But how are we going to emulate proprietary online services for games relying on them?
Games preservation should be legally enshrined, and require client and server source code to be published if a provider decides to stop running the online services required to play.
Not that most modern multiplayer games are worth preserving due to their toxic design, but this isn’t a huge issue. BF2 servers started back up thanks to Russians loving the shit out of that game. Warcraft 3 is still very much playable online and NOT on battlenet thanks to W3Connect. Fightcade made 90s 2D fighters playable online. Numerous console emulators support netplay.
There are lots of examples of online services being REd to bring old games back to life, but doing it after the service has been killed off is A LOT of work
If more people captured network traffic of these services before they’re killed it’ll probably make REing the service much easier later
Well, if your games is popular enough some may start to do revival project or create these custom servers.
Back in late 2000s I rememver my brother who used to play WoW on private server (which unaffiliated with Blizzard) and mostly these unofficial server are popular for MMOs game back then.
Nowaday, you can have something like OpenSpy which emulates GameSpy servers runs by communities. It is all depend how deeper you want to venture each games.
What you can’t preserve is the joy of playing on period correct experience :)
This is a fairly lofty and unrealistic goal. Unfortunately, the right for companies to keep their source code private isn’t going to go away anytime soon and if they were legally compelled to release binaries, the setup for a modern cloud based online experience is not for the faint of heart.
A more realistic goal would be to say that all products should be usable offline (with exceptions for impossibilities like an instant messenger or something)
If the online servers don’t exist anymore, there should be a path to functionality without them. For everything, given the rise of iot especially. If there’s a path to functionality without the online service there’s a path to preserving the game
Private servers don’t really happen much or at all anymore, “here’s a .exe you can run” idea doesn’t scale on modern online infrastructure well
Emulation is typically a very difficult thing to do, often requiring cracking the original game to get it to work with non official servers and also mapping and building out all the online subsystems. It’s rare.
Git off discord tho for game development, it ends up causing only the types of people who are really active on discord to interact and give feedback and I have seen that really send some games off the rails as the rest of the playerbase begins to get the vibe the game is being developed for a small sliver of the game’s fans (the ones on discord and really active).
Speaking from experience giving the loudest users real time access to your sanity isn’t great either. Better to corral them into a slower mode of communication, such as an old fashion forum or use githubs “discussions” feature. Then you can spend your weekend on unwinding without a bunch of kids screeching that they’ve been ignored because you missed some message that was checks notes 200 paragraphs of back scrolling.
p.s. its 1000x worse when you inherit this kind of “community” from someone before you who let the monkeys do whatever. All I can say is thank god discord has that slow-mode feature now.
Seriously. Definitely gives the loudest a place to control how games should work. And when they don’t get their way, they get loud in other places and make drama.
One of the biggest mistakes I keep seeing devs make is listening to the no-lifers who live on social media. Especially the content whiners: fuck content, make the game work right first.
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions. I see devs have some issues with Steam forums because of the toxicity, but most still take feedback from there too.
Usually Discord is just a funnel to redirect feedback to an internal backlog though. Together with all the other channels, including in-game reporting tools.
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions.
I am sure most devs who primarily interact with their game’s community through discord believe they are listening to feedback from a variety of sources, but it is clear to me in every case I know of where a game has “join our discord!” plastered all over the store page that functionally the only place where your feedback will actually be taken seriously and get to the devs is discord.
That might just be the instant chat nature of Discord and how it’s easier to get a reply on there. I’m sure if you went the classic route of sending email it would be acknowledged as well, generally speaking.
You find out where that kid lives. Go to their town and tell them of how brave their father was and how he died next to you in battle fighting the enemy hordes. Tell him you made a promise to raise him and see to his education. Add child to raiding party. Raise him to be a merciless avenger in his father’s memory. Become the scourge of the continent. Eventually child finds out that you were the one who killed his father and turned him into a monster for your own profit. Meet child on the plains for a final battle. Refuse to lift your sword in defense because you’ve come to love him as your own. Oh no - the whole thing was a setup by the enemy: they leaked the truth to the kid and set up this meeting as an ambush for both of you, hoping you’d kill/weaken each other. Fight to your dying breath defending the kid and helping him escape. Last words your hear as he escapes and leaves you to your fate are about how much he’ll miss you and forgives you.
Alternate ending: Find kid, wait until kid is at birthday party, kill 5 kids, take loot, 4c, 5 poison vials. Letter from father says “I left because you were a bad son”. Wasn’t birthday party after all was suicide pact. Other 4 kids were half siblings with the same letters. As you walk away stunned but feeling slightly better you find a chest of weapons nearby and a manifesto. It was a murder suicide pact and these kids were in their way to slaughter the local happy families. You are a hero. Everyone claps. You leave the 4c.
In the distance you see he man you “killed”. It was all a setup to get you and those damn kids to weaken each other. He rides up laughing and says “welcome home son”.
If you’re implying that years of mindless consumerism and television have left my brain completely devoid of originality and creativity, leaving me unable to conjur up unique and never-before imagined stories not anything like those of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Lion King, Frailty, Thor, Batman Begins, Maleficent, Iron Man, and many, many others…well…that’d be a serious accusation friend. What kind of monster would do that? And on the internet?!
Games that I’ve played a bit but didn’t finish because I just don’t feel like it but have a story I’m really interested in? I’ll watch a let’s play or summary.
Other games that I got because I thought, maybe, I wait until I’ve finished a game and want something as a palate cleanser. These I’ll give a go and either really enjoy it and finish or do what I mentioned above.
Some I’ve saved because I really want to give them a try and, if it doesn’t work out, that’s ok.
It’s ok to have games you’ll never play. You bought them, or got them via some giveaway, and in both cases supported the devs and studios in the bargain and that’s good enough.
I loved bioshock. But just couldn’t get into bio shock 2. I have infinite and I may or may not get to it.
Sometimes I know a game is special before I start it and so I save it instead of giving it a quick run. Sometimes I end up not liking them, and that’s ok. Other times they’re perfect such as Outer Wilds. A game that is now my favorite game of all time and has held that spot for a few years.
I find that I’m leaning more and more into new experiences and unique stories lately (firewatch, outer wilds) or puzzles (baba is you) or a mix of both (Talos Principle 1&2) but other times I’ll spend hours and hours on something like satisfactory. Get super into it… and then feel like “this was fun, I’ve had a great time, what new experience should I go for now”
I can’t bring myself to finish dragon age inquisition.
Which sucks, it was a fantastic game I enjoyed nearly every minute of, and I wish I had gotten into the series when I had more free time than a hibernating bear.
No idea what it is, I just stopped playing one day and never started it back up, and now I just don’t have any interest in it.
Right. Some games are so good you like them. But it’s “uphill” to start them again… so it’s either don’t or just push through.
That’s why I’m such cases I’ll watch a let’s play. Something I can have in the background to get the lore or story. Or a video that explains the story for Death Stranding.
But for others, such as tears of the kingdom, that I had to stop halfway through because of a crazy work project and a lot of overtime I just went back and did side quests until the gist of what I was doing kind of came back to me.
In my experience, it’s a threefold problem for large-scale games like RPGs or AAA titles.
Playing the game in short bursts isn’t meaningful enough to be enjoyable. While you could do it, it would either be under pressure, or you would have so little time to do anything that it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing.
To get around that, you have to schedule playing the game into your day or carve time around it. It’s often difficult to do so, and games are usually the lowest priority activity for working adults.
When you can’t schedule the game in, you take a break to play a different game with less commitment requirements. Then, after a couple of months have passed, you realize that you have forgotten where you were in the story and what goals you were trying to achieve. That’s super demotivating, and it’s usually just easier to play a new game than try to figure out where you left off.
When you consider that, it kind of makes sense why small games like Vampire Survivors or handheld gaming (where quick suspend is a thing) have taken off in recent years.
And to add on to #3, you might not even remember how the game works. Like obviously movement is easy but you might forget some other important mechanics.
Though sometimes this can be a good thing because you might learn the game better the second time. Like I got stuck on one encounter in Doom Eternal and dropped the game for a while. I came back and loaded my old save but had no idea what I was doing because the gameplay loop is more complicated than “shoot everything and pick up drops”. So I started a new save to relearn it and didn’t even notice when I passed the point I was stuck on because it wasn’t hard at all the second time through.
I might end up doing this with persona 5 royal, too, though I put a lot more hours in to get where I’m stuck at.
I use dedicated cpu cores and other tweaks on my setup to reduce game input latency. Steam is always the 1 fucking program that randomly starves my remaining cores for absolutely no reason
It’s such a garbage-tier app and always has been. Credit to Valve for busting open online app stores, but I have no idea why people like Steam so much.
Absolutely hated it when I was forced to use it. Nowadays I don’t mind that much anymore. But if a game needs to launch another launcher first, that drives me crazy.
Looking at you, EA and Ubishit.
I got into steam because I could (using modded files) download valve games for free. It was like piracy but without the torrenting and gameboxart.jpg.exe shenanigans.
Then I liked Counter Strike, and portal was coming out… and now I have a few thousand bucks in games.
Still don’t like having to run a nanny program to be “allowed” to play the shit I paid for. But steam is the best of that garbage pile.
I got into it because I got Total War Napoleon (another annoying launcher with the Total War series nowadays…) and didn’t realize beforehand that you needed an Steam account for it.
I came around to appreciate the storefront and library for my purchased digital games. But as you said, I don’t want to have to run a nanny program to play my games. Especially my single player games.
That’s what I like about gog though, I can just download an offline installer for my games from them. Although I think by now even they have games on their store that require launchers.
That’s what I always find funny about the EGS hate crowd… They complain about the features it didn’t have at launch (that it now has) but in the end having to launch any launcher pisses me off, might as well use the one with the least garbage! No Valve, I don’t need fucking trading cards with my games!
Steam has a whole lot of useless features compared to Epic or GOG Galaxy, it’s the most bloated launcher available at the moment. Do you need cards and tradable items linked to your account to play your games?
What’s funny is that if the roles were reversed Epic would be accused of trying to monetize whales and gamblers, but no one bats an eye because it’s Valve doing it.
It’s clearly not part of this discussion because you can’t compare the user experience on Linux when the product you want to compare to doesn’t exist on it.
Also, you can just shut up if you can’t have a discussion without insulting the people you’re talking to, no one asked you to take part in the first place since clearly you’re trying to derail the discussion.
In a discussion where we’re comparing the user experience of two products we need to compare them in an environment where both products are working so the user can experience them both.
I don’t know how you can’t figure that out but here we are.
It’s not clear exactly why Hanzo has such a bad reputation, but it probably has to do with the fact that he’s a character who requires a highly skilled player to really be effective. Unlike other characters, Hanzo tends to work best as a lone wolf, so there’s often the perception that he’s not really contributing to the team’s composition as a whole. This becomes particularly irksome when a team has a hole in its composition that so desperately needs to be filled, but that last person on the team decides to go for Hanzo instead
Article here. I don’t play overwatch, so I didn’t get it.
A Hanzo Main is an insult Overwatch players throw around when one of their teammates exclusively plays the archer — Hanzo Shimada — regardless of the situation or how they’re playing.
Diehard fans of the archer will select him even when he’s clearly a poor choice, and refuse to switch characters if they’re struggling to find their mark and everyone else on their team is begging them to switch. To make matters worse, the most toxic Hanzo Mains are notorious for blaming their team for losing a game, even when it was clearly their unwillingness to cooperate that led to defeat.
Your explanation is actually good, the first article the other guy linked is trying so hard to justify bad hanzo players it’s funny.
Overwatch literally pings every time someone kills another, hanzo is a sniper, if he is good EVERYONE IN THE MATCH will notice. Good Hanzo players don’t play away from their teams, their range compared to Widow is low and they don’t have great disengage skills, they need their team to peel for them. A lone hanzo is a dead hanzo 90% of the time
The people that matter have gotten paid anyway, unless of course the publisher steal from them too, which happens from time to time, see Bethesda and Mick Gordon.
Thankfully the talent still exists, so they might move on to other places, do their own thing, or leave game dev altogether.
Gamedev is an extremely toxic career, and it has been for a very long time. I’m glad people are finally starting to at least somewhat care, if only for the studios themselves.
Sheesh, I didn’t realize it was doing that bad. I recall hearing them implement some really questionable business moves in Payday 2, so this is pretty funny to see.
More like explicitly stating no loot boxes, then several years later announcing loot boxes and editing their own forum post to remove the no loot boxes section of the comment.
Not to mention the conviction of the previous CEO of insider trading.
I don’t get why companies everywhere think that making a promise, then quietly editing it out before breaking the promise is going to work at all for them?
Yes, generally if it’s new to me, I don’t have an appreciation of how their individual play styles will match mine, so I’ll default to the malez same as me. However, where I’m familiar with the characters and their game style, I’ll choose what suits the game in the style I like to play.
So for instance, street fighter is chin li for life.
Same dude. People make a big deal of this shit all the time but it literally does not matter to me.
If the game wants me to create a character I’ll just make a dude like me and spec him out with the stats I want. If there’s preset characters to choose from, I couldn’t care less who they are. If I want to play a necromancer and the only one is an 8ft pink lizard lady that farts rainbows, fuck it, I’m playing an 8ft tall lizard lady necromancer that farts rainbows.
Yeah, but that’s an interesting thing to talk about I think.
My gf always creates characters looking as closely as possible to her. I do the exact opposite. What’s funny is that… she lacks self confidence and I do not. So it’s not about that. I suppose it’s something else that determines us that way. I have an idea, but I wanted others opinions.
Well if you want my opinion, I do it out of sheer laziness. Like I said above, I’m way more into tuning the stats in RPG builds than appearance. Sure, if I need to be a non-human to get a particular buff or ability I want, then I’ll do that. Otherwise, it’s human male, olive skin, short black hair, beard, done.
The height of new game glory for me were the old school huge boxes PC games came in. It wasn’t uncommon to get a thick manual with wonderful art, sometimes spiral bound, maps, other neat add-ins. Even console games had nice manuals with useful information you may not otherwise know. I miss that stuff.
I wrote a similar reply to a higher comment without seeing yours, and I completely agree - I miss it.
I was a bit younger in the 90s and half the magic of the ride home was reading the manual so you could hit the ground running when you installed it/put the cartridge in/loaded the tape.
Endermen are famously inspired by the creepy pasta Slenderman.
Markus Pearson has a lot of problems, but I haven’t seen anything to confirm that Endermen are born from racism. Everything mentioned in the image was just an unfortunate collection of coincidences.
(I’m researching this and found a funny comment about how Notch put Endermen in the game then immediately admitted that they were a horrible idea because their taking blocks disrupted normal gameplay.)
Didn’t get the “graphics can’t get any better” idea, however, when Quake came out, and we turned on GL graphics, it really hit me that eventually graphics could, eventually, be actually realistic. Like, it is hard to explain to people born after this era the INSANE leap forward Quake was.
Oh, man, I'm about to relitigate an almost 30 year old nerd argument. Here we go.
I thought Quake looked like crap.
It's brown, and blocky and chunky and in software mode at 320x200 it's barely putting together a readable, coherent picture at all. Compared to what the peak of legacy tech was at the time, which was probably Duke Nukem 3D, I thought it was a genuine step backwards.
Now, it played well, it was fast and they got a ton of mileage out of the real 3D geometry to make crazy and cool level designs. But visually? Hot garbage.
You're right that the game changer was actually 3D acceleration, and Quake did come to life when it started hitting HD resolutions of 480p or (gasp) 800p, comparable to what we were already getting in Build engine games and 2D PC games elsewhere, but the underlying assets are still very, VERY ugly. To me it all came together in Quake 2, which was clearly built for the hardware. That's when I went "well, I need one of these cards now" and went to get a Nvidia Riva.
I have no complaints about Quake's sound design, though. I can hear it in my head right now. No music, just sound effects. I don't know what that shotgun sound is taken from, but it's definitely not a shotgun and it sounds absolutely amazing.
Oh, and on the original point, I'm not super sure of "graphics can't get any better" beign a thing that I thought, but I do remember when somebody showed me a PS2 screenshot of Silent Hill 2 gameplay in a magazine I mocked them for clearly having mistaken a prerendered cutscene for real time graphics. Good times.
I will agree with you. Quake came out and really stretched the hardware of the time.
I can remember timedemos on a 486/80-- a slow machine for the time, but one that would not be absurd for an ordinary home user- and it was pulling less than 1 frame per second, on a machine where Heretic was playable and had a richer, more exciting world. I could see, yes, the enemies are actually made of polygons instead of scaling sprites, but you gave up so much else for it.
I wonder if multiplayer, even more than the “true 3D” is what gave it the sticking power. The lack of story and olive drab level design didn’t matter there as much.
I think long term, absolutely. At the time, though, very few people were playing online, and a lot of the praise heaped on Quake was for the single player game and the visuals, which I never got.
I mean, I was on a Pentium 133, so I could play it pretty much as intended, I just thought it looked ugly. At that point in software mode I didn't find it looked any better than Magic Carpet, which had stuff like animated waves and water reflections, and you could make a 3D volcano come out of the ground in real time. It's pretty nuts how far the 3D characters took it.
Side note: Magic Carpet is a technological marvel and we don't talk about it enough. Peak non-accelerated 3D environments ever, right there.
Large scale terrain deformation and morphing in real time, procedural fire and magma, gravity physics for objects on slopes and, again, animated, reflective 3D water. All running on software with support for a high resolution mode.
The year before the PlayStation 1 launched.
It is a miracle of dark magic and computer science and I don't understand how it can possibly exist. That game is the reason every time Peter Molyneux came up with some random, obviously impossible garbage everybody went "alright, but maybe?"
Absolutely this, half a hour ago I’ve seen this game for the first time in my life on YouTube and thinked for myself, is it real? I mean castle appearing out of nowhere is alright, it is possible with that time tech, but red faction like destruction and fire and magma physics and water looking like it was made with shaders, oh my god i was shocked, and without need for gpu on hardware of that time? They made impossible possible
It doesn't, honestly, but man, at the time a CRT sure did wonders to blend the pre-rendered backgrounds and a lot of the places where stuff came up short. It really did look great.
I appreciate what you’re getting at, but I also think you forget how grey Duke 3d was.
I agree Quake was too brown and grey, but the idea it was ‘visually hot garbage’ is definitely an outside take. We finally had 3d models that weren’t sprites, not to mention how impressive prerendered Lightmaps were for the time.
I will agree that GLQuake was when the graphics really were at their best.
Man, that's more like it, I was starting to get weirded out by how little pushback I was getting. And the two of you pushing back are being super civil, even. I guess this conversation has lost a lot of its edge now the games are 30 years old and we're no longer in school.
Anyway, it does feel like you're cherrypicking a little bit there. I mean, sure, there's plenty of grey textures in Dule Nukem, but even if you turn around from that spot you mention the entrance to the cinema is full of reds and yellows, the cop pigs are wearing bright blue and once you get inside the theatre it's all red curtains and colourful posters. There is surprisingly little in terms of good screenshots or video of software Quake as it was for a legit comparison, and even when I took one it got mushed and compressed to crap, but hey, that version is an extra on the GOG version of Quake, go check it out, it's an eye openener.
I don't disagree that Quake was done the "hard way", and the lighting effects and 3d models were technically impressive at the time, what I'm saying here is the picture they put together with it was not as appealing.
I totally disagree. I liked the design of quake a lot more than duke nukem. I liked the dark, dungeonesque aesthetic, and, even without GL particle physics, thought it was much better looking than it’s predecessors. It was designed to look like huge temples to eldritch gods and it nailed that.
Quake2 was a big improvement in PvP, however I think it had a lot of the same blockiness, the gibb was less impressive, and it suffered a lot of the same issues with color, just instead of brown/black/green/red, it was grey/green/yellow/red. Sure the polygons were smaller, and more numerous, time, and tech, had advanced. However it wasn’t a huge improvement. I also preferred the sound design of the first, and not just the musical sound track, Quake 1 was much more eerie. It really wasn’t until Q3 Arena that the color palate really opened up.
Previous games looked like cardboard cut outs with higher quality pictures glued to them, in a world of plywood covered covered frames also with images glued to them. Quake was like mannequins passing though a brutalist architecture mock-up.
However, 1996 I had and ATI Rage GPU. In 1997 I upgraded to a pent2 mmx with a voodoo that had a secondary 2d card supporting it. So I may have had a different experience.
I don't think Q2 had nearly as many issues with color as a whole through the game. I mean, it wasn't the most colourful game either on any given screenshot, but it had more biomes and locations. At the very least they learned how to make outdoors look like outdoors, with the bright red skies contrasting with the grey interiors. Later on they even throw a bunch of green lights around when they're feeling frisky.
You're not wrong that Id only stopped making brown games in Quake 3, which if anything is a bit too garish sometimes. I also don't disagree about your description of early shooters, all I'm saying is that people had been getting good at using that cardboard cutout tech and people had gotten good at parsing it. Moving to full 3D required a few steps backwards to then push the tech back past that point, and Quake 1 was a big muddy mess of a game. If you were able to read brutalist eldrich temples as opposed to sand-colored legos that's fair, but even with all the flashy new tech it never read like that to me at the time.
Fyi, quakes’ music and sound effects were made by Trent Reznor (nine inche nails). There were definitely nin logos in Quake 2. He described the “music” not as music but ambient sounds to make things creepy but also contributed the sound effects, presumably for the shotgun also.
Really? I hadn't heard about that extremely prominent aspect of the game's development and marketing for thirty years. You don't happen to have any shocking news about the origins of Super Mario Bros. 2 by any chance, do you?
Alright, alright, I'll tone down the snark, it's just... yeah, that reads a certain way.
But also yeah, he kinda killed it. The Q2 soundtrack in particular has been in my music players longer than some European countries have existed.
I jest you not! I was a nin fan before ever playing the game so I was tuned in when I first saw the logos in game. I think if you go back and play even the first level of Q2 you’ll see them. He did 1 also but I’m not sure there were logos in that. It’s even listed on the Wikipedia site if that confirms that I’m not full of crap.
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Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.
Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.
Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.
Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.
I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished.
I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB. For most of the life of the medium you'd mostly get the 74 min, 650MB one. The stretch 700 and up standards were fairly late-day. I tend to default to 500 in my head because it was a decent way to figure out how many discs you'd need to store a few gigs of data back in the day, though, not because I spent more time with the 63 min CDs.
The smallest standard for CDs was 63 minutes and 550-ish MB
I think I came along around 2 years after burners were commercially available, so I never saw that. And the 700 MB discs came along very shortly later. So I never had a concept of a 550 MB CD (btw you said 500 MB). This is the first I’ve heard of it.
It did exist, I promise. But again, I just default to 500 because it was such common shorthand to think about it in terms of needing two discs to store a gig. And to this day I still have 650 CDs laying around, even when 700MB ones were available they were both around at once.
I think some of the mismatch may also be that you're thinking about it in terms of storage only (i.e. CD-Rs) because of your age and I'm probably a bit older and was mostly talking about them as read-only media. It was years between the first CDs in the late 80s and writers being widespread at all, assuming whatever game or application that came in a single CD was going to take 500 meg-ish to duplicate or install was, again, pretty useful.
In any case, this is obsolete trivia. The point is we went from games being tens of megs to hundreds of megs overnight, and we were all extremely pleased about it.
You are half right. I am misremembering 63min being the original standard of the red book audio CD, that was 650 already, although apparently 63 min CDs were used for audio mastering at some point? Info about that is sparse. As a side note, man, modern search engines suuuck.
Anyway, 63min/550MB was the low capacity standard of the CD-R instead.
And also this, from a eBay auction selling a box and labelling them "incredibly rare", which apparently is accurate. I came just shy of digging through my pile of old CDs to see if I have any left. I may still do that next time I have them on hand.
I mean, the demo for Rollercoaster Tycoon (Mr. “Hand coded in assembly” there) bricked our Windows 98 machine when i installed it as a kid. My dad was pissed: we had to reformat the harddrive, reinstall windows, all that.
Bigger was better, since a larger game meant they packed in more content. Now the bloat is out of control since all game content is delivered over the Internet.
Bloat is out of control because games are HUGE and you can often trade size for performance if you have enough memory to do so.
Also, memory used to be extremely expensive, especially catridge ROMs. Outside of the Switch this is less of a concern now, that's true, but the tradeoff is you get to have pin-sharp high resolution assets and tons of performance optimizations instead of... you know, just chopping enough frames of animation to fit your sprites in 16 megabits then charge a hundred bucks for the extra-sized cart. You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now for the money it used to cost to buy a single game shipped on a cartridge.
The hard drive I had to wipe from the OS, as I mentioned above was a whole 20 gig. 386-ish era. It seemed so huge when I got it (and so expensive) and by the time that PC was done it was... well, a "wipe to OS to fit stuff in" drive.
But that's not necessarily the point, the more relevant thing is how big things are relative to storage and how cheap it is to upgrade storage. It's true that storage sizes and prices plateaued for a while, so a bunch of people are still running on 1-2 TB while the games got into the hundreds of GB. But still, storage had gotten so proportionately cheap before then, and very fast storage is so overkill now. A 1TB Gen 3 NVMe is 75 bucks, and most games will run fine on it, Sony propaganda notwithstanding.
You can fit loads of x360-ps3 era games in the same space CoD warzone takes. The irony is that, for PC players with lower specs, that’s a lot of wasted storage, since they’ll never use/load the higher res textures.
You can buy a terabyte of extremely fast storage now
That line of thinking is what leads to extreme, unnecessary bloat. “Just buy more storage, brah”
You can absolutely do that. You can also fit 16 frames of the Xbox 360 game into a single frame of the Xbox Series X game.
Sometimes people forget how much bigger a 4K target is compared to a 720p image, so I added a bit of a visual aid below. Those two screenshots are to scale, displayed at the native resolutions of their respective platforms. Just keep in mind that the big one is from a 1440p 21:9 monitor, so on a 4K TV the picture would have two of those stacked on top of each other.
It's good that this is smaller, because If you squint you can also notice the Xbox 360 game is extremely blurry and looks like it's in black and white. That's because it is. The 360 had 512megs of ram, to share between the CPU and the GPU. The Xbox Series X has 16 gigs, so 32 times more, and it's running a cool 300 times faster. 360 games were compressing textures within an inch of their lives to fit them into that tiny slab of memory, stripping color data among other things.
Computers are not magic. If you want to draw 15 million pixels of a wall and not have it look like soup you need data for each of those pixels. If you want that data to fit in less space you have to either spend resources compressing and decompressing it or you need more storage to put it in. Or you can draw it procedurally, I guess, but then you're back to the performance problem.
On the other thing, it's not "just buy more storage, brah", it's that storage has to ramp linearly with memory. If you are trying to build huge worlds running at hundreds of frames and streaming data at gigabytes per second out of a SSD you're going to need to put those assets somewhere. The problem isn't (just) that games are big, it's that the ability to move those big assets has grown a bit faster than the ability to make cheaper, faster storage for the same price.
Games aren't big because developers are lazy, they're big because physics and engineering are hard and not every piece of technology improves at the same rate. But hey, on the plus side, storage HAS gotten cheaper. By the end of its life the PS3 was shipping 500 GB. The PS5 and Xbox Series ship 32 times more ram but only 1.5 to 2x more storage because storage is where everybody is skimping to contain costs. That's not commensurate with the increase of visual fidelity or asset size, but at least you can add more for relatively little money, especially on PC.
EDIT: Sorry, this client didn't like the picture going in. Link to an example below from a random image hosting site. Follow it at your peril, I make no claims about its safety. https://ibb.co/Ss7RfzW
Right. That was common, too. Games were tiny and very expensive, so broken balance was often used to pad out length. And yeah, it got crazy once Americans started popularizing rental and publishers got desperate to make the games less economical to beat without purchasing them.
I did finish Ecco 1 legit, though. Once.
I've tried the last couple of stages a few times. I still don't understand how tween me managed that. Even on a CRT with original hardware and zero lag that's a stupid thing to try to do.
I remember reading an early-2000s book on game dev. It did mention that some game (I want to say one of the Unreal games, but I can't recall for sure) had to code their level loading in assembler because it was taking upwards of 10 minutes in C++.
Yeah, I definitely think the OP has super rose-colored glasses on. The free shareware was pretty awesome, though. I had one called "80 mega-hits" or something like that with a ton of games (many of which my poor old PC couldn't run).
I do think that optimization has slacked off more as hardware prices generally trended down. Disk space I don't so much mind, but memory and CPU are still expensive.
The “free shareware” thing is kind of back. I’ve been noticing more and more games producing demos; check out Steam Next fest, for example.
I also remember playing a ton of games from a CD. I had a Mac at the time, but it was “dos compatible”, which meant it had a 486 in addition to the Mac processor at the time, so you could switch over into dos, though you could only allocate half the ram to it.
We ended up installing Windows 95 to play a lot of the games, which ran great on the available 4 MB of RAM.
This is one of those things where I'm not sure what people mean when they say it.
There are bugs that affect performance, and yeah, we're generally more likely to see bugs fro several reasons now. But there's also games just being heavy. We're not in a cycle where the top of the line hardware just maxes out many games, because... well, we're doing real time path-tracing, we have monitors that go up to 400 Hz and resolutions up to 4K. The times of "set it to Ultra and forget about it" with a 1080 are gone and not coming back for a really long time. Plus everything has to scale wider now, because on the other end we have actual handhelds now, which is nuts.
So yeah, I'm not sure which one people are complaining about these days. I'll say that if you can play a game in a handheld PC and then crank it up to look like an offline rendered path traced movie that's way more thought to scalability than older games ever had, but maybe that's a slightly different conversation.
Oh, that's a whole other subject. "Old games were so polished and fully finished". Meanwhile, half of the planet was either playing games squished down, in slow motion or both. And most of them didn't even know.
It's not as simple as that, either. May people think all games ran 15% slower. Many games did have some retiming somewhere, but it was definitely not great and people didn't complain because with no internet, they often didn't realize what was going on.
Yeah I remember the specific clock speed thing! I had a game that I loved on a friend’s computer and didn’t get to play it much. Some sort of space sim / combat game. Years later I had my own much more powerful machine and was hyped to check it out. Installed via dosbox or whatever, loaded it up, and it ran at fucking 10x speed! It took seconds to walk around a city and the combat was completely unplayable. So sad but also pretty funny. No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware. If you want an easier game, just get a worse computer apparently.
At my buddy's house, he had a game called something like 'wings of glory' that was meant for an older clock speed. We were messing with the turbo button and it quickly became unplayable when not in the slower mode.
It was the first time I played it and found the combat frustratingly difficult because of the increased speed. Especially in dungeons where I had to bait enemies one by one just to not get overwhelmed. One hand was always holding a healing spell as well.
Man I loved the hell out of my SB16. I still play a lot of old DOS games in emulation and work pretty hard to get them to sound like I remember vs the higher fidelity versions.
Hah. In fairness, sound cards weren't "minimum requirements". It's just that depending on the hardware you had the game would just have a completely different soundtrack, 75% of which sounded completely broken. If you were lucky the "minimum spec" was silence. If you were unlucky it was making your beeper sound like somebody had tripped a car alarm.
People these days are out there emulating Roland MT-32s on Raspberry Pis. I didn't have a sound card until the Pentium era. Every DOS game in my memory sounds like a Furby got a bad case of hiccups.
I leave this as an example, but please understand this is the absolute best case scenario. Michael Land and the rest of the Lucas guys were wizards and actually cared to tune things for multiple options, including really impressive beeper music.
I have heard the difference of sound cards before in a video explaining it, but it is still just a wild too me to hear it, and nearly a bit difficult to imagine it actually being that way. Like I KNOW it was how sound on computers was at that time, but it is still hard to imagine my games sounding so completely differently depending on what pc I play it on.
I have the opposite problem, where I have to remind myself that a lot of people making these memes just don't have a frame of reference for any of this. I'm used to having been there for the vast majority of home computing, it's so hard for me to parse having been born with computers just mostly working the way they do now.
I can somewhat comprehens the difference in appearance and sometimes game play, but at the same time not really. I have seen the same game be different on pc vs console and a third version on handheld, and while I know this where all computers, I still very much think of them in the way of game consoles you could also do computer things on, even though I know that they were computers that you could play games on.
I blame it a bit on terminology, every time I hear about old computers, they are always referred to much more similar to how we refer to games consoles today then we do with computers. It is an Amiga 500, Amiga 1000 or an Atari 7800 or Atari ST. That is much more similar in my head to like Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 2 or PlayStation 4.
I have never really heard computers be referred to in that manner now a days, they probably are to some extent in some circles, but I have completely managed to miss them, and I do have some interested in computers. Like I can tell you I have owned a Dell, a HP and a Lenovo amongst some, but I would really have to do some digging to maybe be able to tell what version of them it was.
I know my current one start with G and the following looks some what like lam, but I only know that because it kinda looked like Glam so I named it that and because I have needed to Google that exact model, to look up some stuff.
I can however understand how you feel having grown up with with the computers and now talking to and interacting with a lot of people that never experience the older ones. Realising that people have a completely different fram of reference to something is a very weird thing to experience and somewhat difficult to navigate.
I am however happy that you and other people do have different experiences as then I could learn about how sound cards made games sound completely different or how changing GPU or computers manufacturer could completely change the game.
If you try it again, emulators like dosbox let you slow the game down to be playable. I don’t remember the exact setting but I’ve had to do it on things like Freddy Farkas iirc.
No idea why they attached the FPS directly to the hardware.
It’s the most trivial and straight forward thing to do. The game is a simple loop of:
get user input (can be nothing)
calculate new game state based on old state and input
draw new game state.
The speed of the game is now 100% dependant on the speed of computation. NOT attaching fps to hardware is the hard thing, as you need to detach the game state loop and the drawing loop and then synchronize them. Doing that yourself is extremely complicated. Today developers don’t even need to think about that because the whole drawing loop is abstracted away by things like directX/Vulcan and the game engine. But without those tools, fps tied to CPU speed is basically the default.
And in fairness a lot of microcomputers at the time were closed specs. Even on PC for a while you were theoretically aiming at a 4Mhz XT or, at worst, also wanted to account for a 8MHz AT. By the time IBM clones had become... you know, just PCs, a lot of devs either didn't get the memo or chose to ignore it for the reasons you list.
Most of the time "lazy devs" are just "overworked and underfunded devs", but the point is, that didn't start this century.
Also games have gotten way more complicated since the gameboy colour era. I’ve coded a basic 2D physics engine from scratch (literally just circles with soft collisions) and its not just enough to set up the vector math correctly. You can literally make a true to real life physics model (as far as the math of infinitely rigid perfect spheres on a perfectly flat plane goes anyway) and have all sorts of problems crop up because computers aren’t the universe and order of computation is a bitch.
Even the first Dark Souls had game ticks tied to the FPS because consoles had been standardized to 30 FPS for decades.
On the PC port, it was locked to 30 FPS, but a super popular mod unlocked the FPS, and at 60 FPS DoT effects ticked twice as fast, and at even higher FPS could kill you before you had time to react.
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