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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

Most of the Id games were significant advancements (up to Quake at least); in addition to Doom, the other major revolutions were:

- Commander Keen (smooth scrolling)

- Catacomb 3D/Wolfenstein 3d (pioneered ray casting on PC)

- Quake (introduced full 3d worlds)

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As a side note, Terminator: Future Shock ([1]) had 3D enemies in '95 - but still 2D-sprite explosions and weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator:_Future_Shock

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II still used 2D sprite explosions and weapons in 1997. Was Terminator: Future Shock true 3D? I seem remember it used the Daggerfall engine which was 2.5D.

First generation 3D games were kind of a mess IMO. They usually hadn't figured out the controls yet and polygon counts were so low I always thought they looked worse than sprite based games. It isn't a surprise to me 2D-sprites hung around for awhile. Billboard sprites are still a pretty good/cheap choice for symmetrical things like explosions.

XnGine (the engine behind Daggerfall, Terminator: Future Shock, SkyNET, etc - i think the last game to use it was Redguard) was full 3D however Daggerfall relied a lot on sprites for NPCs and such (most likely because it had a ton of NPCs in towns) but the maps were fully 3D and there were 3D objects in them (the screenshots in this tool[0] that show daggerfall maps make it clear). Terminator used sprites for small objects (weapons, pick up items, etc) but enemies were 3D models as was the world. In Redguard almost everything was 3D.

[0] https://www.dfworkshop.net/introducing-daggerfall-scout/

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