4 ms·
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,
by 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.
- torginus 6y agoI'm not super familiar with the history of aviation, but by the end of the 90s, 3D accelerators became widespread. This meant that 3D became available to the masses, but the only way you could render graphics was the DirectX/OpenGL way, with triangles,Z-Buffers,vertex/pixel shaders. Unfortunately this meant that other techniques, like voxel raycasting, spline surfaces and other weird techniques couldn't be accelerated, and became much less prominent. So yeah, the analogy stands that 3D transitioned from a period of whimsical experimentation to a "this-is-how-we-do-things" mindset in the timeframe, while a number of otherwise interesting solutions fell by the wayside.
- Shared404 6y ago> This killed of multiple PC genres on console, the RTS most prominent among them. I don't know. I'm not big into RTS games, but one of my favorite XB360 games was Supreme Commander 2, which definitely falls under RTS.
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- jugg1es 6y agoI think your description is pretty spot-on. Doom was released in 1993. Quake 3 Arena was released in 1999. Doom had all the ingredients needed to make Q3 but Quake 3 Arena still holds up as an arcade-style shooter, whereas Doom feels like a relic of the past. I think that period of time in the 90s was really a remarkable time in the evolution of digital entertainment.
- tjr225 6y agoI think Doom still holds up really well. I played it for the first time around five or six years ago and had a great time.
- jugg1es 6y agoI'm not saying it's not fun, I'm saying my 7 year old kid would look at Doom and say "nope" but he would look at q3a and give it a chance.
- tjr225 6y agoSure but your 7 year old kid would say the same thing about The Godfather vs the Matrix. That doesn’t mean The Godfather hasn’t aged well.
- jugg1es 6y agoI dunno man - for a 'high tech' sci-fi movie, there aren't anything resembling modern phones in the Matrix. My 7yo has a hard time understanding pay phones. At least the Godfather is set in the past haha.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]