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Original Halo was released in 2001, 23 years ago.
Super Mario Bros was released in 1985, 39 years ago.
There is less time between the release of the first SMB and Halo than Halo and the present day, 16 years…
It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down. Back in the 80s and 90s a 5 year old game looked horribly outdated. Now we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.
Technology has slowed down, but there’s also diminishing returns for what you can do with a game’s graphics etc.
- The original Halo ran at 480p on the Xbox. 4K UHD has 27 times the number of pixels as that. The resolution increase from the NES to Halo was about 5.35 times.
- Games nowadays on PCs are often capable of running smoothly into the hundreds of frames per second, but of course for example the difference between 21 and 30 FPS is more noticeable than the one between 231 and 240 FPS. (Looking at you, OoT)
- Render distances are much larger with less obvious compromise on LoD.
- Stuff like ray-tracing is of some graphical benefit but is hugely computationally taxing, and there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s just more diminishing returns.
- Physics engines are much more complex.
- At some point, a limiting factor just becomes art direction and budget. You can have all the fancy techniques you want, but you still need to make detailed textures, animations, etc.
- The amount of polygons starts to hit a ceiling too where the model is basically continuous to the human eye, so adding more polys might only help very subtly.
- Color depth is basically a solved problem now too compared to going from the NES to the Xbox.
You can think of sampling audio. If I have a bit depth of 1, and I upgrade that to 16, it’s going to sound a hell of a lot more like an improvement than if I were to upgrade from 48 to 64.
I think something worth noting about older games too is that they didn’t try and deal with many of their limitations head on. In fact many actually took advantage of their limitations to give the feeling of doing more than they actually were. For example, pixel perfect verus crt. Many 8 bit and 16 bit games were designed specifically for televisions and monitors that would create the effect of having more complexity than they were actually capable of. Other things like clever layout designs in games to limit draw distance, or bringing that in as a functional aspect of the game.
The technical limitations seem largely resolved by current technology, where previously things were made to look and feel better than the hardware allowed through clever planning and engineering.
Oh, absolutely this. I think the YouTube channel GameHut is a great example of the lengths devs went to to get things working. In Ratchet & Clank 3, Insomniac borrowed memory from the PS2’s second controller port to use for other things during single-player (PS2 devs did so much crazy shit that within the PCSX2 project, we often joke about how they “huffed glue”). The channel Retro Game Mechanics explained and the book “Racing the Beam” have great explanations for the lengths Atari devs had to go to just to do anything interesting with the system. Even into the seventh generation of consoles, the Hedgehog Engine had precomputed light sources as textures to trick your brain.
Heeeyyy buddy, wass up didn’t expect to find you around here! And yeah. Rachet also has some ass backward stuff with The way it tries to force 60 FPS all the time which Ironically made it run worse in PCSX2 for the longest time till more accurate timings for the EE were found.
Oh shit, hey Beard. I didn’t expect to see you here either. For that matter I didn’t think anyone else surrounding the project used Lemmy. Cool to know I’m not alone.
Hell yeah! I think Kam might be around here somewhere but not a hundred percent on that. Ofc, Rachet is a good example. But we all know the real insanity is Marvel Nemesis xD
I assume this was supposed to say “more noticeable,” not “less”:
but of course for example the difference between 21 and 30 FPS is less noticeable than the one between 231 and 240 FPS
Ah, yep. lmao
- At some point, a limiting factor just becomes art direction and budget. You can have all the fancy techniques you want, but you still need to make detailed textures, animations, etc.
Very possibly generative AI will alleviate this, although it has yet to produce convincing 3d models or animations.
It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down.
We haven’t slowed down. We simply aren’t noticing the degrees of progress, because they’re increasingly below our scale of discernment. Going from 8-bit to 64-bit is more visually arresting than 1024-bit to 4096-bit. Moving the rendered horizon back another inch is less noticeable each time you do it, while requiring r^2 more processing power to process all those extra assets.
No we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.
The classic games look good because the art is polished and the direction is skilled. Go back and watch the original Star Wars movie and its going to be more visually acute than the latest Zack Snyder film. Not because movie graphics haven’t improved in 40 years, but because Lucas was very good at his job while Synder isn’t.
But then compare Avatar: The Way of Water to Tron. Huge improvements, in large part because Tron was trying to get outside the bounds of what was technically possible long before it was practical, while Avatar is taking computer generated graphics to their limit at a much later stage in their development.
yeah it’s like with F1 racing you hit 99% of your min lap time but then it take a million dollars of R&D for each second reduction in min lap time after that.
Popularised by The Law of Diminishing Returns.
Same with movies. LOTR is almost 25 years old and still looks great.
Jurassic Park released in 1993. 31 years ago…
Alien in 1979…
True. Was playing Arkham Knight the other day and thought this nine year old game looked better than at least half of current gen games.
Getting ready for Shadows, eh? At least that’s the reason I replayed AK the other day. And Origins. And Asylum. And am in the middle of City.
Last time I was amazed with graphical progress was with Unreal in 1998. And probably just because I hadn’t played Quake 2.
From then on until now it’s just been a steady and normal increase in expected quality.
Doom 3 might have come close (and damn, that leaked Alpha was impressive) but by the time it was released it looked just slightly better than everything else.
Obligatory:
Hmm I think GTA 3 , as an engine / open world environment was like a whoa moment from me. Then Modern warfare of course . Recently God Of War and Assasin Creed Odysseys rendition of Ancient Greece is quite spectacular.
Remember that one DNF trailer? It looked mindblowingly good back then.
Damn, should have scrolled farther before looking this up myself.
This is distressing
Crazy to know that Cleopatra was born closer to the creation of Halo: Combat Evolved than to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Oh my god stop! He’s already dead!
Pac Man was younger when Halo was released than Master Chief is today.
You made my knees hurt.
You could use Space Invaders on the Atari
And next year you’ll be able to use Space Invaders the arcade game
Pic has Yoshi. I believe that was Super Mario World, 1990.
It was, but they’re just making a point unrelated to the specific Mario game depicted.
Damn, even worse for Halo
There’s only 4 years between FF7 and Halo
…Hmm this guy must be wrong
Checks
FF7 1997/ Halo: CE 2001
Fuck me!
Wow
At least they used the correct armor.
It irks me when they use the armor from Halo 2 or the remastered game to represent Combat Evolved.
Combat Evolved came out 23 years ago. That’s older than Super Mario Bros. was when the Wii launched.
I am very upset with you right now.
I want to downvote you but I cant.
Go ahead
Retro isn’t a number. It’s two disconnects. There is always something new - innately distinct, previously implausible, promising of future trends. When new things change enough, stuff that existed beforehand becomes old - tangibly dated, behind the times, automatically uncool. When that new stuff in turn becomes old, the old-old stuff becomes retro - distinct from merely out-of-fashion, illustrative of shifting perspectives, capable of being judged on its own merits.
This is why it’s possible to make brand-new games that are still “retro games.” The indicators of a particular era no longer feel poor-quality or unpleasantly limited once they’ve lost direct comparison to modern novelty. Low resolution is a style choice now that it’s plainly not performance-related. Limited color is an affectation. 3D can be taken for granted, so games doing it badly are doing it on purpose.
I say all this to argue: Halo’s not retro because it’s not even retro. It’s just fucking old. The last big disconnect was in the goddamn 360 era. GTA IV looks like an upscaled PS2 game and GTA V still feels like a mid-budget PS5 game. PBR shading, local lights-- I don’t think GTA V specifically had screen-space reflections, but it was definitely A Thing by the end of the PS3 / 360 era. Volumetric fog was in PS3 launch titles.
Meanwhile so many open worlds have become “one of those games where you fuck a map,” which solidified in Assassin’s Creed. What are the exceptions? Soulsbornes? Yeah guess where those took off. Halo’s just one generation prior to linear titles like MW2. No the other MW2. It’s the slightly-lower-contrast, slightly-less-scripted predecessor of a whole bunch of games that were trying to one-up it. Calling any of those “Halo killers” fundamentally distinct feels like arguing “Doom clones” were in a different genre.
Christ, even the retro-as-a-style thing has its inflection point in the 360 era. Cave Story was a big fucking deal. XBLA gave small indie games a taste of revenue. GBA homebrew shifted neatly to shoving emulators on PSP.
It is increasingly difficult to make any game that was unprecedented ten years prior. The toolkit gets wider and wider, but even a sudden massive increase in rendering power wouldn’t allow much that we haven’t expertly faked. I feel like the PS4 came and went without any distinguishing features whatsoever. (I don’t even remember if it was the bold black rectangle or the italic black rectangle.) Contrast this with how Super Mario Bros launched against an Atari that boasted several sprites, and then the NES’s last official game was on shelves beside Tekken 2.
The counterargument to this might be that anything without live-service gacha bullshit is now old. In which case… burn it all down and start over.
This is a really great reply and I agree with all your points. Very well laid out. I’m glad my admittedly low-effort/boilerplate comment could prompt it.
What are your thoughts on “vintage”? I mod [email protected] but I don’t want it to be that restrictive so I settled on adding “retro” to the community display name. The name was form a reddit community I think but someone requested it here so I made it. But now I’m thinking maybe I should have just with “old” or maybe “outdated”?
Vintage implies a level of appreciation. Presumably you wouldn’t post a page of dull classified ads that look barely removed from modern fare, or even generic colorful flyers for amusingly-dated PC hardware. There’s a similar separation: vintage ads are interesting in their own right and for their reflection of culture, not because they’re effective at making you want to buy Doctor Schnortonheimer’s Tincture Of Cocaine In Suspension Of Cocaine.
Shiiit… By 2 years. 3 if you go by the Japanese release.
You think you’re old? I was playing Bungie games when they were only on Mac.
Back then, Halo felt like running 26.219 miles
Leela was my first in-game crush
I played Atari 2600 back when it was the console to have. I didn’t see a pixel that wasn’t square until I was a man. You think you know old gaming. I was born into it, molded by it, and it made me what I am today; an old man with back pain.
You think you’re old? I was playing games on Apples, not Macs…
You think your old. I was playing pong with paddles on channel 3.
You think you are old? I was playing Duodecim Scribta at Ancient Rome!
I still miss the atomic hand grenade…
Frog blast the vent core!
It stings at first, but once you realize you can now play all of the classics on emulators it helps take the pain away.
Nintendo would like to know your location
Nintendo knows
I heard he’s a pretty cool guy and doesn’t afraid of anything.
He afraids of 343’s writing
What if, instead of leading humanity in a fight for survival against a diverse mix of alien races with complex social structures, he fought some apes on an otherwise uninhabited planet?
Give this man a lead writing credit.
“let’s make the big bad kick his ass off screen and then disappear!”
Yeah but remember the way Xbox started up? So futuristic. Boomba Boom boom SQUAAAOOW blblblbblbltingley bingley beep beep dink. That could never be retro.
Reminds me of making mouth noises.
I stumbled across this today and still don’t believe it
That’s impossible…
Look in your heart, you know it to be true
Yeah, it does. They gave Half-Life’s spot to that crappy game.
I thought the halo ce was generally very well received. Is the hate for it a lemmy generation thing?
Alotta half-life and older shooter fans blame the modern console shooter style on halo.
I’ve been playing for the first time a while back. It’s neat, but I think the primary reason people love it so much is that it’s the first popular console FPS that didn’t control horribly and split screen co-op. On it’s own it’s just a decent shooter that no longer feels special.
It is and it’s certainly a better game than HL.
It’s not hard to be honest, time wasn’t kind to HL 1.
It was revolutionary and changed a lot in game design on a significant number of fronts. It just aged poorly as others iterated and replaced its aspects. Halo has aged well mainly because (like most Bungie titles) it still feels like a modern title due to how tight, responsive, smooth, and intuitive the player’s interaction with the world is — mainly the controls and weapons.
I thought the halo ce was generally very well received.
So was a whole bunch of other FPS tripe that glorified USian militarism.
PacMan is pretty boring but its not that bad.
Time to change this community name to u/reallyoldgames.
i still fire up the old star wars raster(or is it vector, i forget) arcade game sometimes. mame is great for stuff like that
It’s vector.
Raster is a grid of dots, vector is lines from point to point.
Young Link’s third appearance was as a dead skeleton afraid that he left no legacy 18 years ago.
What’s the game to the left of Halo? It’s the only one I can’t make out.
I want to say that’s Tetris.
Here’s a clearer image:
No, it’s clearly St Basil’s Cathedral, not a video game!
Its representing Captain Bible, obviously
It is without a doubt Tetris
Looks like a Russian palace, maybe Tetris?
talk about feeling old… does Tetris no longer include this image?
Not really as much anymore
Space Invaders, Asteroid, Pong, Adventure… these are retro
Nah, Space War is retro.
