this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Didn't get the "graphics can't get any better" idea, however, when Quake came out, and we turned on GL graphics, it really hit me that eventually graphics could, eventually, be actually realistic. Like, it is hard to explain to people born after this era the INSANE leap forward Quake was.
Oh, man, I'm about to relitigate an almost 30 year old nerd argument. Here we go.
I thought Quake looked like crap.
It's brown, and blocky and chunky and in software mode at 320x200 it's barely putting together a readable, coherent picture at all. Compared to what the peak of legacy tech was at the time, which was probably Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a genuine step backwards.
Now, it played well, it was fast and they got a ton of mileage out of the real 3D geometry to make crazy and cool level designs. But visually? Hot garbage.
You're right that the game changer was actually 3D acceleration, and Quake did come to life when it started hitting HD resolutions of 480p or (gasp) 800p, comparable to what we were already getting in Build engine games and 2D PC games elsewhere, but the underlying assets are still very, VERY ugly. To me it all came together in Quake 2, which was clearly built for the hardware. That's when I went "well, I need one of these cards now" and went to get a Nvidia Riva.
I have no complaints about Quake's sound design, though. I can hear it in my head right now. No music, just sound effects. I don't know what that shotgun sound is taken from, but it's definitely not a shotgun and it sounds absolutely amazing.
Oh, and on the original point, I'm not super sure of "graphics can't get any better" beign a thing that I thought, but I do remember when somebody showed me a PS2 screenshot of Silent Hill 2 gameplay in a magazine I mocked them for clearly having mistaken a prerendered cutscene for real time graphics. Good times.
I totally disagree. I liked the design of quake a lot more than duke nukem. I liked the dark, dungeonesque aesthetic, and, even without GL particle physics, thought it was much better looking than it's predecessors. It was designed to look like huge temples to eldritch gods and it nailed that.
Quake2 was a big improvement in PvP, however I think it had a lot of the same blockiness, the gibb was less impressive, and it suffered a lot of the same issues with color, just instead of brown/black/green/red, it was grey/green/yellow/red. Sure the polygons were smaller, and more numerous, time, and tech, had advanced. However it wasn't a huge improvement. I also preferred the sound design of the first, and not just the musical sound track, Quake 1 was much more eerie. It really wasn't until Q3 Arena that the color palate really opened up.
Previous games looked like cardboard cut outs with higher quality pictures glued to them, in a world of plywood covered covered frames also with images glued to them. Quake was like mannequins passing though a brutalist architecture mock-up.
However, 1996 I had and ATI Rage GPU. In 1997 I upgraded to a pent2 mmx with a voodoo that had a secondary 2d card supporting it. So I may have had a different experience.
I don't think Q2 had nearly as many issues with color as a whole through the game. I mean, it wasn't the most colourful game either on any given screenshot, but it had more biomes and locations. At the very least they learned how to make outdoors look like outdoors, with the bright red skies contrasting with the grey interiors. Later on they even throw a bunch of green lights around when they're feeling frisky.
You're not wrong that Id only stopped making brown games in Quake 3, which if anything is a bit too garish sometimes. I also don't disagree about your description of early shooters, all I'm saying is that people had been getting good at using that cardboard cutout tech and people had gotten good at parsing it. Moving to full 3D required a few steps backwards to then push the tech back past that point, and Quake 1 was a big muddy mess of a game. If you were able to read brutalist eldrich temples as opposed to sand-colored legos that's fair, but even with all the flashy new tech it never read like that to me at the time.