they keep saying these are the best graphics yet...
Vložit
- čas přidán 1. 11. 2023
- I am experiencing thoughts
formerly titled "isn't it weird how newer games manage to look more realistic than older ones?"
but changed due to popular request.
the "song" at 2:17 is a patreon exclusive for now.
/ 97527998
I'll release it for free/pwyw at some point, once the compilation is ready.
the moment you realize this video isn’t about graphics is when it truly becomes beautiful
The only way to see the world with fresh eyes is to actually see something with fresh eyes!😄
You have to push the boundaries, take risks, think irrationally and suspend disbelief if you want to be surprised at the result.
Otherwise all you're doing is looking behind curtains.
Art is about what we remove from something, not what we add to it. Everything we add is just material structure, filler that we must then savagely carve away again.
When you get to a place in your design where it feels like there is no hope and you keep going anyway, but then the light at the end of the tunnel is blocked by a locked gate, that's how you know you've done the right thing, even if not even God himself possesses the key.
Do this enough and eventually you will find a way out, whatever maze you're in.
You'll simply feel it in the dark because you've learned to stop looking with your eyes.
The right way is neither warm and inviting, nor harsh and difficult, but merely silent, deafeningly silent and still.
The best code is not no code, but it's pretty close. 😉
A great deal of code is wasted on realism and the irony is lost on the developers and users of that code...
The universe does not _try_ to communicate what it's doing, it just does it!
We only _think_ it is our job to pay close attention, but that is only doing, not being.
Intriguing
What else is it about
@@joshdaniel7642they have on nostalgia goggles lol
@@joshdaniel7642 Erasophobia
Its impossible for us older gamers to convey how it felt playing 3d games for the first time. Just like it's impossible for me to know how my parents felt listening to a new Beatles song on the radio. Nostalgia for a time you never experienced is real and can leave a bittersweet pang and a yearning for simpler times.
Well, it might be impossible to convey that, but I believe that it must have felt at least a little similar to the first time I went to my friend’s house and played Superhot in VR
It’s like I had forgotten everything about the Xbox One Superhot I know and love, it felt like a complete new game
"Nostalgia for a time You never experienced"
Is the perfect emotion I have felt it when watching Serial Experiements Lain for the first time this year (2023)
and yes the thing that got Me to watch was:
1 - Opening Music
2 - "I am bailing I am faded" Meme
3 - thoses Thug Pro videos while using a Lain Model Mod
4 - Some videos essays with or without Minor spoilers until I found one that put a warning at beginning of the video saying that would have Major Spoilers and that was when I pause the video and begin marking a day to watch the Anime (Especially when I realise was only 13 episodes of 25 minutes each that is when I say it "Lets do this!")
pretty funny how the beatles final new song dropped thursday lol
Try listening to now and then...
If you haven't heard of the word anemoia before, this pretty perfectly captures it
I think one important part with older game graphics is that since its so far away from photo realistic you do not get hung up on small errors, rather your brain starts filling in the details, extrapolating animations so that after a while you subconsciously upgrade the graphics and it feels better than it actually is.
At least that's my experience after 40+ years of computer gaming :)
Its similar to reading a book without pictures, you create the images in your mind and that always have high resolution and more details than any printed image would have since the mind can add depth.
Yes! This is why I think FF: Spirits Within and Max Steel are photorealistic way back as a kid. It's my mind, filling in the gaps, probably consciously and unconsciously.
Agreed! Also, expectation plays a great role. If a game praises itself for being realistic it will set your mind to detect even the slightest inadequate physics. Whereas if it claims to be Arcade you will never even bother.
Yes, I think so too. In the domain of dialogue, I always liked that Zelda games don't include voice acting. At least in the 3D games, their personality comes from movements and facial expressions, which makes voice acting obsolete for a believable and relatable character.
stylization > hyper realism any day when it comes to video games… give us at most 70h stylized adventures worth the 60-70 dollar instead of hyper 😮real 3h games that one would drop within the first 20 minutes if they didn’t cost 70-80 dollars and took 200 GB of storage.
simpler times and simpler games also made more room for imagination. Just like the classic painted disney films. Moder day animated 3D shite is just.. i don't know. It lacks soul and a sense of being genuine.
I believe that the closer something tries to look realistic, the easier it is to spot the irregualirties. You know what reality really looks like and how it behaves.
Yea i feel like some pixelgames the mind gets creative and fills in the details itself. I still play old strategy games like Stronghold or Blitzkrieg. I still get more immersed in such games than in some way more modern titles with clear 3d graphics!
The mighty uncanny valley
I actually have a lot of trouble appreciating the new art in the remastered Diablo 2 and StarCraft Brood War because of this. Zerglings look like rats, textures look too slick, patterns are too regular and detailed to miss their artificiality.
The grainy pixels added a layer between you and the world inside the game, like you were actually experiencing a world from the other side of a magic portal or deep-space satellite connection. It just feels wrong to be able to clearly see that every demon is identical, every sword in hand, every battle-scarred veteran.
My mind knows what details SHOULD be there. Revealing that they’re missing feels like taking away something the artists never actually depicted.
THIS, so much this. I remember when I first started diving into Playstations Exclusives, and really wanting to try out the Uncharted exclusives, known for their boundary pushing graphics. If you go off a beaten path, or look beyond were the developers wanted you to look, usually strait ahead, you'd notice a lot of low poly assets used to to achieve the higher poly stuff in between. You also notice repeat NPC faces, and models like I did in Alan Wake II, arguably the best looking game that uses a realistic style ever made.
Exactly, never heard someone say sonic is unrealistic. But definetly heard someone say CoD, Cs:go and assasins creed are unrealistic because of one issue in graphics/gameplay/game design
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
[Brian Eno]
Extremely well put. Thank you
That statement seems pretty true! Many games from 2005-2010 or so have option to add film grain. L4D and FEAR 2 came to mind as I have played both games (though it wasn't an option in FEAR 2, just permanent film grain).
Vaporwave is literally a genre built on this idea alone. "The slow cancellation of the future", as Mark Fissher put it. Hauntology
I once heard somebody say, "the limitations from the past are the nostalgia of the future"
What the fuck is CD distortion? You mean the distortion of an entirely digital format that has literally no distortion? Much less jittery digital video vs analog.
this felt like it had the energy and impact of a 30-90 minute video essay. how the hell was it only five minutes long? how’d you say so much with so little? genuinely in love with this video.
for this one, I wanted to try to approach video editing with the same mindset I have when I'm writing a song. I think that combined with a very introspective topic to create a flow that resonated with a lot of ppl.
I don't suspect I'll replicate that impact any time soon :P
Praise be to this video in packing so much analysis, thought, and introspection in less than 5 minutes. This is one of those quality CZcams videos that remain evergreen after many years because of how gorgeous it is in all aspects of the word
This video is only 5 minutes long because it doesn't repeat the same points 5 to 18 times in order to stretch it to 30-90 minutes. 😏
I am seriously nostalgic for 90s and early 2000s gaming. It's a lost era and culture will never be the same... Half life 1 was mind blowing when first released, the huge advances in storytelling and environment building - even AI - was incredible. I was obsessed with it and there were many other gems in this time period. It's hard to overstate how amazing this golden age of gaming was.
Sounds good
GTA sa was the best early 2000s game. It was the ultimate treasure for every kis.
In 40 years people will be praising the 2020 as being the best period for gaming ever, people who have nostalgia bias can’t realize that this is just their brain tricking them, gaming was not better back then.
Yes it absolutely was. You're delusional if you think that it wasn't better.
*games actually got finished and released as a full package
*no microtransactions, no DLC's no part s of the game missing
*games that had actual story and love put into them instead of just another cash grab release of the same thing yeah after year, ie. Call of Duty, Assassins Creed, Animal Crossing etc.
*game developers actually optimized games and not just released the title and trusted that every gamer has the latest and greatest pc ot make up for the lack of optimisation
You can say it is all nostalgia, or you can look at the game industry today with a critical view and realize what a dumpsterfire it is, with money being the sole focus and 99% of the releases cater towards whales who will open their wallet at every opportunity. And it is a damn good thing if they even release their game after it was finished, to begin with...
@@ni9274 I think your comment is not true about gaming. It's more about people's tastes, and the differences between generations. But it haa literally nothing to do with gaming per se.
As a game developer, I felt those last few lines deep in me.
The curtain is removed, the man behind it sitting uncomfortably in his chair, and I no longer have that amazement at every new advancement. Because I've worked on it. Because I know how it functions under the hood.
I miss my youth.
Actually you can embrace both. Like play god of war, You know every technique of its making. But yet you will focus on game itself rather than tinker cuz it’s so good.
Another example is minecraft, Even if you can mod minecraft. You can still play game itself and wonder about redstones, hidden lands.
You can achieve this my dividing your focus in state. When you play, Only admire the game itself by playing it.
When you work, Then when you take inspirations and research. Then you admire by learning techniques behind making it.
this is true for every hobby ive pursued intensely. cars, coffee, guitars, so on and so forth. the better i understand how it works, the less magical it feels, and my excitement feels hampered because i know the exact parameters and limitations set in place. from something so mysterious and interesting that i could never get enough of it to something... normal. in fact it makes me irritated sometimes when people talk about the things i know deeply about because i can recognize all their errors and lack of knowledge(that they are blurting out with full confidence)
You can embrace your youth through God of War. I remember back in my day, fighting children who pretended to be demigods then consuming their flesh to become stronger. Shame God of War doesn't have that last part tho, spoiler alert.
This reminds me of this horror indie game of my youth called "Imscared a Pixelated Nightmare" which is like a "Doki Doki Literature Panic" ante litteram in the sense that is uses simple programming tricks to pull off its scares.
I was fascinated by that "magic" back then, but now, as a software engineer with a job, I know all those tricks and the scare factor is gone.
Sometimes such things make me sad, but I also love knowledge and my job, so I guess it's a tradeoff.
I know how it all works, and I appreciate how it was made more so now
I think for me personally, a lot of this becomes a sense of Fear I Already Missed Out. That because I’m not enjoying a game when it was popular during its initial day in the sun, I’m receiving a stilted and unauthentic experience, despite the fact I might’ve been too young for it or not even born when the game came out. Tough stuff
yeah this hits me a lot, especially with game mechanics.
00s jank is par for the course in the 00s, but hard to overlook 2 decades later...
games are typically more "jank" now than they were then because they're being made by random outsourced office workers. a lot of what you probably view as quality of life is also restrictive, but you don't see that out of casualness.@@GSTChannelVEVO
It's that absolute wonder I felt as a child playing certain games, and now being an adult and longing to play all the games I missed out with that same pure set of eyes.
That's a bad way to look at it. A lot of people wish they could experience their favorite game the first time again and envy those who do. Like watching a classic movie the first time long after it came out, doesn't lessen the experience.
While this facet of retro gaming exists, it also comes with boons.
I recently completed automodelista on the original Xbox after playing it for the first time. Such an incredible experience! One of the best racers I've ever played. I later found out that the game was hit with middling reviews and generally unfavored at its time of release. How we digest media is so largely influenced by how the public and culture perceive it. Sometimes, for really popular things, it can entirely get in the way of having a personal relationship with a game. I hate being told how I should feel about something.
Retro games don't demand that you play them soon to avoid getting spoiled, to be caught up with what's new, or to make sure you don't miss out on the current online community.
It's just you, and the game. You can take it at your own pace, and for games you've never played before, they once again have a clean slate. They can present themselves as only what they are, and not what they should be.
I think this video explains what I love about playing a game series in chronological order. [EDIT: "Release order" is the better term.] You can't avoid looking at each game from your modern eyes, but you can see what changes and evolves - or regresses - from game to game and sort of extrapolate how people would have felt about it at the time.
Parallel to this, I think that a high-effort game can overcome any technical shortcomings. Half-Life 1 may not be "realistic" by modern standards, but you can still feel all the *effort* that went into making it realistic - and immersive - in 1998, and that still feels impressive today.
100% agree chronological order is great for this reason!
but also: Half-Life 1 is an interesting case because, at least in my view, the graphical "shortcomings" feel like an stylistic choice now.
True - if a game looking exactly like HL1 came out today, that would definitely be a stylistic choice. But I think the game also has a style that's more than just "realism" - because even realistic games have their own aesthetic. That additional artistic vision shines through as brightly in 2023 as it ever has.
But that still leaves open a familiar question - how much of people fawning over Half-Life back in the day was because it was cutting-edge, and how much was because it was just a good-looking game, independent of technical specifications? I guess we can never know for sure - and that's the point of the video!
Hl1 still feels real even if it doesn't look it. You'd be amazed just how much a well made environment can make you feel like you're really there.
@@blast_brothers592 If I made a game in the style of HL1, the only thing that i'd change abut the style is to make the pixel count per texture consistent and also disable texture filtering.
Believe me, most modern fps games dont even come close to interactivity as Half-Life 1. They care more about crap like realistic animation rather than seamless storytelling.
I do sometimes wonder how younger people see older games. Like obviously they know they were the best graphics of the time and it must have been amazing to kids at the time, but that's often accompanied by sentiment of how silly it is that they praised it as so realistic. Like you said, obviously no one was confusing screenshots of a game in 1996 to a photo, but what people cared about was emersion and clarity. Going from Atari to NES, you could actually tell what a sprite was trying to represent instead of a symbolic representation. From NES to SNES, you can now finally have bigger sprites, and you're amazed at being able to have the previously imagined details (usually given by the character art in the manual) fairly accurately represented. And then from sprite to 3d, now we no longer had to imagine how these characters look in a more realisticly dimensioned environment (though 3d graphics did take a back seat to the more accurate character design representation for a long time). It didn't just mean better graphics, it meant better gameplay, and I don't just mean from more memory to program more features, but better representation informing what was happening on screen meant more fidelity, faster comprehension of more complex representation meant faster gameplay that a player could actually pick up on. Think Street Fighter vs Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter couldn't be much more than what it was because the graphics couldn't represent more than that, while Street Fighter 2 could have hundreds of move sets uniquely represented thus adding more fidelity to the gameplay. This is what graphics were to the 90s kid. It meant more gameplay, more complexity, not necessarily more realism for the sake of being wowed by the graphics. In fact, the 16 bit era had so many games that suffered for trying to have the best graphics, and no one cared for them, even those who cared about graphics. Anyway, thanks for a small insight on how a younger person might regard older games.
I grew up with half life 1 in my later teenage years. Almost 20 now, I can tell you I didn't worry about graphics at all. I fell in love with the mood, the characters and the setting. It was hella fun.
as a 23-year-old, i often wonder if one day ten years from now, we'll look back on today's "stunning" and "ultrarealistic" games like half-life alyx and think "yeah it still looks good, but you can really see the age" or if current-day graphics really are photorealistic, with their raytracing and what not, and we're only going to see minute and subtle improvements from here on out.
Best I can really offer is playing Metroid Prime Remastered for the first time. The original release was one of the most influential games of my early childhood. I played it before I even knew how to read and I only picked it out at the store because I recognized the "guy" on the box from Smash Bros 64. Even at 5 years old or so, Prime was instantly unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was far more serious, atmospheric, and terrifying than anything I had ever played and I just couldn't take my eyes off it. I was too young at the time to really comprehend the progression of technology and WHY the Gamecube looked better than the N64. It just did. But I knew this was something real special.
Fast forward my entire lifetime and Prime Remastered pops up in a Nintendo Direct. To my astonishment, it's not just a 1080p Gamecube game running on Switch. I buy it immediately and dive right back in and my god. I've often heard of people describing something looking "not as it was, but as you first saw it" and though I've experienced that before, it was never as potently as with Prime Remastered.
I was firmly convinced Prime looked fantastic for its age throughout most of my life. Circa 2014, I would talk about how it had hardly aged a day visually since it first released and even into the very year the remaster released, I thought it still looked incredible on its own merit. It wasn't until I replayed it with an expertly applied new coat of paint, rediscovered all the little details in the environment now in greater fidelity than ever before, and looked back on the gamecube original that something changed. I abruptly felt like I'd gone from looking at a polished jewel that withstood the test of time to feeling the same I did when first laying eyes on Half Life 1 around 2012. Impressive for the time, but so clearly aged.
As someone born too late to experience the Half-Life series (I was born in 2004 so I didn't grow up on it), playing the games now are almost...surreal. Like, compared to some of the games I play now, I can tell the games are a bit dated, but there's still something about the atmosphere, the visuals, the gameplay, etc that's just so captivating.
I'm one of those young people (I grew up on generation 3 Pokemon), and I can say that I don't find it silly in the least that the games were praised so highly. I look back at things like Doom and Half-Life with fondness. Honestly, as an avid Pokemon fan, I would compare this to how we have watched the Pokemon graphics change from black and white 2D sprites to fully rendered 3D sprites with unique and detailed animations. From a small map to enormous open-world environments. From hardware limitations to... well, hardware limitations lol. There is a lot of criticism of the Pokemon series and its evolution, and critique of the bugs from an AAA studio is entirely valid, but when I first booted up Pokemon Scarlet and walked outside to see the enormity of it all, I was overwhelmed with excitement at the changes that improved graphics and creature AI were able to give us.
I don't know if it's the same, but I feel like our experiences truly aren't that different. That being said, maybe I'm just in a weird age bracket, and got to experience this change in a way people barely younger than me did not. The change from the DS to the Switch is not nearly as pronounced as the change from the Gameboy to the Switch, so I still see things like Pokemon Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet with the awe of a child seeing their imagination brought to life.
I have started to venture back in time with my gaming backlog; right now I'm enamored with DOOM, yesterday I was getting lost in the linear hallways of FEAR, and tomorrow I may be falling in love with SIREN or System Shock.
I have always had fun with janky experiences, but these don't feel janky-they just feel like different painters' styles that we get the wild opportunity to see in motion.
I fell in love with Portal 2 the same year I played Silent Hill, the same year I played the entire MGS series. You're limiting yourself if you keep chasing realism; and this feeling will only get harder to chase the high of-as games like this begin to take much longer to create.
Yeah, personally I'd say we reached "acceptable" realism somewhere between 2004 (Half Life 2) and 2007 (Crysis), everything since basically improved the details, but during that time we reached a level of detail that is "good enough"
I wouldn't mind getting a new game on that level of detail, as long as the game itself is good.
Metal gear 1 was sooo good. And 2 even better. Couldn't be improved anymore
System Shock recently had a remake btw
A huge aspect of how much a game's fidelity is advanced truly, is how interactable the world is in a believable way. Your walls may have 8k textures and your particles accurately simulate the aurora borealis any time you fire your 200 dollar weapon skin but when the play space amounts to a static unmoving room, the simplest thing like fruit stands in CS:S spraying a shower of fruit gibs when shot really stand out.
If only we could see HL3's Aurora Borealis, that would be great, 8k or not
THANK YOU! There is a trend now where games focus on ultra-realistic graphics, and you're left with a character that is walk-sliding against smooth invisible walls delimiting where you can walk, even if there are objects around the room. Something like Resident Evil 2 remake. A lot of the hyped Unreal Engine 5 games look that way, and it really is not that enticing to play until that graphical power can be focused on the character and the world reacting to each other in a realistic way.
@@coldtyrea coherent sandbox experience is vital. I think particularly of the Source engine and to some extent the Halo engine circa 3 were so deep and flexible compared to a lot of what we have today.
Luckily, at least in VR games developers realized how important the little interactions with the game world are.
I'd say it's because when in development, a game tester reaching out to an object on a table but having their hand pass through it is more likely to criticize it as jarring to the experience and also be taken more seriously, than if they were complaining that the interact button in a flat screen game didn't do anything.
It's time devs focused on physics instead of graphics
Never has the phrase, "you had to be there" been more apt for this video. Having lived and experienced this era and looking back I have fond memories of this period of my life. But also at the time, this was the pinnacle of gaming technology; whatever was considered photorealistic at the time was, in our eyes, photorealistic. Looking back it's clear that the graphics have aged but they hold a special place in our collective hearts.
Bingo. I remember when Unreal Tournament and Max Payne were really photorealistic, and it felt like that was the limit. Then we had early footage of Unreal 2 and the effects it had, and it was like another dimension. Each of these games would soon be overtaken, over and over.
First time I noticed this was with Tony Hawk Pro Skater on n64 for some reason playing as a kid my mind saw the game with so much more detail.
Coming back to the game a decade later after playing games a couple generations ahead I was shocked with how blocky and blurry those n64 really were...
it kinda sucks that I grew up in a time where "photorealistic" is Cyberpunk2077. it spoils the mind. these older games look awesome to me, but no where near photorealistic or graphically ground breaking. maybe if I fully immersed myself in a generation of games, and played loads of them, and then looked at these "amazing" games, I'd have something else to say. but to me, they're just "old games"
@@MG-mh8xp Kinda relatable, one of the first pc games I played was minecraft and I considered it photorealistic. It was beautiful until I saw games with better graphics.
@@mofik26 I still have an old PC and most new AAA games seem to have bad gameplay due to overfocus on graphics, also minecraft shaders still look great
I think part of the appeal of older games is something most people don't think about: understandability.
You can understand how these older games work much more easily than newer ones. You can look at Commander Keen and take a few guesses about how it might be doing things under the hood, possibly even enough to write an inferior version yourself. You can take a few vague guesses about how things in Half-Life 1 work. You look at the latest near-photorealistic stuff coming out now and you're just completely lost. It's so crazy-complicated, it might as well be magic. Clarke's Third Law in action.
I feel a similar sentiment towards CGI vs practical effects in film. Knowing or at least guessing how the explosions actually took place on set is far more riveting to me than always knowing that a computer added in the fire.
The magic is that with practical we are in awe that something actually took place irl. With cgi there is less awe and mystery, and more indifference.
@@unleashedbread6146 Fire is also hard to do in CGI. Or at least, hard to make it look right, so there's a lot more room for screwing it up than with practical effects.
I was fortunate enough to be a child of the 80s and 90s, so really it was one mind blow after another as technology advanced. That pace kept up until around 2015 or so, and now every game feels like a marginal improvement over the other. I still remember playing Sonic 1 with Genecyst, a DOS Genesis emulator and noticing the weird waterfalls. I proceeded to boot the game on my actual genesis on my crappy TV and it looked so good and blended. That was when I learned about the way old CRT's blended colors as a side effect of the signal quality, and how much richer that made games. In a sense, modern gamers who enjoy retro games don't even get to see them the way we did.
Surely someone can program an emulator to mimic that blending?
@@EdKolis Sure, there's a ton of CRT filters that will take a stab at the look and feel of old CRT televisions, but I've never found one that convincingly reproduces the actual effect, they mostly focus on the most superficial aspects of a CRT display like the curved picture tube, looking a bit blurry, or the scanlines.
@@sirflimflamI can just pull mine out from the closet
@@SLAYERxX420 That sigma energy
CRT Royale filter comes really close to a real CRT TV, but you need a 4K monitor/TV to actually use it
there’s a lot of videos and articles about it
I am glad that as far as Source 2 is concerned, Valve has followed the artistic consideration they learned in the 20 years since HL2’s focus on hyper realism. S2 takes a very painterly approach to colors and lighting, giving things an almost oil or pastel appearance with how things reflect and diffuse. It’s refreshing.
The style has less to do with the engine are more to do with art direction of the dev team.
Kind of like Dishonored, isn't it?
@@uberZanneth it feels like the engine was designed to best facilitate that kind of style
@@uberZannethI'd agree honestly, Half-Life Alyx wasn't so much painterly as Dota 2 and CS2 have been, and focus more on realistic bump mapping and light physics that make it more realistic than most games you'd find
I don't like it. I want to play a game not a 19th century postcard
This video really captures that feeling. "What if i could forget everything and experience it with fresh eyes again" not even from a graphical sense but gameplay too. Eg. Id love to be able to play portal again for the first time, that wonder of the amazing gameplay and story was something that can never be recaptured on a second playthrough.
Hello, I still did not play portal, not even once I launched it. Still have more old games to play. Funny eh?
Average outer wilds enjoyer
Same, bro. First time I played Portal 1 & 2 I wanted to replay it. Sadly I’ll never be able to do it ‘with fresh eyes’ I waited 3 years to play it again but it’s not the same.
not me with alzheimer playing it for the first time... every time
At least there’s so many old games to play for the first time! I just played Deus ex, super old but cool
I’ll never forget when I got a promotional vhs for donkey Kong country. The graphics were mind blowing to me. The video showed how they made the sprites with 3d models and I remember them showing this wireframe of Diddy Kong. This was the first time I saw how 3d was going to impact gaming, and it was on a 2d side scroller. I was so blown away by the graphics that when the game actually came out I spent hours just exploring the first level and just jumping around. I need to go and find that vhs.
I remember that VHS tape they sent out
I remember people going nuts over StarFox at the time and just thinking "this looks worse than literally anything else on the SNES"
This one? czcams.com/video/Rv_YCSbWP78/video.htmlfeature=shared
The cold, dank & grizzly feeling of Metal Gear Solid are what this video brings me back to. It’s about a time and a feeling and how these things can shape us as people. Nostalgia is a tough one for gamers.
I always got that Solid Snake onggggg. It's why I'm not allowed near schools. 😅
The more I play older 3D games, the more I struggle to find the words to appreciate them. I will say something like “I loved the visuals in Quake,” receive the reply “like in a retro way?” and… I don’t know what to say!
It’s not in a retro way, or in a “this must have been mind-blowing at the time” way. They were sincerely, authentically pretty to me, in 2023. People don’t have trouble appreciating impressionist or similarly nonrealistic paintings, why is it we struggle so much with older games visually?
I completely agree. That's how I feel with games. I still play old games the same way I watch old movies and they still look beautiful to me because even tho the hardware can't render as many assets it still looks beautiful in an authentic way not just a retro way.
Minecraft looks like its made in 2000, but hey its the most popular game ever.
Valheim is a recent game with low resolution textures that still looks good
This is very much just a you thing. People who can articulate themselves well don’t have this problem.
i wouldn’t say that people don’t have trouble appreciating nonrealistic paintings, there’s plenty of numbskulls who say that it’s “ruining art” or whatever. i don’t think they’re the majority, though. nor are the people who won’t play any game that doesn’t have 8k 120fps ray tracing ultra hd textures. they’re just the loudest.
To sum up your point: we don't really experience things how they are, but through our lives and our context. Our experience with a game can be shaped by all sorts of things, ranging from the time period the game was created in (older games likely having aging technology, game design, etc.), to other games we have played (which broaden our perspective and shift our standard as to what we consider a good game.)
I'm 31 now and started working with Design when i was 17. Today i feel like i've lost the capacity of looking at pretty much ANYTHING and not looking at it from a Designers perspective first. I learned UX, UI, how to code as well thru all the years.. The more i learn how things are built the more i notice much more than i should all the time. Even if i'm not working or actually wanting to think about design.. i just look at things and.. everything has a design and purpose, all things around us, it's like once you're looked enough into the matrix you can't unsee it.
I've being also playing games since i was 4 years old.. the feeling with games exist as well. Good video.
I’m the same with sound as a sound engineer. Meditation is the way out
I feel the same way, i see design in every component a game is made of. I prefer to think of it as a blessing and not a curse, but i do sometimes wish to return to this ignorant childlike state where i can see the bigger picture instead. Still i wouldn't trade it for the wisdom (as useless as this wisdom is, since i don't actually work in the computer game industry).
@@themoonbootman How so? Could you elaborate on that? Does meditation alter your state of mind enough to be able to see it in a different light?
@@wolfexer8250 for me personally, I often end up obsessing over little details in audio, trying to perfect it. Meditating helps me to clear my mind a bit and regulate my nervous system, as it usually tends to be some form of anxiety or lack of control that leads to me being so stressed over the little things. I think when things are getting overwhelming in life, it’s easy to get stuck in your head and focus on stuff you already understand, rather than allowing things to just ‘be’ and experience them. Just my thoughts, hope that helps!
@@wolfexer8250 Meditation is about controlling your thoughts and only resonating with what matters. Makes it easier to filter out things if you do long enough searching for a purpose like that. I'm autistic and the way my brain works and how and why i think about things around me makes it hard for me to have success with meditation per example. Even if i can do it, if i'm not doing it's analysis mode all the time.
Born in the early 80’s…and to respond to your curiosity, the PS1 sounded amazing. The boot up sound especially triggers some response deep inside of me, even today. The SNES, Gameboy original, and PS1 were the most significant systems of my youth. PC titles were great too… Thanks for making this!
were in the uncanny valley for sure… games nowadays dont even impress me because it no longer feels like im looking at a simulated world inside a computer, it just feels like im watching a slightly fucked up interactive video… theres a really simple "physicality" to pixels and polygons but we put so much effort into concealing them through filtering, anti aliasing, lens effects, etc… dunno if this makes sense
yeah that makes sense! there's a beauty to things that exaggerate reality instead of trying to capture it.
I think I get it. All that concealing and filtering can make it hard for me to comprehend what I'm looking at.
Have you seen the character models in the new CoD games? It's crazy how close they are to reality.
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w I genuinely dislike a lot of modern rendering techniques, items/objects get lost in the noise quite often.
I found my performance in games to be much better with older graphic styles simply because I'm not overwhelmed or distracted.
Bloom, film grain, chromatic aberration, motion blur. The four horseman of poor video rendering.
@@PanoptesDreamsI was thinking how good the Activision engines are.. I ordered a yoghurt..
This reminds me of one of my most cherished gaming memories as a child when I saw the game Riven and for a long time was totally convinced that the pictures were just real photographs. Looking back on it now there's so many obvious tells of it being CG, but I really was laying in bed wondering how they could have possibly built those massive structures and contraptions to take photos of.
I'm putting some DnB on and watching some guy click thru Riven on my second monitor now lol. I was born in 1997, it's year of release, and while the gameplay is not exciting to me, everything in that game looks so amazing!
I still remember thinking MYST was photoreal. And then when Riven came out.... no words. Hell I remember being blown away that they managed to map the real actor's faces to the characters in Goldeneye. Every generation of gaming has that sense of awe. I grew up in the 80's though, so I have a bit of perspective I guess.
I just looked it up, seems interesting
I looked it up, and assumed it was from like 2005 from the pictures. Nope! 1997!
There's a sequel to Myst?? Looking forward to it, I've been playing Myst for 30 years now, I'm sure I'll beat it in just a few more years.
Dude. This literally made my eyes water a little bit. This was beautiful. God I love gaming.
Came here to pre much say the same thing 😊
Did you get goose bumps too⁉
Gaming is temporary. Yo mom is eternal.
I remember my mom telling me she was so scared of the Godzilla movies when she was a kid, because they looked so realistic. I think it might just be a thing when you are growing up with a new form of media and watching it get better. Similar to how people felt about the first Star Wars movie.
Like the audience running away from the oncoming train in the first picture show
Godzilla still ain't NEARLY as big as yo mom so idk why tf she's scared of him.
The first Godzilla (without the added American crap) was actually pretty well done, very atmospheric. If that's the movie you're mom is thinking about, I agree with her.
I was born in 1974. I grew up with personal computers and video games. A part of this context and perspective is the amount of experiences you have. I was excited to see Pac Man. Asteroids. Donkey Kong. But I think in terms of large leaps. The next time I was as impressed in the same way was probably After Burner II with the hydraulic cabinet. More recently, only VR has carried similar “wow this is new and neat” in terms of that emotional sensation, with more realism just making me go “meh”.
Yeah I agree (born in 78). Lots of excitement in those early days. Even stuff like King’s Quest IV going from day to night as you played seemed really immersive.
VR on the original Quest felt like that. The first time I had a “flashback” in Red Matter was quite an experience. Though I’m not sure why it seems hard to stick with using it long-term. Maybe the smaller “sweet spot” on Quest 2 soured things a little.
Most recently, AI things have felt like this a little. Getting tutoring from GPT-4 and it truly feeling interactive in a way that googling or watching a video isn’t. Or back when MidJourney was at v3 and the new beta before v4 came out and it was such a huge leap.
I have mixed feelings and even fears on some of that, but the advancement is still incredible.
Interesting though you have to consider that you've probably "kept up" with games to some degree my mother born in 78 but no really much games apart from maybe Pac Man, was at some point randomly blown away by the realism of the rain in a video game I played in 2015. So I imagine if you aren't much of a gamer and you go from Pac Man then of course seeing your kids play something like The Wii and Browser games or The Sims and Tycoon games.
To suddenly a games with what feel like highly realistic rain that's enough to stump you and make you go "wow, that looks pretty"
YOOOOO ALEXANDER BRANDON IN THE COMMENTS
Don't forget M.A.C.H. 3, a laserdisc game. I poured quarters into that one.
Snap. I'll be 50 next year too. I miss the feeling of stepping into a good arcade. I used to go to the Trocedero in London as it had all the latest games in expensive cabinets. Like X-Men on a massive screen, Sega Rally in a car that had real feedback in the steering wheel as well as the seat. I spent so much money in there
I have seen the evolution of early 8-bit games till today and many times I have told myself "wow, how much more can graphics evolve?", and I always get surprised when they do.
It's nice going back and experiencing different stages of the evolution of games and witnessing that more realistic graphics not necessarily mean better or more fun.
I really love how you closed out the video, the feeling really resonated with me. Growing up and spending my whole life trying to peek behind the curtain and understand how everything works, I feel that I lost the ability to see things for their novelty, and it almost seems a bit empty to not be able to see things from a fresh perspective anymore.
I don't know why but this video was beautiful. It gave me the time to reflect about the things I've been experiencing since I have memory. You won me with this :)
The first game I ever played where I was legitimately blown away by the graphics was the Point du Hoc mission in Call of Duty 2. The detail on the soldier's faces, especially the sergeant who picks you up. You can see clear expression on his face, his stubble, a small cut from the battle. I thought "these look like real people, I can't believe they can do that!".
Call of Duty 2 was one of the first games that truly blew me away with its graphics. Xbox 360 was new at the time, I was in 6th or 7th grade, and was spellbound by the beauty and realism of games like COD2, Oblivion, and Halo 2 (not a 360 game, but still!). Nowadays all three look very dated, but that doesn't invalidate how I felt about them at the time.
The faces are still better, than in starfield! Truly fantastic!
I dont think I considered 'graphics' until the first Halo game....
Sure, games got better looking but I never chose to play Mario 3 over Dig Dug because Dig Dug looked old. Dig Dug was fun... so when I was in the mood thats what I played. Same with Mario 3. I never chose to play Baldur's Gate over Might and Magic 7 due to graphics... they were fun and when I got the itch for different reasons I chose to play one over the other.
But for some reason when Halo CE came out, the graphics mattered to me.
I didn't play this kind of stuff so the equivalent thing to that is probably playing mario kart 8 on the wii U. I didn't understand how a game could look any better. The thing is, even the new mario kart 8 deluxe stages still don't look as good
I was a kid in the 90s and grew up with a lot of this stuff. It's just all right, just as exciting when new stuff you like is released this very day. Perhaps less because we are not kids anymore. Don't worry much about this weirdly twisted FOMO and learn to enjoy the present day.
Indeed, while some older games might be missing some quality of life innovations that were developed after that game was made, usually the good ones still hold up very well. Games like Chrono Trigger or Majora's Mask feel right out home next to modern retro games. If you play an old game and it feels like jank, it probably felt like jank back then, too. And with the power of modding, it is even possible to patch QoL improvements into older games, such as playing the original DOOM with modern mouse + WASD controls.
@@Greywander87I think when we were younger, in many ways, jank felt like a feature rather than a bug because we didn't have a solid expectation or conceptualization of what was optimal, and we weren't as acutely aware of the limitations of the media.
@@autoteleology I think another part is that many of us only had a few games growing up and only time we could look forward to getting a new game was on birthdays or Christmas. As such, we had to make do with what we had, no matter how jank it was. As adults, we have a lot more demands on our free time, so we're not as patient with games, and we can also just buy new games whenever we feel like it (Steam sales help a lot). Our tolerance for jank is much lower and games have a limited amount of time to impress us before we simply move on to the next game.
@@Greywander87 We're honestly spoiled for choice
@@autoteleology True. 20 years ago, I don't think people were saying, "I bought so many games I haven't even played yet. They are just sitting on my shelf, while I keep playing the same games I've already played."
Now it seems common to just have a ton of games you've never even downloaded, nor will you ever download. Especially with some free games on things like Epic Games Store.
I played the 1991 Sonic game on the Wii as a kid. I’ve never played any other Sonic game, and have no idea what a spin dash is lol. So when you brought the game up, I got excited and thought about how much I loved playing it, assuming you’d feel the exact same way. I even played it again a few years ago, and the music randomly gets stuck in my head sometimes. It’s interesting how different experiences can be due to the knowledge you possess.
My first Zelda game was Zelda 2. The first time I saw the original, I thought, what the heck is this? The perspective is all screwy!
Did you beat it as a kid? As a kid it is both a game that is easy to get lost in and a game being very hard to beat.
the coastal sound of waves and wind in half life will forever be my favourite moment in video games especially now that you can reply the game in vr. such good vibe
And now we can appreciate the fact that realistic is not always better.
Yup
For example Dishonored one has one of my favorite art styles in gaming and its aged phenomenally
but a fact is that realism and emotions are intertwined, you do not have the same strong emotions to a PS1 pixelated low poly character as you do a real person. This is why realism will reign supreme.
I mean... If the real person is a stranger or someone we do not care about in the slightest, probably not.@@Danuxsy I still feel more strongly about ED-E dying in Fallout New Vegas, than some real people. Realism does not "reign supreme". This is a fictitious medium, after all.
🤝
half life 2 still is one of the best looking games of all time, i don't care what anyone says, very few games (even modern games) feel as grounded and solid as half life 2 does. good art direction, attention to detail, powerful technology and a mastery of how physical light interacts with the world let valve make a photorealistic game long before the concepts of PBR, raytracing or any of the other modern rendering techniques we have (and squander by blowing out the colors in a final color adjustment post processing layer that makes the entire game blue or something)
Well, the concepts were definitely there, part of what makes HL2 look so good is lots of baked-in global illlumination calculated when the maps are finalized.
It oozes atmosphere, much like the original STALKER did. Sound FX play a major part in this - even with lacklustre graphics, the combined whole is greater than the sum of its parts for sure.
@@disobey81 "lacklustre graphics" where the hell did you get that from?
Half-Life 2 did use ray tracing though, via baked lighting. I think it was one of the first games that did so, and the main reason it looked so impressive back then. Contemporary reviewers who talked about "high resolution textures" missed the main reason why it looked so good, they were just rationalizing their positive impressions.
@@cube2fox I'm pretty sure half life 1 also used that
At some point, some games just looked close to undistinguishable from movies to me. But I don't know if it was because I was young or because it was just how I perceived things.
This just goes to show that even if you archive everything humanly possible, some information about the in-the-moment experience always gets lost regardless. We can share those experiences, of course, but it's not the same. It's fascinating to think about.
I once saw a philosophy film talk about how intimacy with a person is basically just noticing that your entire life is utter solitude of the mind, and you've temporarily weakened that barrier through a shared experience, whether that be sex or a very personal conversation or whatever. Taking what you've said a step beyond, its not even just the fact that you can't record the feeling of experience, each person has a different perspective to the exact same stimuli. It represents the source of all human conflict but also all art. If we could experience the world through another's eyes, the entirety of society would have developed differently
I am actually having brief moments of "is that CG or not?" and as the machines make fewer mistakes it's going to get harder.
I'm not sure how I can express what it was like to see Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time, but it sure looked impressive. What is even harder to express to those who weren't there, is how a simple game like Jet Set Willy once represented the cutting edge of what was possible, and how magical it seemed. Or what it was like to see Xevious for the first time. I still maintain a connection to those memories, but I guess they will die with us. The 20th century sure was a wild time for gaming.
Damn, I avoided this video for days on my recommended because of the title.. No duh, right? The man's right and this video is amazing!
For me Goldsrc and games like Everquest is the sweet spot of graphics fidelity. The limitations force the artist to interpret the world in an impressionistic way. A beautiful recent example is Valheim.
You have good taste
You have good taste
i wish stylised video-games were the norm again. i can't stand the sheer amount of the same hyper-realistic graphics style we see every year at e3 etc
My personal sweet spot is Stalker Clear Sky exactly.
Although I get your point, lighting is the exception. Modern lighting and lighting advancements is a good thing in general.
This is why I also agree that valheim is an excellent example, The polygons object shaders and textures are limited to a retro level, but it has modern gorgeous lighting
Remember when Luclin came out and the models turned to dog shit?
One of my friends had never heard the phrase “The cake is a lie” I got him to play the original Portal 1. For a moment, I got to see what that game would have been like if you didn’t see the twist coming. It was beautiful
Yo mom stole the cake ong fr!!!!! 🗿 🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿
Man i watched this at midnight in my living room with the lights off and i can say this is the most atmospheric CZcams video I’ve ever seen thank you
Wait wtf i just did that too
I loved this! Evoked strange pangs of nostalgia in just a few moments. Super well done!
Man, I really like the narrative. It sounded like a movie. "I love looking behind curtains. But in so doing I lose the ability to see the world with fresh eyes. And I can't help but wonder: what does that world look like? But all I can do is, wonder." Goosebumps.
Great video :)
I feel like this with music a lot of the time. I went to music school in university and, while I'm no virtuosic musician, now when I hear music, I hear EQ filters, reverbs, and sidechains. I think I can appreciate music on a deeper level with a better understanding, but music isn't magic anymore and I do kinda miss that.
I've mixed feelings here! all of my music knowledge has let me appreciate music on its own terms, but there's a reason that i go bonkers over "weird" music. autechre and blawan and SDEM and such. or avant prog
emotions mathematically derived from sounds? still magic to me!
Once you learn how it works. You can easily recognize how it was made.
@@GSTChannelVEVO autechre and blawan appreciation
i'am a musician too but in my case it hasn't changed my listening of music for the worse, instead, i think i like music even more.
I often think of this and all I can say is that I'm grateful because I watch the gaming industry grow through my childhood and I'm still impress with it. Games for me are the best art expression ever invented.
I turned 30 the year before Covid-19 sent us into lockdown. I'm 34, now, nearly halfway to 40. Lately, I've been thinking more and more about life and how it feels as it progresses towards its end. I've been wondering... is this what the rest of life is going to be? Thinking about the end? Seeing everything through the prism of endings?
I wonder how I would have felt about this video if I had watched it in my 20s.
I'm 33. It seems you became aware of the clock. You can't see the clock but you become increasingly aware that it's ticking in the abyss. So you stare into it hoping to catch a glimpse. Is it 5 minutes left?, a day?, 50 years?. The prisim of endings indeed.
Yes. The clock ticks louder and louder in the back of your head.
I remember playing games on my DS, and then playing games on the Wii and seeing how much better it looked without the understanding and vocabulary to explain why.
I didn’t know that the characters were made out of triangles, but I knew that on the DS they looked ‘chunky’.
the waterfall thing explained so much! It's interesting to know how a lot of old games abuse the hardware to create their effects, but as technology progresses and they become more dated, the effect stops working. Like how old pixel art games abused scanlines to make their images look much higher quality, while emulators often don't compensate for this. In this case, the screen of the TV made the waterfall shimmer, but obviously emulators can't mimic this easily.
Sometimes I really wish I could temporarily block some of my memories just to experience things for the first time again. Especially great stories, ya know, books, movies, games that had an incredible impact on me the first time, but become very much "been there, done that" on replay.
I've finished disco elysium like a 2 weeks ago and I already can feel it. It was experience, something way more than just a game
For me that game is Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Every once in a while, I come across videos like yours where I realize that I'm blessed to be able to dissociate. I can enjoy graphics and technology for what it was, and what it is today; the added knowledge doesn't change how I play, and I'm grateful for that because my thoughts will always remain pure.
I have a story that somewhat relates to this, when I was a little kid I played a lot of retro games because I didnt really have access to the newer consoles at the time. Most of my gaming experience then were games that were decades older than I. So I grew used to the look and feel of retro games, to the point where it became normal and default to me. When I got my hands on a psp when I was in middle school and played NBA '06 for the first time I couldnt help but be in awe of the realism the of game's graphics. But that was NBA '06, and when I first played it, it had already been out for a whole decade. The only other time I can think of something like this happening was the way the dungeon wall's looked in A Link to the Past and how they were so much more detailed than Zelda 1 on NES which I had already put hundreds of hours into. Ive been chasing this experience ever since, being in awe of the graphics of games not in the context of looking back at how good they looked at the time, but how they looked to me in the moment.
The medium of things is quite important I feel like. I got into 35mm photography about a year ago, and now I develop and scan the pictures myself. The graininess, weird colours, distortion of far away objects into clumps of blurry microscopic crystals dotted with dust particles and development artifacts seem so nostalgic to me. The pictures look like they're from another world, people's expressions and poses seem somehow better captured, the pictures look like ones my parents would have taken before I was born.
But when I show my parents they think they just look like normal pictures, no nostalgia or anything.
I know this is only tangentially related to the video, apologies for being one of those prerentious analogue types
no this is 100% related! you get what I'm saying! I just focused a little too hard on computer graphics :P
@@GSTChannelVEVO Aw thanks :)
I guess it's kind of like the direct opposite of (what I think) you were talking about - what a new thing (like a game) seemed like to people at the time. With photographs people, at the time thought nothing of it, that was just how the world looked, it's only in retrospect that we see the intricacies of things.
Nice
this is one of the best videos i’ve seen in a long time. it’s the kind of stuff i aspire to make.
I remember when my brother brought the first Alone in the Dark home and being able to see a 3D world blew my mind.
I vividly remember how I sat at a friend's house with my brother and, since he was already 18 and I was 11, they wanted to play this new game: Mafia. I only caught a glimpse of it, but man, my jaw actually dropped when I saw the cars, the building textures and style. It's a fond memory.
For me it was GTA4. One of the first games on PS3 that was a huge upgrade graphically from PS2. It wasn't just the graphics, but the sounds, fog/smog and physics of Liberty City, it looked and felt like a real place (still feels more alive than GTA5 in some ways too) the gameplay really immersed me though, Niko moved like a real person, cars felt heavy and awkward to manoeuvre at first, like driving a real car for the first time it was scary to drive without crashing, which resulted in Niko flying out the windshield. Driving at full speed was honestly thrilling AF because of that. GTA4 was soo good, many see GTA5 as a downgrade (at least in atmosphere and physics)
Seeing the summon animation in Final Fantasy 7 for the first was that experience for me.
@@vladik87 oh yeha, FF10 was one of my earliest memories on the ps2... the startup of the console and then the first cinematic was just pure wow. Back then, every FF release was a huge global event in the gaming community and gaming magazines had the best screenshots and Infos. Good times!
I remember having my brain melted by Grand Tursimo 3 when it came out.
The music in the original Mafia is what I remember most, and it still holds up well. Of course, the soundtrack was a retro recollection of period pieces by Django Reinhardt and The Mills Brothers very few people had heard before. The game itself was pretty solid (aside from some rough edges around a certain forced car race) and it had a sharp narrative and solid voice acting to boot. The original Mafia really did atmosphere well.
It had middling success commercially, among a sea of developers trying to develop open world games. Before long most forgot about it. Then a bunch of suits pulled it out of a shallow grave and back into the 2020s limelight with a fresh coat of paint. What's old can be new again, and then old again, and then new again.
I still remember pulling up HL2 lost coast for the first time, to my young mind, even 5 years after the release of HL2, I still thought that lost coast looked astounding. The old man on the pier felt so life-life, and the church's lighting was awe inspiring, absolutely beautiful. I tried pulling it up a couple years back just to take a peek at that church again and listen to the dev dialogue, but I just couldn't see it the same. The once radiant glow of the stained glass was now simple and flat, the smooth animations of the past were now stiff and unnatural. Not to shit on lost coast, because I still love it, but it reminds me of losing a bit of that sense of childhood wonder.
it still looks good stop tweaking, shit on the hdr it introduced instead
holy FUCKING SHIT IT'S NIKO FROM ONESHOT!!!!11!!
wow... this video is like one of the best ones I've seen this whole year, really, I find this so relaxing and makes me think alot, thanks for making this
Born '98, much later past the era of early videogames, but one of my favorite games growing up was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. MAN that game will always hold a dear place in my heart, and if it ever got a remaster, I'd fork up so much for it!
Honestly I often wonder if we're reached the point of saturation for this.
If you show me a still from a PS4 game and one from a PS5 game taken at the same resolution, chances are I'd hardly be able to tell the difference.
Sure, looking REALLY carefully will reveal a number of differences, but I can't imagine it mattering all that much.
I wonder if the technology will pivot to ensuring this same level of visuals alongside better and better performance now, higher resolution and framerate, but I can't imagine the underlying models, textures, shaders and effects becoming even more intricate and sophisticated in a way that will truly shock the general person that doesn't know the details.
Agreed! If not saturation, we've probably hit a point of markedly diminishing returns. Art direction always trumps mere realism, and doing more with less is almost always a good choice in the economy of development.
"shock the person that doesn't know the details"
that's kind of what I'm getting at, yeah.
there's still really cool rendering tech being developed but I feel like you need a PHD to understand why it's mindblowing now.
or to rephrase: ppl in the past seemed to be more familiar with the vocabulary of growing tech than the ppl today, since the growing tech today is so much more niche. this affects how impressed ppl are with each new development.
One somewhat large difference there is the PS5 can do ray-tracing. This helps the game world look a bit less... I dunno, "flat".
A while ago advances in graphics meant they could do more interesting things with gameplay or storytelling. We sorta hit a point where those advances are real slow. You could probably get a lot of modern games to run on an xbox 360 if you made them for it. I look at the file size of modern games and think it's just such a waste, games are regularly going over 100GB that's more storage than most xbox360s had (I think the later models had upto 120GB). All the increase in power is just letting game studios be lazy. In the 16bit sonic games they use different specialized compression formats for the art and mappings to make it as efficient as possible. Now some games don't even bother compressing their art.
I've also yet to see a AAA game with raytraced lighting have it be more than a gimmick.
@@childish4487there's quake 2 rtx, sure, you could still very much play it without, just as you could play any game with lower detail if you wanted, but it looks so great compared to the original
I just watched the first two minutes and was genuinely shocked to realise I was nearly halfway through the video, and that two minutes had already gone by. You just read out game review quotes for a solid two minutes and it was incredibly engaging and purposeful. You shouldn't be able to get away with that. Instant sub. Wow. I will now finish the video.
Is this what the world has came to in 2023? People think it is incredible for a mere two minutes to pass without their attention drifting off? My god.
Lol
@@rtmclean484 quite the opossite, op seems very concious of their time. Is the opossitte of attention drifting ogg
I love your style! Just feels as getting a look into ur thoughts, thank you!
I didn't agree with the title at all upon clicking, but I was very interested in such a fascinating perspective and your video does not disappoint. Very well put
Born in 1989 and I played some of these games or saw people playing them. Every graphical step up used to be groundbreaking to me when growing up. Now I work in video game development and even major improvements over years seem incremental in comparison.
That's because you saw graphical improvements over 5 year gaps instead of 5 month gaps like you do now.
When you pay attention the change feels more gradual.
I look back on Heavy Rain and how at the time it was "like playing a movie" and it's pretty funny.
Even some modern "hyper realistic" games show much room for improvement.
But stylized games seem to hold up better graphically.
Personally I think there's a lot of room for improvements in physics.
You look at like Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and how you can take pretty much anything out of your inventory and throw it on the floor, many of which have interesting physical interactions, and it's so much more immersive than all of the open world games where items only exist in your inventory.
Well, a lot of the time, the more advancements that are made, the longer it can take to make more advancements, and the harder it can be to make advancements. That's why I have always wondered how advanced graphics would be today if we had the graphics that we have now back in the 90s or 80s.
@@kamikeserpentail3778 Fair enough, but I also think that hardware evolve constantly and are better used to their advantages. There are no major shifts with new hardware coming out like there used to when I was young. Going from N64 games to an Xbox with Halo CE and Silent Hill 2 was a major change whereas nowadays, the last games put out on a platform are available on the next and often look just as good as the first games on a new console.
Graphics are becoming less important, as you said. Game mechanics and how well the game performs is what's taking priority.
@@fredbyoutubing I think there's a lot of things to it, including that games are often made with previous generation systems in mind, and a wide range of PC audiences.
Nintendo doesn't even try to be cutting edge, which is fine with me.
And Xbox doesn't even try to be console exclusive.
So it's hard for Debs to have a homogeneous market of devices to build for.
Also, there's something to be said about Sonic 3D Blast's opening cutscene apparently being too big for the cartridge.
They found some very interesting ways to get around their limitations.
I still do feel like each generation makes pretty big improvements but it's not as noticeable at a glance like going from mostly sprite work to models like SNES to 64, or going from rectangular faced characters on the Playstation to ones that actually have a polygon count in their models. :P
It feels hard to imagine about how people feel or experience when a groundbreaking game release like Half Life, I remember myself being impressed by COD4's graphics as a kid(I don't see much good games at the time) and coming back to it now I just went like "Huh, looks kinda flat". And that spin dash part perfectly describe how I imagine people would feel when they hear Valve's theme in Surface Tension if they play a lot of Valve's games before
The feeling of seeing something with fresh eyes is something I've experienced a lot while learning a 2nd language. I'm not taking a class or drilling anything, just spending time with the language every day as a hobby. Being able to step back and just take in information that's completely new to me can be scary but more often, very refreshing.
It's so weird to think about how many times I've thought something along the lines of "wow this is close to the best graphics can be for sure", like I couldn't even imagine things getting more detailed.
I remember thinking the cutscenes in God of War 1-2 were the pinnacle. Then 3 came along and had better in game graphics and my mind was forever altered never to think graphics have peaked.
For me, the composition of everything a work is and what its directorial intent was, versus how things turned out in practice means a lot. Appreciation for mediums started to shift for me a few years ago, where previously I thought "Oh, it's just an old NES/2600/black-and-white/silent film and therefore too quaint to matter" upon experiencing these things, and began to appreciate and criticize them (or at least attempt to) for what they actually *are*.
Also I like how you switched Lost Coast's texture filtering over to nearest-neighbor for the last few frames. It suits the theme of the video!
you. you get it.
@@AuntieAliasing I can understand why people appreciate old stuff. It's just not for me though yeah I am the "it looks old" kind of guy.
Though I still like Portal 2 even if it's old. Games on the 360 era reached the "timeless" point where a game can still hold up if it was made well.
@@yol_n I had to look up how old Portal 2 was because I was sure that it was pretty new... Now suddenly feel ancient. :D
@@mccGoNZooo yeah it's pretty damn old which makes even more impressive how well it holds up
There's a mod coming up for it called Desolation and they're only touching a few things on the lighting because the base game already looks so good!
There's definitely some kind of perception layer that dictates how we see things at the time compared to in retrospect. I absolutely remember playing Playstation 1 games and looking and thinking, wow this is pretty much photo realistic. Probably helped by the fact that we were watching through very low resolution screens at the time, not that they were low resolution to us. It's not just limited to games but films (try watching the Spiderman 1 goblin glider scenes now) or even fashion trends that at the time looked aesthetically pleasing but now look awful.
Nothing is more realistic than what is filled in the gaps by your imagination.
People forget that older games were made for crts. They actually look a lot better when played with the slight blur crts give. Which is part of the reason people thought games looked better back in the past.
Most super photorealistic games now that I have seen use stylized body cam blur to take advantage of your mind filling in gaps likr crts of old.
@@zs9652It’s one of those things where the reason why retro games look worse today then they did in the past is because - to some extent, the actually *do* look worse then they did back then, because modern 4K LCDs/OLEDs do a very poor job at upscaling such low resolution, usually interlaced images, running at sometimes unconventional frame rates.
That’s on top of some recent remastering efforts being rather poor, with missing effects or other issues that don’t show the game in question in the best light, so even what should be the better alternative sometimes isn’t.
That was such a calming and somehow deep video! It really kind of brightened up my evening. I hope to see more of your thoughts as videos in the future.
I didnt know about the sonic 1 waterfall looking that beautiful on the CRT...
I count myself as extremely lucky to have memories of watching my dad play Half-Life, and experience the awe induced by Half-Life 2
I think many people had experiences like this recently when Raytracing started becoming more popular and making some game look incredible. It’s like we were able to appreciate something in the moment that would one day be less mesmerizing because of exposure to it
Except there's nothing special about RT, it's just a tool that saves devs time when they have the horsepower to use it
@@tvsonicserbia5140 I disagree, normal game lighting has layers and layers of different techniques and tricks to get a somewhat convincing representation of light, ray tracing and path tracing and all that are actual simulated lighting. To me lighting is the most important part of a games visuals and it always bothered me how it always felt held together with tape even if it was well done, so yes the moment it hit me that we finally had (mostly) fully simulated lighting in games in real-time was a pretty big deal. That just proves their point how fast everyone's already used to it. And it's not even like its the default base level lighting method yet, it's still very taxing and still improving.
@@tvsonicserbia5140I don’t think you can say that when we have games like Cyberpunk and it’s path tracing mode going beyond the limits of what even the PS5 and Xbox Series X are capable of. Yes, in a fully statically lit scene where every table and chair is bolted to the floor lightmaps can be fully sufficient, as the same defuse lighting information can be baked into textures, but most games are not like that. Dynamic time of day, interactable props and objects, hundreds of characters and vehicles moving around - you need a cocktail of different rasterisation techniques blended together to get a result that even vaguely resembles what raytracing does out of the box. And that’s ignoring the specular or reflective lighting part of the equation which is just as important, and an aspect where rasterisation has always performed poorly. There might be alternatives to RT when used in specific aspects of rendering but that isn’t really the case when talking about a fully ray traced scene.
@@tvsonicserbia5140It actually takes more effort to implement raytracing because it still requires an option for older lighting techniques
Yeah I think it was really interesting when I got my 2060 super and minecraft could have so much depth to the lighting. I don't see games that look that good very often.
this is one of my favorite videos I've seen in a while. a poignant meditation.
Wow, what an amazing vid. Got those goosebumps by the end. Subbed, great work!
My thoughts have been provoked. How everything here is presented... It's so goddamn good. Ideas were explained flawlessly, and the style of the video is just so good. It feels like I'm watching a movie.
I've thought about this a great number of times. One of many examples is The Last Of Us (1), I thought it was so impressive at the time and now it clearly looks like a 2013 game.
oh wow, the end caught me by surprise! It felt Like an Intro to a long and detailed video essay, and I was so ready for it! Now I want more! this is such an interesting topic!
one of, if not the best videos of come across in a long time. it was such a dramatic change from everything on this platform. no loud sound effects and screen flashes shoved down our throats every two seconds. just thoughts. actual genuine thoughts with legitimate curiosity backing them up. thank you.
ah, yes, I carefully placed each loud sound effect and screen crash at an interval of 30 seconds: the optimal time. :P
more seriously, thanks for the kind words. glad this resonated with you
I really identify with this video. As someone who went into game development, I live behind the curtain, and it has certainly warped my perception. But this is also why I cherish those rare few games that manage to take my breath away and truly shock me.
Like Outer Wilds. I don't think any other game in the modern era, or I guess more appropriately, in my adult life has managed to achieve what that game did for me.
That game is *easily* the best game I've ever played. I've played a lot of games, but nothing has come close to the depth of emotion and sheer creativity that game displayed.
If you aren't familiar with it, don't look it up: just play it. You want to know as little about it as possible going in, but I promise it is worth your time.
this is such a cool way to look at things. I've genuinely never really thought about it like that. I've thought about descriptions and thought before language but there's something so much different about this than that. Especially as the most cutting edge graphics on games are approaching what looks like real photos and real body cam footage you really can't help but wonder "will future generations look at these insane graphics in the same way I look at the graphics of half life 2?" and "will we ever reach a 'peak' in graphics? where we could create a VR experience indistinguishable from the real world?" . This video seems to have sort of unlocked an entire new stream of though and that's amazing. Thank you
incredible video essey that really smoothly shifted from videogames to the whole epistemological aspect of our lifes. your way of thought is so fascinating to me. your words about losing the ability to see the world with fresh eyes hit me so hard.
Honestly a beautiful video, also good job I'm getting blessed by the algorithm this video definitely deserve the blessing it's just very well made you should be proud.
In high school, during the late 2010s I fell in love with SNES games. I had intense binge sessions where I beat LoZ: aLttP, Super Mario World, Star Fox, F-Zero and Chrono Trigger. With each game I played I was blown away at how something so deeply complex, whether it was the artwork, the story, or the incorporation of Mode 7, was capable on a system that came out a decade before I was born. I did the same thing with the entire Half-Life franchise, where with each new entry I became deeply enthralled with the rich atmosphere, story, music and gameplay. Despite having much more modern eyes, I was still able to see these games with a fresh set of eyes as I was playing them for the first time, and I loved it. This did have its limits for me though. I never could have the same sort of wonder as I did for the SNES as I did for the NES or the N64. Maybe it's because of my modern view, or maybe it's because the art and music don't click for me.
I don't think this sort of feeling is possible at all for any new games that release today. It's expected of new, high budget games to have beautiful graphics, and many indie games that use a pixel artstyle refine it and remove all the rough edges that were caused by the older hardware. I can still fall in love with newer games, but they don't have the same wonder as something that was created with passion many decades ago.
Isn't it beautiful that we are thrusted into a game we've played countless times before yet we forget each time were reborn to experience everything like it was the first time.
Thanks for really poking my brain here, makes me just that much more aware that I might find interests in things that can be considered well and beyond outdated, retro even, but yet will probably have completely different reasons for developing fondness of such relics of the past, mainly just because of my experiences being limited to this more futuristic world I currently live in.
this feels like the intro to a two hour long essay
It felt like dreams coming true. Every time some newer better looking or more interactive thing came out, it felt like we collectively moved closer to some kind of ideal vision we all shared. The games industry was able to actually deliver this for a while, though I'd argue the era ended some time in the mid 00's. The hype you feel for new titles is basically the same thing except at the time we were much less disappointed, because the world was very different and the baseline techiness of our lives was way, way lower.
GST made it god damn, I remember watching your Tim Follin video when it was sub-1000 views. You are still one of the most engaging and thorough creators and I still have you to thank for encouraging to take a closer look at composers and their respective ranges. Not only have you made something even more engaging, but it carries that same depth and breadth that I wouldn’t even consider otherwise. Excited to see more and especially with content like this.
I saw the intro of the video and got so excited because I knew I just found a new gem of a channel. This was amazing
Fun anecdote: When I was younger, I once walked into a game shop, and saw a football game on a little TV. I actually thought it was real for a moment, and I thought to myself, "Why are they showing football in a videogame shop?" Then I looked closer, and saw that the TV was connected to a Dreamcast, and realized it was actually a videogame demo. I was amazed by the graphics at the time, but if I saw it now, there's no way I'd be fooled.
I remember looking at screenshots of Colin McRae Rally 3 (2002) in a gaming magazine, and being amazed by the photorealism. Same with STALKER screenshots (2007). These days, they are unconvincing. The way we perceive digital footage is absolutely relative.
I played Phantasy Star IV before I had ever seen anime or cartoons. When the cutscenes kicked in it felt like real life, even though it was a slideshow. I dreamed of it in motion, heard the characters. Will never forget that feeling.
Intro music still one of my favorites
As someone old enough to have played everything mentioned when it was new this was really interesting to watch. I am always fascinated at what people without nostalgia goggles think of older games.
Somehow, I never thought to start a "high af" playlist until now. You're the first thing on it.
It was only 5 minutes... i cant believe... felt like a whole movie
I was 14 when Chrono trigger came out. I grew up playing Amiga games and the S/NES titles. Yes, Chrono triggers graphics were amazing at the time. We were in awe of it then just as now. Plus the music and sfx we recognized as also absolutely incredible.
Well done pixel art will always be amazing regardless.
Yes, some media can in fact be "timeless". This is why we say "it stands the test of time," when people go back to something and it still holds up to today's standards.