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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Far Cry came out. Around the time, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 were the most anticipated games for quite a while, mostly because they promised graphics far ahead of anything released so far. But as they were delayed multiple times, Far Cry stole a lot of their thunder when it came out months before them, with similarly impressive graphics.

We don't see technically ambitious PC exclusive games like this anymore, as the market for these games greatly decreased in relevance. Most people don't own an expensive desktop PC anymore (due to smartphones and laptops doing most of their jobs) and they just buy a console if they want to play games.

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Huh? That doesn't seem right. We absolutely have ambitious games on pc that bring generational leaps in graphical fidelity.

Like the Witcher 3, which was absolutely stunning when it first released. Similarly (although originally a console exclusive) Red Dead Redemption 2 looks incredible on PC. We also have releases like Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice which pushed the limit of what was possible to achieve with limited resources (regarding the development, not the hardware).

Honorable mentions should probably also include Star Citizen, which although still unreleased is definitely an incredibly technically ambitious project. As is Cyberpunk 2077. The launch might have been a total disaster, but afaik it's the first big game to ship a full ray-tracing renderer.

Maybe we have a different understanding of what a 'technically ambitious' game is. But I see technical improvements left and right. Unreal Engine 5 comes with some features that are just mind-blowing and make a whole new level of graphical fidelity available even to small indie developers. Just take a look at the recently released footage of "Unrecord", where lots of people thought it was real life footage.

Most ambitious games are now primarily developed for console while only being ported to PCs. Cyberpunk 2077 was apparently primarily optimized for PC (while still being a cross platform title) but that's an exception.

It depends what your reference point for the rate of progress is. The release date of Crysis is closer to release date of Doom than today, but visually Crysis holds up dramatically better than what Doom did at the time of Crysis release.

16 year old games were considered "retro" when Crysis came out. Crysis came out 16 years ago.

Hell, if you were making a game that looked like Ultima VI (1990) in the mid-late 90s, that would be treated as embarrassingly retro. Call it 5 or 6 years.

Once we settled on quasi-realistic 3D games with a mostly consistent control scheme as the norm, that process of obsolescence has slowed down dramatically. Games have sort of plateaued in that way. So you really can go back and play Crysis and it's still fine. It's noticeably "retro", but I think only serious graphics nerds would be bothered by its deficiencies.

Yeah, seems like that every year the age of games that are considered "retro" keeps increasing. Now it is at least ~25 years or so.

idk. 80s-early 90s pixel art style was all the rage 10 years ago as retro, nowdays the action is at late 90s-early 00s wonky polygon graphics, so it seems to have advanced pretty proportionally

On the other hand I bet there are more people playing Doom 1 & 2 today than Crysis. Doom's gameplay held up better, and 3rd party WADs (in large part facilitated by the primitive graphics making it easy for one-man creators) gave Doom a life of its own.

In general I agree, but I rather remember The Witcher 3 for the story and atmosphere, than for the graphics. Likewise Senuas Sacrifice - it pushed the limit for psychological games(the game is about processing loss through a psychosis, so it is not a casual game). In either case, both titles are really worth it.

I have never heard of Senuas Sacrifice, so I googled it. It's 85% off on steam summer sale ($4.49 in the US). Just an fyi for anyone else interested.

That's definitely worth it. But just to repeat myself, it is not a casual game and I recommend head phones, for the full experience. Meaning you should not be on the call, when playing it. It also has a decent fight mechanic but the main experience for me, was the mind trip.

(professional psychologist were strongly involved in the developement)

Witcher 3 is 8 years old and considered an old persons game. I learned that the hard way when I tried talking to my nephew about video games.

In all seriousness, most of your examples I would consider part of the previous era of gaming, which ended with Fortnite’s explosion. Hyper realistic games will continue to be developed of course, but the overall industry trend is moving towards mobile-friendly graphics, which presents its own set of technical challenges.

I agree that Witcher 3 doesn't count as "current gen" anymore, but it wasn't meant to represent that. I picked my examples to show that we've seen high fidelity games throughout the last decade. All of those games pushed the boundaries of what's possible in some way and I don't think we've seen a decline of that at all.

There are just so many more games now that it might seem like that.

Parent comment said PC-exclusive, Witcher 3 and RDR2 are examples where the PC port came out way after the console release and they are both fairly old games at this point.

To be fair, I edited in the "exclusive" to make it clear I wasn't talking about ports, so he might not have seen it.

Witcher 3 came out on PC at the same time as consoles. CDPR has a long history with PC gaming and they tend to emphasize the PC experience. They also own GOG which is a PC game store/platform. RDR2 on the other hand was indeed a timed console exclusive.

Witcher series, and generally everything from CDPR RED, is PC first and anything else an afterthought (if not contracted out port to someone else)

Witcher 3 caught a lot of flak when released for looking worse than what was shown at E3. Why gamers still pay attention to early-access peeks of games at E3 is beyond my comprehension, it seems like a recipe for disappointment every time..

You're undermining your own point but listing a bunch of console games.

The PC gaming market is actually bigger now than it was back then.

The difference is that consoles didn't really start to become viable for the FPS genre until the Xbox/PS2 generation (and even then it was really just Halo).

So an FPS was PC exclusive by default with only the biggest games getting a clumsy console port or spinoff years later (like FarCry Instincts). Consoles became a first class citizen in the world of FPSes with the 360/PS3 generation in the mid-2000s. That's why FarCry 1 (2004) was a PC exclusive but FarCry 2 (2008) released on consoles and PC at the same time.

Competitive FPS games did even exist on the N64 (James Bond Golden Eye, Perfect Dark), and in the next generation they were very common and mostly had the modern two stick controls which is still used today. So I don't think that had anything to do with it.

> The PC gaming market is actually bigger now than it was back then.

This might be true, but I'm fairly certain that the market share of the PC platform has strongly decreased relative to the consoles. AAA games have largely shifted to consoles or console ports. The most plausible reason is that the desktop PC market has collapsed. The heyday of PC gaming was probably somewhere between Quake (1996) and Crysis (2007).

The "next generation" after N64 was Xbox/PS2. In my previous comment, I pointed out that FPSes on consoles became viable during that time. There were FPSes on consoles even prior to Golden Eye/Perfect Dark. For instance, there were SNES ports of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. They were just all pretty bad. Even the "good" ones like Golden Eye don't really hold up against the PC shooters of the time.

Shooters didn't become a premiere genre for consoles until the 360/PS3 era. Like I said, as far as popularity went, there was Halo and MoH (to a way lesser degree) during the Xbox/PS2 days but not much else. And then all of a sudden, shooters became the hottest genre on consoles in the mid-late 00s. That's when CoD and Battlefield made the transition over to consoles in earnest. It's when Sony invested heavily (and ultimately failed) in creating a "Halo killer". It's when CoD went from a pretty successful PC franchise to consistently being the highest selling game year after year.

As far as the PC gaming market goes. There was a dark age starting in the mid-00s. But PC gaming is very popular right now (we'll have to see what impact high GPU prices has on its future) .

For instance, Activision makes more money from the PC platform than all consoles combined.

https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-is-making-more-money-on-p...

PC has been Ubisoft's second largest platform (ahead of Xbox but behind PlayStation) since 2018

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269679/breakdown-of-ubis...

No one in the industry ignores the PC market anymore. Everyone (except Nintendo) is releasing their games on PC now even companies that weren't traditionally in the PC gaming market like Japanese publishers. Genres that had a spotty history of PC support (Sports, JRPGs, Fighting games, etc) are seeing consistent PC releases. And even Sony conceded and started releasing their exclusives on PC (years later but it's still a dramatic shift from even a few years ago).

As someone who was primarily a PC gamer in the 90s, I can tell you anecdotally that I know several people who were console gamers only 20+ years ago who are now PC gamers.

By the time Far Cry, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 came out, shooters were very common on consoles. There were many more console shooters apart from Halo. The fact that we see hardly any PC-exclusive AAA shooters anymore, but did back then, calls for an explanation. And it's not just shooters. In general there are few AAA games nowadays that are PC-exclusive or mainly targeted at PCs and only ported to consoles. The situation was very different in 2004.

FarCry Instincts was much better than FarCry, I'll fight ya!

> We don't see technically ambitious PC exclusive games like this anymore

You should consider A Plague Tale: Requiem. Even without ray-tracing, it is by far one of the most beautiful games I've played in a long time (since The Witcher 3, at least). Not to mention it has a sucker-punch of a story and a phenomenal soundtrack.

The know how to make a game is free knowledge with paid education add-ons... we figured out the broad strokes.

Smaller tech leaps in client-side game software is difficult to protect from instant duplicaton. The cloud and mobile is the 'last moat'.

Are we going to move into black box software designs and trusted platform modules in hardware to enforce a technology moat for devs on pc's?

It was a weird time. The Xbox existed and while not as powerful as PCs of the day, were closer in terms of cutting edge features thanks it's GPU with prorammable shaders. Doom 3 managed a decent port and Far Cry was remade as Far Cry Instincts which while less graphically impressive, was the better game. Half Life 2 got a port in 2005, but woof, it's pretty rough.

The real winner that year was The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, which did what Doom 3 did (stencil shadows, normal maps, unified lighting) on Xbox months before Doom 3's release on PC. It's the better game, too.

Crytek still makes graphical masterpieces (and IMO crysis has one of the best FPS stories). Crysis 1 and 2 remastered are very good, and crysis 3 is still a masterpiece after more than 10 years.

And crysis 4 is coming.

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