Played Anno 1800 a couple years ago, good game and pretty.
But the original Anno 1602 still wins in the looks and style department. As most 2.5D isometric games do..
But the original Anno 1602 still wins in the looks and style department. As most 2.5D isometric games do..
My point was 1602 holds up visually in a sense of doing it’s job assisting the game mechanics, something most modern games often fail and over complicate. Also.. nostalgia.
(A friend’s mum was famous among us kids because she could play 1602 well, I always got bankrupted by tools. How did she do it!!)
Can you expand on that please? (I recently prototyped a maze editor in isometric view and would love to hear more about the alternatives and what makes the isometric projection interesting.)
Also not really an issue these days, but I think it's still somewhat valid: In a controlled isometric projection where the angles are fixed, you can focus on making the art just pixel perfect, shadows and lighting being also a big part. This makes it possible to make your game look good with a fraction of the budget. In many cases, depending on the style, you still want to model and render the stuff in 3D and use hugely advanced renderers ( now GPUs/game engines have realtime ray-tracing, global illumination, subsurface scattering, advanced shadows, etc. but still, you can get most of the look by rendering it offline and just present sprites in a "2.5D" isometric projection and they'll look amazing at a fraction of the cost for both a game studio and the gamers who have to run that )
Of course there is also a great deal of nostalgia, but I would not discount the current trends of "going back to the basics" as just "nostalgia".
I remember a YouTube video talking about this and I think it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs4B8-qoY1I