now i’m not too familiar with PC Gaming, especially those of old (pre-2010s) but i bet most people saying this are looking at things in rose tinted glasses. there have always been badly optimized games, even AAA’s. GTA IV and (I think) Fallout 3 are notorious. (continued) - ThreadSky

torasapphire.bsky.social • 4 days ago

now i’m not too familiar with PC Gaming, especially those of old (pre-2010s) but i bet most people saying this are looking at things in rose tinted glasses. there have always been badly optimized games, even AAA’s. GTA IV and (I think) Fallout 3 are notorious.

(continued)

Reposted from Dominic Tarason

One of those growing bits of ahistorical nonsense I see online is 'Games were just optimized better in the old days'.

Like fuck they were. The entire history of videogames is stuff barely running on intended hardware. Why do you think we've had ultra-low graphics options available since hte 90s?

Comments

tyranthraxus.bsky.social•4 days ago

I remember one particular game. Birth of the federation which had a memory leak so bad that made games last half an hour tops

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

another strategy game from that time that was known for running very poorly was Lego Rock Raiders (PC). not just that, but installing it on Windows 98 could cause the DirectX kernel to crash, or outright nuke your install. having a graphics accelerator that wasn't 3dfx would also make thing crap out

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

ironically enough, the company that developed Rock Raiders was Data Design Interactive... who notoriously made some of the worst shovelware for the Wii and PS2 known to man. rock raiders, at least on PC, was one of their better games though, and has a cult following to this day.

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

that, and the internet being more prevalent than ever makes bad game optimization (idk if i’d call it doomerism) drama way more vocal than 15+ years ago. the complete ass suckage of the GPU market over the past 5-7 years hasn’t helped with that either.

(continued)

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

and honestly, does any of this really really matter if said game isn’t fun in the first place? even if it were to be optimized well and run on mommy’s HP piece of shit from 2011. i think a lot of people forget that (most singleplayer) games are supposed to be fun, not a pissing contest.

(continued)

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

if a game is fun but your enjoyment isn’t as high as it could be because you’re not able to get it looking as good as you want/can with acceptable performancd figures, then i get it. but y’know, you can always turn down settings and find the happy medium.

(continued)

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

or, get this, you don’t have to play these games within the first month that they’re relevant! if you want to wait for a good discount or for future PC hardware to have a much better time handling max settings, by all means go ahead! all i really play is beamng, and that does fine at 4k ultra

cont.

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

i’m not defending bad optimization, but rather saying that badly optimized games have always been a thing, and all the hubup feels like it’s for nothing when a good chunk of those games aren’t fun anyway.

you want classic examples of games that were hard to run?

Trespasser (1998)
Crysis (duh)

torasapphire.bsky.social•4 days ago

Lego Island (1997)… though i wouldn’t exactly call this unoptimized in the same sense, they did their best to make sure it would run on a 1x CD-ROM drive by compressing the music big time. just that your average home computer back then was really weak and didn’t have good, if any 3D acceleration

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