more personal note, since it's filled with your fantasy. Scott McCloud made the same point while discussing Abstraction in comics in his book 'Understanding Comics'. The more abstract the representation of a character is, the more easily a reader can project themselves onto that character and identify with it.

b0rsuk 6y ago
My school teacher also told us that anonymous, blank slate characters are often used to represent everyone, or the reader. This is what most people don't get about the Doom Guy or Gordon Freeman. If you try to fix it, you're actually breaking the quality. This is highlighted in this video: "I Hate Immersive Sims" a.k.a. "Why is Half-Life 1 so compelling". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HByDGHl7PNc

vansul 6y ago

David OReilly wrote a nice essay covering the 'less is more' philosophy in 3d art ('Basic Animation Aesthetics' -pdf can be found here: http://www.davidoreilly.com/downloads http://www.davidoreilly.com/downloads) He's done a bunch of great animations (eg The External World, The Horse Raised by Spheres - youtube) and games (Mountain, EVERYTHING - steam/consoles) that epitomize it imo - very worth a watch/play

torginus 6y ago

I have so much to write on this, sorry if it comes off as incoherent rambling. The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling. I'll try to list what came to mind. - Just like the 60s-70s in music, product people had no concept of what a marketable game looked like, and were willing to fund much more riskier ideas. - Video game team sizes and budgets were smaller, allowing designers much more leeway, as well being able to personally oversee the production much better. - Although Moore's law was a thing before and after the 90s, It's the advancement during that time meant that games went from pixelated abstract bleep-bloop affairs, to being able to render and simulate complex 2D and 3D worlds. - Feeding in to my previous point, people were literally writing the book on modern game genres, like RTS, Sim games (who thought that managing a city could be fun?), FPS, etc. - John Carmack, I literally cannot overstate how impactful his contributions were to the FPS genre. With the introduction of Binary Space Partitioning in games (first in Doom in 2D, then a fully 3D version in Quake), he elegantly solved occlusion culling, collision detection, and 3D level editors in a masterstroke, while allowing 3D games to run on the meagre hardware of the times. Almost literally every FPS game used a BSP to represent its levels for more than a decade (Unreal, Quake and Source sure did). Unfortunately, the console era which came after, has put a brake to this breakneck pace of development.Console games, especially in the PS1-X360 eras, were dumbed down for both technical limitations, and gameplay: - Studios sought to appeal to the masses, who didn't always appreciate the complex mechanics. - You just can't make as sophisticated UI for gamepads as for keyboard/mouse. This killed of multiple PC genres on console, the RTS most prominent among them. - Due to the primary storage medium being DVDs/CDS in the console space, developers had to contend with their limitations, such as slow transfer speed, and abysmal seek times (yes even compared to HDDs). This meant that levels needed to be more linear, and player freedom had to be restricted. RAM sizes were also tiny compared to PCs of the time, further increasing the problem. I'm sure there's a ton of stuff that I missed.

taneq 6y ago
> The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling. I don't think it'd be exaggerating to say that the 90s were, for 3D gaming, the equivalent of 1900-1910 for aircraft. The decade started with a few barely-functional attempts and ended with relatively polished and widely available products.

klmadfejno 6y ago

> I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff. A lot of this is probably lighting. Lighting is hugely important for things to look good. Not just photorealism high-res whatever. Dynamic raytraced super expensive lighting looks good. Old school, fake lighting where everything is automatically lit is also good. Poorly configured lighting is very bad. Minecraft has good enough lighting by default. Unreal does not. I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley. If you want the 1 minute laydown on good enough unreal light: * Put a directional light in the scene * Set it's property that says its a sun * Set it to mobile (so it doesn't try to bake things) * Add a sky atmosphere and set all of its light scattering colors to black (so it gets its colors realistically from the sun) As a non artist, the lighting and atmosphere functionality of unreal is probably my favorite feature: https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA?t=932 https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA?t=932

iforgotpassword 6y ago
> I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley. Hmh, not sure. I agree on lighting being very important, but RTX-Quake looked just weird too. But imagination probably plays a role in games like doom where enemies are barely more than a couple pixels. It's like horror movies are scary because of the stuff that is only implied through storytelling and sound, as these things then happen directly in your brain and not on the screen.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  I'm only watching the trailer but I think RTX Quake looks pretty good with the glaring exception of big polygonal visual effects. The explosions in particular don't work. Certainly ray traced lighting isn't going to be good if the logic of what makes, blocks, and transparently passes light doesn't look good.

breakfastduck 6y ago

Games in this era were also ultimately designed to sell copies and be fun. No micro-transactions, no limitations by console platforms, no huge worldwide marketing campaigns and TV adverts. Just developers trying to make the games as fun as possible so more people would buy a copy when magazines gave it a good review or people showed their friends when they were over.

meheleventyone 6y ago

Don't worry we're on the cusp of getting loads of PS1/N64 aesthetic games. It's been bubbling in some niches (notably horror) but it feels like we're about to see it as the next indie thing. I personally am looking forward to a return of the wobbly skin model skinning from Kingpin!

mecha_love 6y ago

I think how the game plays is very important. Counter Strike 1.6, Minecraft, Wolfenstein etc. These games had a lot to offer as an experience, almost an arcadeish feeling. With CS:GO or the new COD games there is just so much to take in it just takes away the arcade feeling and makes it more of a movie experience rather than a game

leetcrew 6y ago
whenever I go back and play 1.6, I'm always amazed at how crisp and direct the controls feel. it's hard to describe the feeling precisely, but modern fps games (even csgo to an extent) just seem clunky in comparison. it's almost like the feeling you get when you forget to turn off vsync. not sure if this is just my nostalgia kicking in or if there's a technical reason for this.
- mecha_love 6y ago
  I totally get what you mean. The gameplay itself is just.. different. Not the story or whatever but strictly the movement. What you wrote about vsync just hit me on another level. I remember playing CS Source (don't ask) and that was just awful, I still played it for hundreds of hours, but it just was not hitting it like before. I think there is a technical reason for it, because I turned on CS 1.6 in between these comments and the difference was noticeable immediately