Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Version467 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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 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.

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