Comment on isn't it weird how newer games manage to look more realistic than older ones? - GST Channel [5:32]
xyzzy@lemm.ee 10 months ago
It’s an interesting video, I suppose more so if you didn’t experience games in real time like those of us who did. No one ever thought Half-Life looked real. But wow, if you experienced games starting with text only and colored squares like I did, each new capability was incredible.
In Zork, you were wondering around an entire dungeon, simulated in text. Anything was possible!
Then a game like Ultima VII came around. The world was so huge, and it felt like a whole world where I could do anything. It was to me how Skyrim was in its time.
Ultima Underworld (or Wolfenstein 3-D or Doom for most people) felt incredible because it was movement in a 3D space, but without step transitions like the earlier dungeon games. When I walk, I actually see my movement in real time.
Each step was bringing us closer and closer to reality, and when you get to a game like Half-Life, where it feels like a small section of a world was being faithfully simulated, it was incredible.
I was reading one of my old magazines and there was an article mentioning how water on Unreal(the original) was so close to real life.
Also I remember playing Alien vs Predator FPS and mentioning to a friend that games couldn’t get much better graphics because it was almost indistinguishable from reality
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nobody thought that it looked real, but people were impressed that it could represent reality. Five years before Half Life the most cutting-edge FPS couldn’t do slanted floors or have one room on top of another, and every enemy was a 2D sprite shown from eight different angles. Two years before Half Life the cutting edge was the muddy brown abstract fantasy environments of Quake. There’d been attempts to represent realistic environments in Build-engine games, but they had their own sets of limitations. Half Life was one of the first times that we had a 3D game where things just looked like the things they looked like. You’d never mistake them for the real thing, but you could easily tell at a glance what they were supposed to be, which wasn’t the case only a short time before.
xyzzy@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Exactly, every couple of years there was another big leap in verisimilitude.