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Small, incremental improvements don't make shockwaves like the old massive tech leaps used to.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Did those go for realism though, or were they just good at balancing the more detailed art design with the gameplay?
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the "last gen still looked good" game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn't believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays... well, like Silent Hill, and it's still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn't a zero sum game. You don't trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
They clearly balanced the more detailed art design with the game play.
GTA didn't have detail on cars to the level of a racing game, and didn't have characters with as much detail as Resident Evil, so that it could have a larger world for example. Colossus had fewer objects on screen so it could put more detail on what was there.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that's what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn't that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you'd see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Except for the ones that don't do a good job of balancing the two things. Like the games that have incredible detail but shit performance and/or awful gameplay.
Well, yeah, but again, that's not new, and it's something every game has to do, better or worse.
I'm aging myself here, but if you must know, the time that stands out most to me in the "graphics over gameplay" debate is actually... 8 bit micros, weirdly.
There was a time where people mostly just looked at how much of a screen a character filled, or whether the backgrounds scrolled and just bought that, while a subset of the userbase and press was pleading to them to pay at least some consideration to whether the game... you know, could be played at all.