This These caused protests
I remember when the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was being claimed by people as an animated movie that was so photorealistic, you wouldn’t even be able to tell you were looking at animated characters.
TBF it hasn’t gotten much better than that in the 22 years since. Beowolf was cool, though.
I saw it in theatres back when those new age 3D glasses came out, it looked really cool.
Here’s a decent impression of the times: http://i.imgur.com/mAUyo.jpg
But back in the day (2003-ish) we still had amazing things to look forward to:
- translucency (windows were not see-through)
- realtime lighting and shadows (shadows were blobs below a model)
- metallic reflection, and reflections in general (though working mirrors existed since at least Duke Nukem 3D, but those were a hack; copy the room and player model and flip them around to create the effect of a mirror)
- further viewing distances (though this isn’t a positive, IMO)
- physics (everything was static - models moved, but did not rotate (much))
- inverse kinematics
It’s crazy how far we’ve gotten, but view distances spoil everything (IMO), and graphical improvements have slowed down (not stalled, but definitely slowed down) with Ray Tracing becoming wide-spread being the last big graphical improvement (since 2018).
M2 EXCLUSIVE! Full specifications of 1997’s hottest new 64 bit game machine
To think what might have been. The M2 would have tough competition against the PlayStation and N64 but it would have been interesting to see what a 3DO successor would have done to the market at the time, especially if 3DO had stuck with the hardware licensing model.
Curious to hear more about your stance on view distance because you felt it needed to be mentioned twice.
I can’t imagine anything about increased potential being inherently bad in an of itself, but it does present more opportunities for level designers to fall short by under-utilizing the spaces.
There is a level of charm that came from the compromise forced by technical limitations which pushed a lot of detail into sky boxes and other 2D workarounds to simulate a 3D space. Even so, it was always frustrating when you became aware that those details would only ever be unavailable to explore up close.
Spyro the Dragon launched in 1998, a year and bit after that issue of Next Generation linked. Spurs was one of the first games to make use of varying levels of detail to expand the view distance.
The level design of Spyro took advantage of this to encourage the player to explore the levels with Spyro’s glide jump by making interesting areas of levels in the distance more visible.
The game received a lot of praise at the time for its graphics and gameplay.
At least the game is fun and functional, unlike buggy cash grab games nowadays
Even back in 1999 we could tell the difference between in-game graphics and pre-rendered cutscenes. Nobody thought that the blocky model shown here was as good as it got.
But we also knew that those pre-rendered cutscenes took at least a week to render and didn’t think the games themselves would ever look that good.
Edit: after giving it more thought, that should instead be “dreamed of the day gameplay would look that good” because the overall trend was obvious.
Toy Story came out in 1995 but nobody then expected we would have graphics like that in real time for a long time to come. There were claims made at the time comparing the graphical abilities of the PS2 and Xbox generation to films like Toy Story and they were widely derided at that time.
Yeah, marketers doing their usual thing lol.
These days, I often can’t tell if cutscenes are pre-rendered or rendered by the game engine (or another real-time renderer packaged with the game).
Though that some of the old Blizzard cutscenes that impressed me a lot at the time stopped being so impressive even a decade ago. Like the Diablo 2 ones are on the far side of the uncanny valley still, but I remember being awestruck by them back in the day.
