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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I think some periods have more lasting appeal than others. For example, the grainy low-polygon, low-colour, dithered look of early 3D PlayStation games has, to my mind, much less appeal than the 2D games of late SNES era (and PlayStation era, viz. Castlevania: SOTN).

Lots of people are nostalgic for Final Fantasy 7, for example, but I think most prefer the remake over the original.

Early 2D games have the same issue. I think very few people are fans of the Atari 2600 and its extremely crude graphics. To me, that machine is more interesting from the technical perspective than the visual or gameplay perspective.

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There’s definitely a sweet spot for me that overlaps with when games became “really good” to my taste.

I was playing Civ6. And honestly, why the 3D and all the animations? It’s just slow and consumes power that it doesn’t need to. The Civ2, MOO2, MOM, X-Com era is still to my mind the best. I just want the quality of life improvements and some of the newer mechanics from the new games.

Yes. I completely agree. I refuse to play new 3D games like Civ6 because they feel incredibly "heavy" without any benefit. A skilled team of 2D artists and graphic designers could run circles around Civ6 with incredibly beautiful and detailed art and user interface design without any of the power consumption or heaviness.

I am a huge fan of Civ2, MOO2, MOM, SMACX, and X-Com as well. Bringing those games forward with updated 2D designs, clean user interfaces, and high quality of life would be incredible!

I'd take up master of orion 2 again only with a heavy automation toolbox. Love the game, but bhe middle to end game was so click-click painful especially on big maps. Played it recently with Autohotkey and it was so much better.

In case of Civ6, the thing that consumes most resources doesn't seem to be the rendering so much so as all the game logic written in Lua. On very large maps late into the game, AI turns can sometimes take minutes.

That aside, I broadly agree that 3D graphics in 4X strategy games is, at best, a useless distraction. And sometimes it's actually harmful when it results in fewer noticeable details.

It still depends very much on the game. For example, Battlezone (1998) on PC was from that early / awkward 3D era. But the visual design of the game was very conscious of hardware limitations at the time, making it look surprisingly well back then, and tolerable even today with some minor tweaks like resolution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmHc_o9uoUI

(and then, of course, even if the graphics isn't great, the game mechanics might be so good that the graphics doesn't really matter)

Final Fantasy 3-4 is the big example for this.

Remade in 3d, then remade again in 2d to appeal to nostalgia for that style.

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