Small, incremental improvements don't make shockwaves like the old massive tech leaps used to.

What I don't understand is why games look prettier but things like NPC AI (which is really path-finding and decision trees, not actual AI), interactivity of the game world, destructability of game objects - all those things are objectively worse than they have been in a game of 10-15 years ago (with some exceptions like RDR2).
How can a game like Starfield still have all the Bethesda jank but now the NPCs lack any kind of daily routine?
Most enemies in modern shooters barely know how to flank, compare that to something like F.E.A.R. which came out in 2006!

The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can't make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say "reality" is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it's far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it's still a big absolute improvement, it's relatively minor -- and you're never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that's not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
- Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
  Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
- Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
  Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that's part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically "etc.." to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.

I don't mind the graphics that much, what really pisses me off is the lack of optimization and heavy reliance on frame gen.

I don't understand why developers and publishers aren't prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.
- The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
  They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
  That hasn't eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.

from the image it seems like you're expecting a fourth dimension in games now? I don't think you'd like the development cycle on that. miegakure is still on the way is it?

This is what a remaster used to look like.
- Pretty sick if you ask me
  
  I agree whole heartedly
- It was a remake not a remaster. The hit boxes weren’t the same.
  
  Technically an original source code was adopted to SNES, even including some (most?) glitches, so I'd say it's more like a port or remaster than remake, even though graphics and audio were remade.
  
  The difference is academic and doesn't affect my point.

There's no better generational leap than Monster Hunter Wilds, which looks like a PS2 game on its lowest settings and still chugs at 24fps on my PC.
- Could've done your research before buying. Companies aren't held to standards bc people are uninformed buyers.
  
  Never said I bought it. Why would I buy a 70€ game without running the benchmark tool first?
  I just still find it ridiculous that it looks and runs like ass when MH World looks and runs way better on the same PC. Makes me wonder what's really behind whatever 'technological advancements' have been put into Wilds. It's like it's an actual scam to make people buy new hardware with no actual benefit.

The question is whether "realism" was ever a good target. The best games are not the most realistic ones.
- So many retro games are replayable and fun to this day, but I struggle to return to games whose art style relied on being "cutting edge realistic" 20 years ago.
  
  I dunno, Crysis looks pretty great on modern hardware and its 18 years old.
  Also, CRYSIS IS 18 WHERE DID THE TIME GO?
  
  Really? Cause I don't know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
  And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
  As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
  
  STALKER is good, though I played a lot of Anomaly mostly, and I'm not sure that STALKER was ever known for bleeding edge graphics
- Factorio and Balatro
- We should be looking at more particles, more dynamic lighting, effects, realism is forsure a goal just not in the way you think, pixar movies have realistic lighting and shadows but arent "realistic"
  After I started messing with cycles on blender I went back to wanting more "realistic" graphics, its better for stylized games too
  But yeah I want the focus to shift towards procedural generation (I like how houdini and unreal approach it right now), more physics based interactions, elemental interactions, realtime fire, smoke, fluid, etc. Destruction is the biggest dissapointment, was really hoping for a fps that let me spend hours bulldozing and blowing up the map.
  
  Destruction is the biggest dissapointment, was really hoping for a fps that let me spend hours bulldozing and blowing up the map.
  Ever heard of The Finals?
- Like cgi and other visual effects, realism has some applications that can massively improve the experience in some games. Just like how lighting has a massive impact, or sound design, etc.
  Chasing it at the expense of game play or art design is a negative though.
- A Link to the Past > Ocarina of Time
  Fight me
  
  I've been playing the zelda games in order since the new one was announced on the switch and I'm stuck on OoT (zelda 2 was a pain as well).
  I don't have much free time.
- Idk, I'd say that pursuing realism is worthy, but you get diminishing returns pretty quick when all the advances are strictly in one (or I guess two, with audio) sense. Graphical improvements massively improved the experience of the game moving from NES or Gameboy to SNES and again to PS1 and N64. I'd say that the most impressive leap, imo, was PS1/N64 to PS2/XBox/GameCube. After that, I'd say we got 3/4 of the return from improvements to the PS3 generation, 1/2 the improvement to PS4 gen, 1/5 the improvement to PS5, and 1/8 the improvement when we move on to PS5 Pro. I'd guess if you plotted out the value add, with the perceived value on the Y and the time series or compute ability or texture density or whatever on the x, it'd probably look a bit like a square root curve.
  I do think that there's an (understandably, don't get me wrong) untapped frontier in gaming realism in that games don't really engage your sense of touch or any of the subsets thereof. The first step in this direction is probably vibrating controllers, and I find that it definitely does make the game feel more immersive. Likewise, few games engage your proprioception (that is, your knowledge of your body position in space), though there've been attempts to engage it via the Switch, Wii, and VR. There's, of course, enormous technical barriers, but I think there's very clearly a good reason why a brain interface is sort of thought of as the holy grail of gaming.
  
  Having a direct brain interface game, that's realistic enough to overcome the Uncanny Valley, would destroy peoples lives. People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They'd end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one. Shit, give me a universe wherein I can double-jump, fly, or communicate with animals, and I'd have a hard time returning to this version.
  We could probably get close with a haptic feedback suit, a mechanism that allows you to run/jump in any direction, and a VR headset, but there would always be something tethering you to reality. But a direct brain to machine interaction would have none of that, it would essentially be hijacking our own electrical neural network to run simulations. Much like Humans trying to play Doom on literally everything. It would be as amazing as it was destructive, finally realizing the warnings from so many parents before its time: "that thing'll fry your brain."
- I agree generally, but I have to offer a counterpoint with Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I only just got back into it after bouncing off in 2019, and I wish I hadn't stopped playing. I have a decent-ish PC and it still blows my entire mind when I go roaming around the countryside.
  Like Picard said above, in due time this too will look aged, but even 7 years on, it looks and plays incredible even at less-than-highest settings. IMHO the most visually impressive game ever created (disclaimer: I haven't seen or played Horizon). Can't wait to play KC:D 2!
- not really. plenty of great games have visual fidelity as a big help in making it good.
  i dont think rdr2 would be such a beautiful immersive experience if it had crappy graphics.
  
  Visual fidelity isn't the same as realism. RDR2 is trying to replicate a real experience, so I mostly agree with you. However, it does step away from realism sometimes to create something more.
  Take a look at impressionist art, for example. It starts at realism, but it isn't realistic. It has more style to it that enhances what the artist saw (or wanted to highlight).
  A game should focus on the experience it's tying to create, and it's art style should enhance that experience. It shouldn't just be realistic because that's the "premium" style.
  For an example, Mirror's Edge has a high amount of fidelity (for its time), but it's highly stylized in order to create the experience they wanted out of it. The game would be far worse if they tried to make the graphics realistic. This is true for most games, though some do try to simulate being a part of this world, and it's fine for them to try to replicate it because it suits what their game is.
  
  Couldn't disagree more. Immersion comes from the details, not the fidelity. I was told to expect this incredibly immersive experience form RDR2 and then I got:
  carving up animals is frequently wonky
  gun cleaning is just autopilot wiping the exterior of a gun
  shaving might as well be done off-screen
  you transport things on your horse without tying them down
  Yeah that didn't do it for me.
  
  I had way more fun in GTA 3 than GTA 5. RDR2 isn't a success because the horse has realistic balls.
  To put another nail in the coffin, ARMA's latest incarnation isn't the most realistic shooter ever made. No amount of wavy grass and moon phases can beat realistic weapon handling in the fps sim space. (And no ARMA's weapon handling is not realistic, it's what a bunch of keyboard warriors decided was realistic because it made them feel superior.) Hilariously the most realistic shooter was a recruiting game made by the US Army with half the graphics.
- It's the right choice for some games and not for others. Just like cinematography, there's different styles and creators need to pick which works best for what they're trying to convey. Would HZD look better styled like Hi-Fi Rush? I don't really think so. GOW? That one I could definitely see working more stylized.

To be fair there isn't just graphics.
Something like Zelda Twilight princess HHD to Zelda Breath of the wild was a huge leap in just gameplay. (And also in graphics but that's not my point)
- Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then... the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
  What could you really do in BotW that you couldn't do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem's Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
  
  What? Botw was awesome! There was so much to explore, the world was interesting, the NPCs are good, and so on. Oot and Majora's Mask are both amazing too of course, but botw is a modern masterpiece.

Let's compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.
Generational leaps then:
Good lord.
EDIT: That isn't even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.
Good. Lord.
- Yeah no. You went from console to portable.
  We've had absolutely huge leaps in graphical ability. Denying that we're getting diminishing returns now is just ridiculous.
  
  We're still getting huge leaps. It simply doesn't translate into massively improved graphics. What those leaps do result in, however, is major performance gains.
  I have played Horizon Zero Dawn, its remaster, and Forbidden West. I am reminded how much better Forbidden West looks and runs on PS5 compared to either version of Zero Dawn. The differences are absolutely there, it's just not as spectacular as the jump from 2D to 3D.
  The post comes off like a criticism of hardware not getting better enough faster enough. Wait until we can create dirt, sand, water or snow simulations in real time, instead of having to fake the look of physics. Imagine real simulations of wind and heat.
  And then there's gaussian splatting, which absolutely is a huge leap. Forget trees practically being arrangements of PNGs--what if each and every leaf and branch had volume? What if leaves actually fell off?
  Then there's efficiency. What if you could run Monster Hunter Wilds at max graphics, on battery, for hours? The first gen M1 Max MacBook Pro can comfortably run Baldur's Gate III. Reducing power draw would have immense benefits on top of graphical improvements.
  Combined with better and better storage and VR/AR, there is still plenty of room for tech to grow. Saying "diminishing returns" is like saying that fire burns you when you touch it.
- The fact that the Game Boy Advance looks that much better than the Super Nintendo despite being a handheld, battery powered device is insane
  
  Is it that much better? The colours just look more saturated to me
- What game is the first one
  
  Final Fantasy 4 (2 on USA)
  
  It appears to be a Final Fantasy game, so likely either 4 or 6 aka 2 or 3 in the US
- It is baffling to me that people hate cross gen games so much. Like, how awful for PS4 owners that don't have to buy a new console to enjoy the game, and how awful for PS5 owners that the game runs at the same fidelity at over 60FPS, or significantly higher fidelity at the same frame rate.
  They should have made the PS4 version the only one. Better yet, we should never make consoles again because they can't make you comprehend four dimensions to be new enough.
  
  The point isn't about cross generation games. It's about graphics not actually getting better anymore unless you turn your computer into a space heater rated for Antarctica.

I mean, how much more photorealistic can you get? Regardless, the same game would look very different in 4K (real, not what consoles do) vs 1080p.
- The lighting in that image is far, far from photorealistic. Light transport is hard.
  
  That's true but realistic lightning still wouldn't make anywhere near the same amount of difference that the other example shows.

Kind of like smartphones. They all kind of blew up into this rectangular slab, and...
Nothing. It's all the same shit. I'm using a OnePlus 6T from 2018, and I think I'll have it easily for another 3 years. Things eventually just stagnate.
- I was hoping that eventually smartphones would evolve to do everything. Especially when things like Samsung Dex were intorduced, it looked to me like maybe in the future phones could replace desktops, running a full desktop OS when docked and some simplified mobile UI + power saving when in mobile mode.
  But no, I only have a locked-down computer.
  
  Yeah whatever happened to that? That was such a good idea and could have been absolutely game changing if it was actually marketed to the people who would benefit the most from it
  
  there is an official android desktop mode, I tried it and it isn't great ofc but my phone manufacturer (oneplus) has clearly put no work into making it functional
- I miss physical keyboards on phones
- You can easily keep a phone for 7 years.
- OnePlus 6 line of phones are one of the very few with good Linux support, I mean, GNU/Linux support. If custom ROMs no longer cut it you can get even more years with Linux. I had an iPhone, was eventually fed up, got an Android aaand I realized I am done with smartphones lol. Gimme a laptop with phone stuff (push notifications w/o killing battery, VoLTE) and my money is yours, but no such product exists.
- One company put a stupid fucking notch in their screen and everyone bought that phone, so now every company has to put a stupid fucking notch in the screen
  I just got my tax refund. If someone can show me a modern phone with a 9:16 aspect ratio and no notch, I will buy it right now
- Maybe make the rectangular slab smaller again?
  
  I would love to have a smaller phone. Not thinner, smaller. I don't care if it's a bit thick, but I do care if the screen is so big I can't reach across it with one hand.
- What do you expect next? Folding phones? That would be silly!

I would argue that late SNES era games look far better than their early 3d era follow ups
- Late 16 bit games had to lean into distinct art directions which allowed them the stand the test of time.

Eventually we hit a limit to how round we could make car tires.
- Rush on the N64 had octagonal tires and real damage! I still play it every year or so.
  
  Oh it's a bit of a running joke that every time there's a new Forza or Gran Turismo, they brag about how round the tires are and how wet the pavement looks.
- We technically aren't at max roundness. Almost every rendered now renders polygons, but it's possible to make a rendered to other shapes. We can render a perfect cylinder if we want to, or whatever shape you can define mathematically.

This is true of literally any technology. There are so many things that can be improved in the early stages that progress seems very fast. Over time, the industry finds most of the optimal ways of doing things and starts hitting diminishing returns on research & development.
The only way to break out of this cycle is to discover a paradigm shift that changes the overall structure of the industry and forces a rethinking of existing solutions.
The automobile is a very mature technology and is thus a great example of these trends. Cars have achieved optimal design and slowed to incremental progress multiple times, only to have the cycle broken by paradigm shifts. The most recent one is electrification.
- Okay then why are they arbitrarily requiring new GPUs? It's not just about the diminishing returns of "next gen graphics".
  
  That’s exactly why. Diminishing returns means exponentially more processing power for minimal visual improvement.
  
  path tracing is a paradigm shift, a completely different way of showing a scene to that normally done, it's just a slow and expensive one (that has existed for many years but only started to become possible in real time recently due to advancing gpu hardware)
  Yes, usually the improvement is minimal. That is because games are designed around rasterization and have path tracing as an afterthought. The quality of path tracing still isn't great because a bunch of tricks are currently needed to make it run faster.
  You could say the same about EVs actually, they have existed since like the 1920s but only are becoming useful for actual driving because of advancing battery technology.
  
  If you think about it, the gaming GPUs have been in a state of crisis for over half a decade. First shortages because everybody used them to mine bitcoins, then the covid chip shortages happened and now AI is killing cheaper GPUs. Therefore many people are stuck with older hardware, SteamDecks, consoles and haven't upgrades their systems and those highly flammable $1000+ GPUs will not lead to everyone upgrading their PCs. So games are using older GPUs as target

Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.
Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.
Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.
- Had to, as in "they didn't have enough experience to optimize the games". Same for Super Mario 64. Some programmers decompiled the code and made it run like a dream on original hardware.
  
  The programming knowledge did not exist at the time. Its not that they did not have the experience, it was impossible for them to have the knowledge because it did not exist at the time. You can't really count that against them.
  Kaze optimizing Mario 64 is amazing, but it would have been impossible for Nintendo to have programmed the game like that because Kaze is able to use programming technique and knowledge that literally did not exist at the time the N64 was new. Its like saying that the NASA engineers that designed the Atlas LV-3B spacecraft were bad engineers or incapable of making a good rocket design just because of what NASA engineers could design today with the knowledge that did not exist in the 50s.
- One of the reasons I skipped the other consoles but got a GameCube was because all the first party stuff was buttery smooth. Meanwhile trying to play shit like MechAssault on Xbox was painful.
  
  I never had trouble with MechAssault, because the fun far outweighed infrequent performance drops.
  I am a big proponent of 60fps minimum, but I make an exception for consoles from the 5th and 6th generations. The amount of technical leap and improvement, both in graphics technology and in gameplay innovation, far outweighs any performance dips as a cost of such improvement. 7th generation is on a game by game basis, and personally 8th generation (Xbox One, Switch, and PS4) is where it became completely unacceptable to run even just a single frame below 60fps. There is no reason that target could not have been met by then, definitely now. Switch was especially disappointing with this, since Nintendo made basically a 2015 mid-range smartphone but then they tried to make games for a real game console, with performance massively suffering as a result. 11fps, docked, in Breath of the Wild's Korok Forest or Age of Calamity (anyehwere in the game, take your pick,) is totally unacceptable, even if it only happened one time ever rather than consistently.
- when i was a smol i thought i needed to buy the memory expansion pack whenever OoT fps tanked.

Games did teach me about diminishing returns though

Don't get me started on Horizon: Forbidden West. It was a beautiful game. It also had every gameplay problem the first one did, and added several more to boot. The last half of the game was fucking tedious, and I basically finished it out of spite.
- It's so weird how reddit and Lemmy constantly shit on these games yet they always score well with players elsewhere.
  I never get sick of the combat in these games, the world is absolutely gorgeous, and the story is a lot of fun.
- Awww.
  I enjoyed the heck out of the first one, especially the story. Haven't gotten around to picking up the 2nd so that's a bummer to read.
  
  I'd say it's still worth playing, but the story is way more predictable, and they made some things more grindy to upgrade than they were in the first one. Also they added robots that are even more of a slog to fight through.
  Those giant turtles are bullshit and just not fun.
  
  If it helps, I loved both.
  
  I enjoyed learning the backstory of the first one, but I was very disinterested in the story, as in, what is currently happening.
  
  If You liked the stealth aspects of the first game then there is no point in starting the second. The stealth is gone. It's also more difficult. The equipment is much more complicated.
- I loved both. Different strokes...
- I agree. I loved the first game, considered it one of my favourites. Couldn't wait for the sequel. I was so disappointed, I abandoned it after a couple of hours.

And they're shocked that no one bought the PS5 pro for 800 dollars

Has anyone ever really noticed how samey everything looks right now? It's a bit hard to explain, because it's not the aesthetics of any kind of art style used, but the tech employed and how it's employed. Remember how a lot of early 3D in film just looked like it was plastic? It's like that, but with a wider variety of materials than plastic. Yet every modern game kinda looks like it's made using toys.
Like, 20 years from now I think it would be possible to look at any given game that is contemporary right now and be able to tell by how it looks when it was made. The way PS1 era games have a certain quality to them that marks when they were made, or how games of the early 2000's are denoted by their use of browns and grays.
- My guess is a lot of convergence to a smaller set of known game engines. Godot, unreal, unity, plus a few others and some in-house like valves source.
  I could be wrong but I presume in the past almost every game was made with its own custom engine. Now a lot of them have the "unreal engine" look.
  But I'm not complaining. Looks great to me and leads to better performance and fewer bugs in the long run. Of course there are some caveats
  
  Oh yeah this isn't a complaint, because I think it looks good. It's just I notice it, and it probably is from almost everything being made on UE5 these days. However, I think MGSV was one of the first games to have this particular look to it, and that's on its own in-house engine (FOX Engine). It could just be how the lighting and shadowing are done. Those two things are getting so close to photorealism that it's the texturing and modeling work that puts things (usually human characters) into the uncanny valley. A scene of a forest can look so real... And then you put a person walking through it and the illusion is lost. lol
- Yes, definitely. It has to be that they're all using the exact same engines and methods or something.
  
  It's everyone using UE-based mocap tools that cause the hyperrealistic-yet-puffy faces, is what I suspect he's talking about, along with the same photogrammetry tools/libraries.
- Games look samey because Game Studios don't have ideas anymore. They just try to sell 20 h of playtime - that is essentially empty. It's literally just a bunch of materials and "common techniques" squashed into a sellable product. In the early times of gaming, people had ideas before they had techniques to implement them. Nowadays, we have techniques and think the ideas are unimportant. It's uninspired and uninspiring. That's why.
- What do you mean, "everything".
  I wish this place was better for images, but... just pulling from my recently played list disproves this hard.
- Honestly the biggest thing missing in general lighting is usually rough specular reflections and small scale global illumination, which are very hard to do consistently without raytracing (or huge light bakes)
  Activision has a good technique for baking static light maps with rough specular reflections. It's fairly efficient, however it's still a lot of data. Their recent games have been in the 100-200 gb range apparently. I'm sure light bakes make up a good portion of that. It's also not dynamic of course.
  So, what I'm saying is, raytracing will help with this, hardware will advance, and everyone will get more realistic looking games hopefully.
- Horizon really shone in movement and how fluid the environment felt. It came out a long time ago now, though.
  I thought it had a pretty good art direction for what it was

yeah but the right hand pic has twenty billion more triangles that are compressed down and upscaled with AI so the engine programmers dont have to design tools to optimise art assets.
- I know you're joking, but these probably have the same poly count. The biggest noticeable difference to me is subsurface scattering on her skin. The left her skin looks flat, but the right it mostly looks like skin. I'm sure the lighting in general is better too, but it's hard to tell.
  
  yeah they probably just upped internal resolution and effects for what I assume is an in-engine cutscene. Not that the quality of the screenshot helps lmao
- It just works™

I wouldn't mind like a new style of controller like maybe a fleshlight with buttons on the side or something
- I don't know what kind of games you're playing. No seriously, what are the names of the games you're playing and where can I download them?
  
  Well I play a lot of Street Fighter and I think I've perfected a real winner of a control method; but it'd also be good for Minecraft so I can try and fuck a creeper

Why not do apples to apples?
- A cutscene isn't the best representation. This shows off the 8-bit vs 16-bit better.
  
  I mean, the original image is a cutscene, so...
  But hey, I'll split the difference. Instead of SMB 1, which was a launch game and literally wasn't running on the same hardware (because mappers), we can do Mario 3 instead.
  Or, hear me out, let's not do a remaster at all for current gen leaps. Here's a PS4 vs PS5 sequel one.
  It doesn't work as well, though, since taking the absolutely ridiculous shift from 2D to 3D, which has happened once and only once in all of gaming history, is a bit of a cheat anyway.
  Oh, and for the record, and I can't believe I'm saying this only now, LttP looks a LOT better than OoT. Not even close.

The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
- Well, that's what Moore's Law was for. The processing power does increase massively over each generation. It's just that at this point better graphics are less noticeable. There is not much difference to the eye between 100.000 and a million or more polygons.
  We've basically reached the top. Graphics fidelity is just down to what the artists do with it.
  
  I disagree ( that we have reached the top).
  Go watch a high budget animated movie (think Pixar or Disney) and come back when real time rendered graphics look like that.
  Yea games look good, but real time rendering is still not as good as pre rendered (and likely will never be). Modern games are rife with clipping, and fakery.
  If you watch the horizon forbidden West intro scene (as an example), and look at the details, how hair falls on characters shoulders, how clothing moves in relation to bodies, etc, and compare it to something like inside out 2, it's a world of difference.
  If we can pre render it, then in theory it's only a matter of time before we can real time render it.

tbf I went from Wii to PS4 and shit a brick
- Yeah, but the Wii was a very underpowered system, and it didn't even have HDMI. That transition wouldn't have been as stark going from PS3 to PS4.
- Horizon Zero Dawn was a stunning game, I did pretty much the same
  I'm kinda annoyed bc my 2 BFFs JUST got PlayStations like for Xmas. I've been on PS4+PS5 for a long while now and played both Horizons for free. I really wanted to tell them to give Zero Dawn a whirl just to show what the PS5 could do with it... but for full price? Eh... I'll leave that up to them.

Have you played VR? You might get that feeling again.
- I'm waiting in a affordable VR setup that can let me run around at home without hitting a wall. Solutions exist but they as expensive as a car and I don't have that kind of money lying around.
  Anti Commercial-AI license
  
  If anyone can optimize Disney's omni directional walking pad, we'll be there. I'd give it 3 decades if it goes that way. I've heard it's not like real walking. It feels very slippery. All that being said, you don't have to wrap yourself in a harness and fight friction to simulate walking like other walking pads. It also seems simple enough, hardware wise, that it could be recreated using preexisting parts/ 3d printing. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen a DIY project yet.
- VR definitely feels like the next 2D->3D paradigm shift, with similar challenges. except it hasn't taken off like 3D did IMO for 2 reasons:
  1. VR presents unique ergonomic challenges.
  Like 3D, VR significantly increased graphics processing requirements and presented several gameplay design challenges. A lot of the early solutions were awkward, and felt more like proof-of-concepts than actual games. However, 3D graphics can be controlled (more or less) by the same human interface devices as 2D, so there weren't many ergonomic/accessibility problems to solve. Interfacing VR with the human body requires a lot of rather clunky equipment, which presents all kinds of challenges like nausea, fatigue, glasses, face/head size/shape, etc.
  2. The video game industry was significantly more mature when (modern) VR entered the scene.
  Video games were still a relatively young industry when games jumped to 3D, so there was much more risk tolerance and experimentation even in the "AAA" space. When VR took off in 2016, studios were much bigger and had a lot more money involved. This usually results in risk aversion. Why risk losing millions on developing a AAA VR game that a small percentage of gamers even have the hardware for when we can spend half (and make 10x) on just making a proven sequel? Instead large game publishers all dipped their toes in with tech demos, half-assed ports, and then gave up when they didn't sell that well (Valve, as usual, being the exception).
  I honestly don't believe the complaints you hear about hardware costs and processing power are the primary reasons, because many gaming tech, including 3D, had the same exact problem in the early stages. Enthusiasts bought the early stuff anyway because it was groundbreaking, and eventually costs come down and economies of scale kick in.
- VR is the one thing that feels similar to the old generational leaps to me. It's great, but I haven't set mine up in a few years now.
  
  Fair. I haven't played "No Man's Sky," yet, but apparently, it's awesome in VR.
- Needs a couple more generations to cook.

I feel like we won't be able to see the difference until a couple of years, like CGI in old movies.
- The generational leap from PS3 -> PS4 wasn't that significant already, and that happened more than 10 years ago. The biggest difference seem to be lights/shadows and texture size, the latter of which balloons game size and can tank performance

They said we'd never have consumer tech that could white clip in real time but look at us now.

I’d say there’s more progress on scale than visual fidelity. There’s greater ability to render complexity at scale, whether that’s real actors on screen or physics in motion. I agree that progress in detail still frame has plateaued.

Slightly improved graphics while having worse enemy ai, unreal engine stutter, constant hand holding with in game puzzles, restricted character creation, all while having to wait for updates to fix issues that shouldn't be there at launch.
- Don't forget how many modern AAA games feel like you're playing a gamified version of your car's navigation app.
  Waypoint>cutscene>waypoint>cutscene>waypoint>cutscene

Ignorance is bliss.

Link has two hookshots?
- The Hookshot and the Longshot are different items internally, and via cheats or mods both can be equipped.

What big shift do you expect? Even regarding 3D realism we are way past the point of diminishing returns in terms of development costs.
- I can't imagine what it would look like now. I just wish everyone could experience the same incredible growth.
- Bigger maps, more entities on screen at once, larger multi-player server capacity (anyone play Mag?).
  I don't care if the graphics have to go backwards to do it to. I love valheim and it isn't high res.

NHL 2014 and NHL 2024 are probably the same game, only in NHL 2014 the players don't spit out their mouthguards like they do in 2024.
But I need that level of realism /s

This is my next gen: https://superspl.at/view?id=72a8bfcd
- What am I looking at exactly?
  
  Pixel clouds
- This is not usable on mobile and loads for a minute on firefox.
  Thanks, no.
  
  oh that's quite a large scene. Try this one: https://superspl.at/view?id=c4b928a2

1. VR presents unique ergonomic challenges.

2. The video game industry was significantly more mature when (modern) VR entered the scene.