Graphical fidelity is becoming more and more of a crutch, compare how they made the Original Doom and used graphic shortcuts to make it run extremely smooth to a lot of games nowadays and you can see the difference in mentality.
You'll only get this from the indie dev community though and even those guys as we all know are often leftists just looking to churn out woke side scrollers like the insufferable hipsters they are.
This is why I push back against the people here who act like indie games are the perfect solution to the problem that current AAA games are woke garbage. Most indie games are poorly made dreck that are shovel-ware tier even aside from whatever politics is contained within. And then like you said, a lot of indie devs are programmer socks wearing weirdos who fill their games with woke ideology.
It’s more than a crutch: it’s a wheel chair. All of the major companies are using Frankenstein’s monster of gaming engines with barely stitched together code. Graphics is the only thing they can improve unless their code just gives up.
It's also because keeping up with cutting edge technology is incredibly expensive, so they can't afford to take any risks whatsoever. Budgets are so big that everything has to be decided by committee, which turns everything into bland garbage with woke marketing because the suits think that's "safe".
as someone who has had to do a group presentation on doom and decided to do their section on the limitations of doom and why they might exist compared to similar games of the time
oh boy is that a rabbit hole and some of the choices they made are very interesting
for example the majority of collisions are calculated using only X and Y values, the only things that take into account the Z height of anything are projectiles (rockets etc)
now if you think about it there's not a whole lot of long-lived projectile spam in doom but there is a lot of mobs that are going to be constantly checking collision and 2D collisions are computationally cheaper than 3D collisions
its not 100% but i'm fairly certain the mostly 2D collisions are entirely because of optimisation reasons
If the peak nostalgia window is ~20-25 years, that means we're entering the period when PS2 is considered retro. PS2 games are essentially modern games with low res graphics and a few quirks.
When we enter PS3 nostalgia (~2031), then there will be no retro style to ape because PS3 looks pretty much the same as PS5. GTAV is available for both consoles and is largely unchanged. It'll be the end of video game history.
We're seeing this movies and TV shows as well. Eventually the reboot monster devours its own tail and you're making reboots of reboots. It's the end of cultural history across the board.
Lot of PS2 games (especially the newer ones once the devs really figured the system out) look like PS3 games if you play them on an emulator with upscaled rendering.
That particular guy has some videos where he plays Gran Turismo 4 with all the high res texture packs, and it easily passes for a game made in the early '10s.
I suspect you will find many real "tech nerds" who develop the technology (as opposed to the "I heckin' love technology" crowd) would agree with you. Certainly I do.
But to defend the Computer Engineers for a moment, much of the blood that is squeezed from the "marginally improve x86 ISA performance" stone is instantly consumed by programmers adding yet another layer of Javascript to the shitty web app that used to be a native Win32 app.
When I went through University 20-ish years ago the thing that was drilled into our heads was "programmer time is worth more than CPU time", which meant that you weren't supposed to care so much about performance because computers were fast and would continue to get faster. Which sounds great when you're a programmer who always has more work than he can possibly do, but when that's what'd drilled into programmers' heads for 20-30 years...well we live the consequences of that tradeoff every day.
If you want a "this is what they took from us" moment in computing, try installing Windows XP and Office 2003 on a modern computer. XP boots in about 5 seconds, and Word 2003 loading is "blink and you'll miss it" fast. In other words, it's what you'd have wanted and expected out of technological improvement over time.
Meanwhile what you actually get is booting Win10 and modern Word takes about as long as it did to boot XP and Word 2003 on 2003 era hardware.
It's mostly mentally deranged people who have lived their whole lives through media making games for normies who have lived their whole lives through media. Of course it's going to be mostly shit.
I think Forza reached its Zenith at 360. Everything is just an add on after that. I say the same for Gran Turismo.
Also, I miss the Capcom Cel Shaded racer. They keep trying to make a good looking but horribly thought out version of Cel Shaded games. They look rendered and not drawn.
Graphical fidelity is becoming more and more of a crutch, compare how they made the Original Doom and used graphic shortcuts to make it run extremely smooth to a lot of games nowadays and you can see the difference in mentality.
This is why I push back against the people here who act like indie games are the perfect solution to the problem that current AAA games are woke garbage. Most indie games are poorly made dreck that are shovel-ware tier even aside from whatever politics is contained within. And then like you said, a lot of indie devs are programmer socks wearing weirdos who fill their games with woke ideology.
It’s more than a crutch: it’s a wheel chair. All of the major companies are using Frankenstein’s monster of gaming engines with barely stitched together code. Graphics is the only thing they can improve unless their code just gives up.
It's also because keeping up with cutting edge technology is incredibly expensive, so they can't afford to take any risks whatsoever. Budgets are so big that everything has to be decided by committee, which turns everything into bland garbage with woke marketing because the suits think that's "safe".
I think one of the best examples of this sort of innovation remains Quake's fast inverse square root: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code
as someone who has had to do a group presentation on doom and decided to do their section on the limitations of doom and why they might exist compared to similar games of the time
oh boy is that a rabbit hole and some of the choices they made are very interesting
for example the majority of collisions are calculated using only X and Y values, the only things that take into account the Z height of anything are projectiles (rockets etc)
now if you think about it there's not a whole lot of long-lived projectile spam in doom but there is a lot of mobs that are going to be constantly checking collision and 2D collisions are computationally cheaper than 3D collisions
its not 100% but i'm fairly certain the mostly 2D collisions are entirely because of optimisation reasons
His love of Forza is the only thing that rivals his hatred for women.
You do have a bit of a reputation.
From what I've seen, you're going to have to be really really right for a long fucking time to change public opinion.
Either that or just stop giving a fuck about internet points.
Yeah, being right about all the worst things can be really fucking heartbreaking after a while.
At least, that's what I assume you're getting at.
If the peak nostalgia window is ~20-25 years, that means we're entering the period when PS2 is considered retro. PS2 games are essentially modern games with low res graphics and a few quirks.
When we enter PS3 nostalgia (~2031), then there will be no retro style to ape because PS3 looks pretty much the same as PS5. GTAV is available for both consoles and is largely unchanged. It'll be the end of video game history.
We're seeing this movies and TV shows as well. Eventually the reboot monster devours its own tail and you're making reboots of reboots. It's the end of cultural history across the board.
Lot of PS2 games (especially the newer ones once the devs really figured the system out) look like PS3 games if you play them on an emulator with upscaled rendering.
That particular guy has some videos where he plays Gran Turismo 4 with all the high res texture packs, and it easily passes for a game made in the early '10s.
I suspect you will find many real "tech nerds" who develop the technology (as opposed to the "I heckin' love technology" crowd) would agree with you. Certainly I do.
But to defend the Computer Engineers for a moment, much of the blood that is squeezed from the "marginally improve x86 ISA performance" stone is instantly consumed by programmers adding yet another layer of Javascript to the shitty web app that used to be a native Win32 app.
When I went through University 20-ish years ago the thing that was drilled into our heads was "programmer time is worth more than CPU time", which meant that you weren't supposed to care so much about performance because computers were fast and would continue to get faster. Which sounds great when you're a programmer who always has more work than he can possibly do, but when that's what'd drilled into programmers' heads for 20-30 years...well we live the consequences of that tradeoff every day.
If you want a "this is what they took from us" moment in computing, try installing Windows XP and Office 2003 on a modern computer. XP boots in about 5 seconds, and Word 2003 loading is "blink and you'll miss it" fast. In other words, it's what you'd have wanted and expected out of technological improvement over time.
Meanwhile what you actually get is booting Win10 and modern Word takes about as long as it did to boot XP and Word 2003 on 2003 era hardware.
It's mostly mentally deranged people who have lived their whole lives through media making games for normies who have lived their whole lives through media. Of course it's going to be mostly shit.
I think Forza reached its Zenith at 360. Everything is just an add on after that. I say the same for Gran Turismo.
Also, I miss the Capcom Cel Shaded racer. They keep trying to make a good looking but horribly thought out version of Cel Shaded games. They look rendered and not drawn.