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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

I think the best example of this is Doom 3. It looked incredible at the time (even on the Xbox on release in 2005), but it has not aged well. Maybe today's games hold up better, but photorealism is always gonna be competing with tomorrow.

On the other hand, BotW has framerate drops and limitations on the Switch and it was designed for a console that was underpowered five years ago, which doesn't bode well.

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World of WarCraft is probably the best example of this effect. If they'd gone for realism, the game would've looked dated within a year or two, and had its popularity drop a lot faster.

But the cartoony style let them keep going with just minor updates to the graphics for more than a decade. That decision must've made them at least a billion dollars over the last 10 or so years.

While I kind of think WoW looks pretty dated these days I would otherwise agree. When WoW was released it was alongside Everquest 2, which was poised to be the next big thing with realistic graphics and a name everyone recognized in MMOs (though people certainly recognized Warcraft as well). I would be surprised if anyone even really remembers Everquest 2 at this point, but for a good year or so we talked about which one would win out. WoW beat it and proceeded to beat every MMO record ever by several orders of magnitude.

I played both, and I remember talking loudly and often about how much better WoW looked despite having a fraction of the system reqs. WoW vanilla could be run on a potato - I think I had it going on a pentium 2 with a third hand graphics card...

I remember thinking at the time "wow, the characters look like ass". I think the character models look worse than Final Fantasy X, which was a game with good art direction and miniscule polycount that came out in 2001.

I agree about the problems of pursuing photorealism, but I think Doom 3 actually holds up well, particularly the lighting and environments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mn_fJlmbo

The 2005 Doom was a movie....

[EDIT: Yes I know the post above has been edited to fix/clarify, no I can't delete this post.]

They likely meant the one that came out in late 2004, Doom 3.

Which actually did come out in 2005 for the Xbox, according to the Wikipedia article for it.

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