Why are late 90s early 00s video games so comfy?

OP not supporting his argument

being young and full of hope for the future

Because each individual game was handcrafted

'Engines' weren't that popular and every game had its individual quirks you could find nowhere else. Stuff that is impossible today was commonplace back then -- like massive multiplayer matches over dialup. (I'm still mad terrain deformation in SMAC was not implemented in Beyond Earth.)

I remember disliking most of the PS1 games I played on my PS2. It was the PS2 games that were comfier

Something something soul

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White men made them.

Devs and artists were forced to make the most out of limited hardware. This is why the art style in games like HL and Unreal Tournament have aged fairly well.
Besides that, the sound design in Half-Life and Counter-Strike was exceptional.

Less effort spent on graphics, more on other games.

Because they worked despite the limitations to deliver a great experience. That's why I despise so much the current trend of remasters and remakes.

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played the original half life (the won version) first tie in opengl last day, holly shit that was insane, i mean i played it in software and d3d mode before but in its original opengl it was crazy!

I can still hear the sound that menu makes when you hover over an item in it

Complex enough to not get boring but smaller scale enough to offer good pacing and satisfying length. Essentially, medium sized games died.

Games took their time, but not in the wrong way. Pacing and level design is all fucked now.

Don't forget A3D
youtube.com/watch?v=AAOcdfCN-RU

Readable visuals and gameplay, and despite being inferior, your mind still fills the gaps.

Modern games have overly complicated visuals and tons of thigns distracting you everywhere, leaving no place for imagination nor immersion. And then gameplay is barebones as fuck.

baked lighting

this

wat gaem?
serious question, how hard would it be to make a game using the quake engine?
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, youtube.com/watch?v=S1Fb92AH5Mc is a new game said to run on the quake engine. Idk how to get started.

Also don't forget the added COSTS of new game dev which makes games harder and slower to produce with the added bonus of investors breathing down studios neck to make a solid hit or return on investment so less risk than years past.

Yeah, level design is such a mess now. All that fanciest tech and a million distracting props with 4K PBR textures won't substitute good gameplay.

"Readable visuals" exactly, the lower detailed models stuff created good CONTRAST against the world and this was also combined with fog as well for silhouette clarity. Speaking of, remember how when TF2 was first being designed they made a good effort to make classes identifiable by good solid silhouettes and mentioned it in their design video/pdf in 07? that was a core gameplay feature, and later on they chucked that out the window by piling on all those bullshit cosmetics , clashing styles, unnecessary detail and particle vomit in later updates.

The game is Unreal

>>
>Also don't forget the added COSTS of new game dev which makes games harder and slower to produce with the added bonus of investors breathing down studios neck to make a solid hit or return on investment so less risk than years past.
On that topic, I know the guy at Ubisoft that worked on damage markers. You know, those red arrows pointing to a direction.

Spent years debating about the proper shape and color, making sure it wouldn't hurt anyone's sensibilities in any culture all over the world, not to mention ensuring it won't be epileptic, will be seen by colorblind people...

Three years later, he was finally ready to release his entire life's work: red fucking arrows.

Yeah, about them COSTS.

A lack of gender options.

Definitely stuff that’s already been said; a cross section of good level design, tight controls, and better art direction (older games almost look stylized by today’s standards). But, it seems we’re in some weird renaissance now, with games like Dusk and Amid Evil. Hopefully more like them will follow.

What was the last good era here?

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2001-2005 were the last years of extreme consistency in quality and variety. 2006/7 was the beginning of a descent.

Good god

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Heh

Quake & GoldSrc are getting some activity again in the modding community due to a bunch of new tools and renewed interest. For example check this hot shit out:
youtube.com/watch?v=shcAvnYp9ow

Welp time to Play Sven Coop

>dev talks about diversity
>finally someone gets it
>they talk about peopel of different races instead of having all sorts of different guns
>product is a game with various cultures and races but just 1 machine gun copypasted with slightly different rate of fire and damage

>pre 2000
>no GPUs, no libraries, loads of fucking around to set a game up
>post 2000
>great games, studios are about 20 people big and churn out great games
>post 2009
>game studios are way too big, graphics become a burden

I think companies like valve and blizzard dont make games because their philosophy of "everything is perfect and everyoen is putting their life into the craft" doesnt work on a 200 people scale with this many layers, it only works when youre 20 people in a garage banging out a game while living off pizza and soda

Damn - what good mods have been made with this?

>fnaf pizzeria map
OH NO NO NO

>graphics become a burden
Honestly they aren't. If anything, it's become easier. "Good graphics" didn't just come to exist, they were enabled by better tools, easing production.

The main issue is they're fucking around doing retarded shit instead of working on the fucking game. The technical teams are generally well-led, they're technical people, they don't fuck around, and they support the entirety of the game. Visual artists, level designers, writers, and gameplay devs are pure fucking cancer on the other hand, they can't make up their minds, they debate endlessly over pointless issues, spend WEEKS taking a single decision that once was taken in seconds by one guy and considered "good enough", and if "not good enough", changing it took just a few more seconds. And considering the decisions they take are always bad and lead to more complications, it never ends.

If any company was to release an engine for a game complete with its toolset, a bunch of literal modders could beat them to the release date and make a better game.

>Honestly they aren't. If anything, it's become easier. "Good graphics" didn't just come to exist, they were enabled by better tools, easing production.

While its true that improvements in tools and 3D modelling have happened, the main point here is it takes an absolute fuckton of time to make a assets nowadays due to the high detail and complexity which nullifies the speed advantage of new 3d workflows. If anything things take way longer than they used to and a ton more money for example everything needs a Zbrush sculpt, retopo, lods, PBR textures, advanced rigging, and the list goes on.

This is why modern games cost millions and need outsourcing too.

Even with the old versions of 3dsmax and hammer back in 1997 a single person at valve working on halflife could flesh out an area, make a fully rigged character, texture, animate him then place in map and playtest all in a short time due to low poly detail.

purity

bump

Because back then you were at you most impressionable age.

This. It's the same reason everyone loved the graphics in Mirror's Edge so much.

The lighting is ray-traced when the map is compiled so the colors and shadows look great, but the trade off is that the lightmaps are static.
If you want a light to toggle or change colors you have to make a separate lightmap for each state of lighting, and that increases memory usage so it has to be used sparingly.

This is critical too because in numerous interviews Gabe stated that part of Half-Life's nuance is owed to the fact that their developers had skill overlaps between multiple disciplines.

They had their animators and programmers designing levels and essentially peer reviewing each others' departments on the fly, which allowed for more intuitive and rational implementation that bolstered the game's presentation, being able to analyze and solve problems from multiple perspectives with greater flexibility than someone operating within a discrete niche.

That seems to be less common or just downright impossible nowadays where people are overly possesive and entitled to their personal work, but I hear Valve has been the exact same way in the last decade. The company that made Half-Life basically doesn't exist at this point, and nu-Valve is somewhat dysfunctional in that regard.

The critical distinction of this specifically is that they were doing this outaide of a democratic process. Different problems were essentially being addressed, and content being tooled, on the fly with minimal deliberation as I understand it, by people with different skill sets and thought processes outside the realm of said considerations. The way they put it, the team was efficient and robust.

One of the reasons I can barely stand to play online shooters anymore. There's so many props and sprites and shit everywhere combined with high contrast lighting/shadows that it strains your eyes just to try and spot enemies through all the bullshit on your screen.

I don't know to what degree things are different in the industry today vs what they were 20 or 30 years ago when it comes to management and development, though

I think the disciplines have become too difficult to really be able to be confident at multiple of them. Like with science, you can no longer be a renaissance man in modern times since science is too far developed.

Also I think the size of a team mkaes it difficult to really respond to eachother on the go. If you have 2 dudes doing AI you can easily talk to them, if its a whole department its a lot more difficult.

it just shows how video games died, in few decades vidya will be just a meme and futurezoomers won't care about it at all

But op asked a question

because you were a kid and didn't know any better

Digital distribution killed gaming. Valve has done more damage to gaming than any other company.

The low poly lets you imagine how it can look better.

Like a picture of 2+2 vs a 4

Smaller budgets, smaller expectations to perform, smaller hobby itself which all leads to small and enthusiastic teams who answer to no one but themselves and go balls out instead of trying to appeal to everyone to break even on a bloated budget

Back then devs used to enjoy making video games, not anymore.

why are epic threads so comfy?
discord.gg/Su9sdBE

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>tfw I was born in 86 and lived through the golden era
Gaming might be shit in Anno Domini, but at least I got the best ride.

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>tfw I was born too late and I only got the tail end of gen 6 kino

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man millennial are kids born on or after the fucking start of the millennium

The year 2000 and up

Cunts born in 1985 can't lumped into the same bracket as some fucking shit heads from the year 2000, doesn't make sense. Totally different cultural changes and opportunities

You're retarded. Millennial means someone who was in the school system in 2000, those born 1982-1995. Google this.

generations are pretty big, not jsut 10 years long. And the point of millennials is that they experienced the turn of the millennium, not that their dad nutted at that time

Except classes are still identifiable even from a far despite the new cosmetics. Maybe you are just bad?

My point is generational change usually comes with vast changes in culture and technology

Folks born in 1985 never even had internet until they were 12-15, and then it was dial up with msn messenger and stickdeath.com and what have you. Most of these kids were still using encyclopedias or maybe Encarta if your 16mb of ram could run it without freezing

Music, Education and Entertainment were so vastly different to those born after the year 2000 there's just no way that they should be classed as the same generation

>That seems to be less common or just downright impossible nowadays where people are overly possesive and entitled to their personal work, but I hear Valve has been the exact same way in the last decade. The company that made Half-Life basically doesn't exist at this point, and nu-Valve is somewhat dysfunctional in that regard.

More because they moved to R&D of gaming infrastructure over outright game development. Attempting controllers, Linux support, VR, they act more like a research lab now, barring ongoing titles.

12-15 is still very much formative years and someone who experienced being able to text people is very different than someone who only got that when he already was a working adult. Im sorry kid but youre a millennial as well. We can call the kids born now something else if that makes it any better

They still have plenty of gaming development, hell HL3 was in development from the moment they released episode 2. But it got scrapped at least 2 times. They had a lot of issues pushing out the episodes, and now they are so old and crippled they cannot even make a game at all. They have a flat hierarchy but that doesnt work if you have a huge team full of people trying to get themselves ahead instead of the team.

It's because of the innovation and creativity that was driven by new technology that wasn't just pointless increases in visual fidelity
games had everything that they needed by 2005, everything since then has be pissing in the wind

Im hoping we get another vidya golden age with improved NPC AI and Virtual Reality, but those things seem be at snail's pace in terms of progress.

What exactly made the gaming industry to blow up so fast from the late 90s t he mid 2000's, anyway...?

Was it all just investors willing to make products to get people to buy shit, which in turn created rapid progress?

Games actually felt like actual games and not disguised movie bullshit. It’s rare to find

Usually it's because of their killer atmosphere, supported by great art- and sound-designs that were practically obligatory, as the tech could not handle super high fidelity visuals.
Focus on small details was also still a thing, and gameplay was still very "free", patronizing. Even a linear shooter like HL still felt like a grand adventure, not like a walking sim with action.

All this was possible thanks to the devs being mostly small teams of real-life friends or at least like-minded individuals, all whom wanted to do something amazing and cutting edge, out of subject matters of their interest.
It was a honestly very pure and innocent time; games were still fairly niche, they were made for gamers of many sorts, and all of "politics" in gaming industry practically were still narrowed to whether or not some more brutal title would pass the age rating or some local censorship laws.

>What made the gaming industry to blow up so fast from the late 90s t he mid 2000's, anyway...?
The gaming industry has been growing up exponentially ever since its initial spawning in the late 1970s.
It was heavily aided by the spread and popularization of the computer technology, which became way bigger mainstream thing than anyone would've imagined even back in mid-80s. The Arcade circles also printed money like crazy for a while there, which indirectly helped PC and console gaming for a couple decades.

Up until ~mid 00s, the industry was quite a different place in general.
Just like films and books, a publisher was practically a necessity to get your game out and known, so even tiny teams we'd otherwise now consider "indies" had to step up their game and impress people on some level. Also, since Nintendo had already made gaming into an "every family's thing" back in 80s, and the whole phenomenon was already towering over the film and music industries by the mid 1990s, more folks got fascinated by it, and more support was given to ambitious projects.

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Do any other anons think the comfy 2000s graphics extends to pic related? To me, SCS games always gave off the same vibe of clean visuals, just a few years later on. It's one of the few examples I can think of of a relatively modern game that doesn't have that bullshit "fake realism" style every new game tends to have.

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>What exactly made the gaming industry to blow up so fast from the late 90s t he mid 2000's, anyway...?
It became far more profitable. The market was much wider than ever before, you didn't need to hire the best in the industry to have the best tech as engine licencing became more widespread and there was more talent than ever before as modding allowed people to learn skills freely

Gameplay is such a loaded term, loads of games have added tons of systems that arguably could constitute as "gameplay" unless this user just means games that insane FPS or platformer reflex-fests that this user themselves could hardly play once they hit their 20s and can only scrape through the ones they know because of muscle memory.

No other boomers out there afraid to be one of those people who are seemingly stuck in the past?

I crave new experiences and stories, sure i play classic games too, but there is always something new and exciting out there.

>no content made for ATS
>because ETS 2 has more player
>ETS 2 has more players
>more content for ETS 2
>no content made for ATS
>also no freightliner licence
[wake me up inside]

>What was the last good era here?
hows this even a question
you can clearly see the downhill free fall from gen y to gen z

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Yeeeeeaahhhhh games used to be so much better truuuueeee I know right????????

Fuck off, games are only getting better and better. Shit you’re describing cannot be said about every single game. There are more games now obviously, some of which are complete shit made for money, but there are quite a few games with the old school mindset

If you don’t enjoy gaming anymore, stop looking for exudes.. oooohhhh the industry is shit nowadaysss fuck :( ( :(

You all remind me of a friend who cries about the same all the time, but then opens some old game he liked back in the day only to realize it wasn’t that great after all these years

Nostalgia. Personally, I hated that era of games, but then I was already an adult at the time.

Which modern cinematic lootbox experience do you want me to pour money into user? Which season pass do you want me to buy?

Then was no zoomers around.

Do Sekiro, RE2 or DMC5 have any if the bullshit you’ve just described? These are all games that came out this year

I'm still mad at the remake

Were you by any chance 8-18 years old at the time?

based golden age

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dmc5 is absolutely full of cinematics

>Why are late 90s early 00s video games so comfy?

the people that made them

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They were made in a comfy decade.

i dont know.
they were just better in every way
t. zoomer

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>back when developers were actual nerds
take me back

Because you grew up with them.

This is always such a lazy and false assumption.
I've played dozens of 20+ yo games for the first time ever, during this decade, and many of them have completely BTFO majority of recent titles when it comes to engaging and complex gameplay and atmosphere.

Rebuilding the rendering loop and using the bsp data for static rendering is actualy pretty straight forward.

Clean visuals, no bump mapping, pixel shaders or post-processing. New games all looks blurry unless rendered in 4k with some effects disabled.

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mid-00s tech was best blend of good art-directing and modern effects. The pre-bloom & blur era, that is, with primitive normal maps and dynamic shadows.

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Doom 3 and Far Cry really pushed the graphics during that time. Both doing great for their environment. I member playing both on my GF4 ti and hitting 30fps at best but it was still playable with a CRT.

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this

working mirrors and optimized game engines
now most games are made in fucking Unity, look like facebook games and lag like fuck while running the CPU at 90c and dropping frames.

I'd just purchased my first "real" PC a good year earlier, and the 2004's Big Three (HL2, D3, FC) were the titles that made me get my first proper GPU as well, the Geforce FX 5600, 256mb.

Unity has nothing to do with any of that. Just lazy people who cannot into optimization or proper design rules in general.

why do people like the re engine again?

Comfy is just short for "comfortable".

If you're using the word "comfy" in a way where, if it were replaced with "comfortable" it wouldn't make any fucking sense, you're using it wrong.

>tfw born in 97 but grew up playing morrowind and abandonware games with my brother (shit like commander keen)

could have been worse

uhh what? 20s are prime age for fps

Anyone with half the brains do not.
Kids just see their first photo-scanned character models, and think that it's some tech-voodoo ya can't get on any other platform. Said tricks were already in use a decade ago.

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They made games, not services