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Comment by ad_hockey | Hacker News Reader

This style just ages well, doesn't it? I still play Zelda: Link to the Past every few years but I can't play Ocarina of Time even though it's probably the better game. That early 3D with the fogging and pop-in and muddy textures just doesn't hold up, but pixel art is timeless.

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Yes. I stopped playing video games when 3d happened ( mid to end of the 90s) because most games were either uninteresting (3d for the sake of 3d), or plain ugly.

I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .

There are timeless early 3d games too. Metal Gear Solid or FFVII are popular examples, but there are also: Thief, Morrowind, Deus Ex, American McGee's Alice, and many more.

Then again, it is indeed a much different aesthetic than pixel art.

That's fair. I haven't played Metal Gear Solid for a long time but I did replay Deus Ex a few years ago and it still holds up. The low resolution is a bit of a problem but it's not a barrier.

Early 3D on the PC was better than on the N64, though. The low draw distance and blanketing everything with fog was pretty horrendous in a lot of games.

Deus Ex with GMDX plays great even with just a 1280x780 resolution.

Also it enhances the places with more furniture, trees, objects and new areas. OFC there are new weapons and upgrades too.

I've noticed that stock mesh/texture Deus Ex has staying-power partly because everything is visually cohesive. Most objects have similar levels of detail and follow similar implicit rules for how they are (or aren't) complex.

This is, unfortunately, easy to ruin that with partial mods, breaking your immersion when two objects from different universes are in the same room.

Ff7 is an interesting example : I’ve never understood the appeal of the original game which I’ve always found to be truly hideous, including when it came out. It looks like chunky pixel soup - I’d rather have 2D pixel art which looks clean.

Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.

Yeah, I’d agree, I definitely wouldn’t classify FF7 as graphically timeless.

I think most people would agree that early 3D games (PSX and N64 era) - particularly ones attempting to achieve texture-mapped photorealism, like FF7, GoldenEye, Tomb Raider etc. did not age gracefully, at least where graphics are concerned.

Contrast that with something like Mario 64, which, while still chonky, looks way better because it’s so highly stylized.

I find this kind of comments weird. So you stopped playing for 25 years and now are surprised that games have evolved?

They are explaining their lived experience.

But for whatever reason, here in HN you see a lot of people that don't play games but feel the need to give their opinion on the gaming industry, criticize modern gaming, and ramble on how old games where better. I find it really weird...

No, as the previous poster said, this is my lived experience, and I play games these days. I’m neither criticizing modern gaming nor rambling on how old games were better. If anything I have a very solid gaming culture, having spent a great amount of time trying out things.

What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.

Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.

I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.

While I certainly played several shooters (DOOM, Quake, CS) a bit, but not with any passion.

But my favorite early 3D game was Total Annihilation. Which is not a 3D game. It's a 2D game with a 3D rendering engine. Classic RTS isometric POV, but all of the benefits of a 3D engine (arbitrary model rotations, movement dynamics, rockets flying through the air, shrapnel...oh, the shrapnel).

Similarly with Warcraft III, another RTS done with a 3D engine. Its gift was the interstitial cinematics done with the engine for story telling purposes.

In both these cases, 3D added immensely to an ostensibly 2D experience. I also imagine once they got things sorted out, it made things much easier for the level and scenario designers to be able to just put Objects into their flat-with-some-terrain 3D worlds.

Did you play Supreme Commander? Really made use of the 3D for scaling in a out

I remember TA very distinctly - my brother was very good at it, I’ve always been hopeless at RTS games.

You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.

This is interesting because Zelda: Link to the Past, despite being a great SNES game, came out early in the SNES lifecycle and has quite basic pixel art compared to most top-down SNES JRPGs which came out later. Some of the prettiest being Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu 3, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean.

I agree that the early 3D games (PS1/N64) have not aged well graphically.

Perhaps it's more of an acquired taste, but there are definitely modern games that intentionally try to replicate that old style of 3D graphics. There are even things like animations on YouTube that aim for it as a stylistic choice.

I'm guessing young folk have more nostalgia for this type of thing

In the vein of "intentionally old 3D graphics" it's not quite the same thing but I'm reminded me of the old indie horror game movement where a lot of them were pixelated, low color depth, and low fog distance because those things help the scariness.

BUT!.. You can play OOT in 4k 120fps raytracing with an official Bluetooth N64 controller and it is amazing

https://github.com/GhostlyDark/OoT-Reloaded

(big fan here)

You may be pleased to hear that Nintendo are remaking Ocarina of Time.

Ocarina of Third Time's the Charm?

Just a few weeks until the OoT remake is released

They're revamping Ocarina of Time with updated graphics currently

Good think there’s a remake

It's more of a generation thing. Early 2D games had atrocious graphics as well, both due to technical limitations and the inexperience of game designers. You could probably say much the same of text-based games. (At least on personal computers, it was true.)

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