I grew up in the 90s when 2D games were peaking and 3D graphics were just primitive shapes. Still, didn't care for the 2D games as much. I thoought Pokemon was garbage, even though I loved it, I thought of it as very basic and mindless (just mash A until the battle is over) but forgave them because they put so much into a gameboy cartridge and the simplicity went along with the new "mobile"/"casual" genre that Pokemon was pioneering.
When I got into making games in 2002, I used Game Maker and over time did a lot of pseudo 3D effects. I made my own Pokemon game that used a technique called "Oblique Projection" which looks like a 3D orthogonal camera but is actually just isometric 2D with split faces so that the viewpoint can be rotated. The math to do this is actually a lot easier than it sounds, especially if you remember learning trigonometry in high school.
I was a teenager when I moved on to 3D gamedev. I encourage anyone stuck in 2D to give it a try, its really just the same with an extra coordinate to consider. Making games in 3D is not that much more difficult, it's even easier in some cases.
The 2D format has it's benefits though, mainly in performance. Compare Age of Empires 2 and Red Alert to AoE4 or C&C4, the main difference is NOT that the visuals are "Realistic" and 3D and the camera can change angles, no the main noticeable difference is that those new games SUCK. They suck because you only see a few dozen units at once, the battles stopped being epic, as the hardware limitations of running in 3D are turned into limitations of game mechanics. If you want to play an RTS game with hundreds of units moving around, 2D is king. Multimeshing in 3D is possible but tricky if you want to include animations or AI, and it may be more performant to have each character unit be it's own draw call depending on how complicated the game is (just look at World War Z for example).
So yeah bullet storm and RTS genres may actually be better on 2D currently. Certain other games may be subjectively better in 2D from an artistic standpoint. Platformers is where we see a split: a lot of gamers hate 3D platformers while many others hate sidescrollers. Many people to this day consider Mario 3 to be the best Mario game, much better than Mario 64, Sunshine or Galaxy. But I disagree with those people and think 3D platformers are very fun.
Vampire survivors comes to mind....
I grew up in the 90s when 2D games were peaking and 3D graphics were just primitive shapes. Still, didn't care for the 2D games as much. I thoought Pokemon was garbage, even though I loved it, I thought of it as very basic and mindless (just mash A until the battle is over) but forgave them because they put so much into a gameboy cartridge and the simplicity went along with the new "mobile"/"casual" genre that Pokemon was pioneering.
When I got into making games in 2002, I used Game Maker and over time did a lot of pseudo 3D effects. I made my own Pokemon game that used a technique called "Oblique Projection" which looks like a 3D orthogonal camera but is actually just isometric 2D with split faces so that the viewpoint can be rotated. The math to do this is actually a lot easier than it sounds, especially if you remember learning trigonometry in high school.
I was a teenager when I moved on to 3D gamedev. I encourage anyone stuck in 2D to give it a try, its really just the same with an extra coordinate to consider. Making games in 3D is not that much more difficult, it's even easier in some cases.
The 2D format has it's benefits though, mainly in performance. Compare Age of Empires 2 and Red Alert to AoE4 or C&C4, the main difference is NOT that the visuals are "Realistic" and 3D and the camera can change angles, no the main noticeable difference is that those new games SUCK. They suck because you only see a few dozen units at once, the battles stopped being epic, as the hardware limitations of running in 3D are turned into limitations of game mechanics. If you want to play an RTS game with hundreds of units moving around, 2D is king. Multimeshing in 3D is possible but tricky if you want to include animations or AI, and it may be more performant to have each character unit be it's own draw call depending on how complicated the game is (just look at World War Z for example).
So yeah bullet storm and RTS genres may actually be better on 2D currently. Certain other games may be subjectively better in 2D from an artistic standpoint. Platformers is where we see a split: a lot of gamers hate 3D platformers while many others hate sidescrollers. Many people to this day consider Mario 3 to be the best Mario game, much better than Mario 64, Sunshine or Galaxy. But I disagree with those people and think 3D platformers are very fun.