Ok, I’ll bite. The all-time best graphical style for video games, the ideal balance between fidelity, artistic expressiveness, and development effort, is what was state-of-the-art about 20 years...
Ok, I’ll bite. The all-time best graphical style for video games, the ideal balance between fidelity, artistic expressiveness, and development effort, is what was state-of-the-art about 20 years ago. Specifically 2003 to 2006, the latter half of the sixth console generation. The heyday of DirectX 9. If you’re remastering an early 3D title, this is what you go for.
The 2003 to 2006 span is the goldilocks zone. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. If you go earlier, you’re sacrificing graphical fidelity for a retro vibe. That can work, but it’s an affectation. It usually doesn’t serve a remaster, which is supposed to honor the original vision rather than reframe it as kitsch.
The problem is that earlier hardware was full of compromises. The PS1’s depth handling was novel, using manual sorting instead of a Z-buffer, and its use of fixed-point math gave it that signature texture wobble and polygon jitter. The N64 had proper Z-buffering and filtering, but its texture memory was tiny, so everything looked muddy. The Saturn was worse, with dual CPUs and two graphics chips awkwardly bolted together, making 3D development a nightmare. And on PCs, well, this meme is extremely accurate. Pre-DX9 graphics were fractured across Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D, and assorted vendor APIs. Some games had card specific builds, and some games only worked with one or a few cards. It was the wild west.
If you go later, you run into the opposite problem. First, there’s the three or four year stretch where every game was brown because Gears of War taught us all that dirt and grime = realism. Even once color came back, the dawn of HD consoles demanded so much more detail and content. Ubiquitous DVDs and broadband meant ballooning asset sizes. Suddenly you needed massive textures, higher poly counts, more shaders, mocap, full voice acting. From that point forward, making a game look good wasn’t about clever design within limits. It was about raw production scale.
Yes, games have gotten prettier since. Bigger, more detailed, more cinematic. But at the end of the day, the graphics style of 2005 has everything you need to be clear and expressive without drowning in production bloat.
Ok, I’ll bite. The all-time best graphical style for video games, the ideal balance between fidelity, artistic expressiveness, and development effort, is what was state-of-the-art about 20 years ago. Specifically 2003 to 2006, the latter half of the sixth console generation. The heyday of DirectX 9. If you’re remastering an early 3D title, this is what you go for.
The 2003 to 2006 span is the goldilocks zone. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. If you go earlier, you’re sacrificing graphical fidelity for a retro vibe. That can work, but it’s an affectation. It usually doesn’t serve a remaster, which is supposed to honor the original vision rather than reframe it as kitsch.
The problem is that earlier hardware was full of compromises. The PS1’s depth handling was novel, using manual sorting instead of a Z-buffer, and its use of fixed-point math gave it that signature texture wobble and polygon jitter. The N64 had proper Z-buffering and filtering, but its texture memory was tiny, so everything looked muddy. The Saturn was worse, with dual CPUs and two graphics chips awkwardly bolted together, making 3D development a nightmare. And on PCs, well, this meme is extremely accurate. Pre-DX9 graphics were fractured across Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D, and assorted vendor APIs. Some games had card specific builds, and some games only worked with one or a few cards. It was the wild west.
If you go later, you run into the opposite problem. First, there’s the three or four year stretch where every game was brown because Gears of War taught us all that dirt and grime = realism. Even once color came back, the dawn of HD consoles demanded so much more detail and content. Ubiquitous DVDs and broadband meant ballooning asset sizes. Suddenly you needed massive textures, higher poly counts, more shaders, mocap, full voice acting. From that point forward, making a game look good wasn’t about clever design within limits. It was about raw production scale.
Yes, games have gotten prettier since. Bigger, more detailed, more cinematic. But at the end of the day, the graphics style of 2005 has everything you need to be clear and expressive without drowning in production bloat.
In other words, I Want Shorter Games With Worse Graphics and I’m Not Kidding.