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?
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?
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I've got 10 year old games that still CHUG in modern hardware! (Or worse, games that run uncontrollably fast and overheat it!)
I remember when Ubisoft released Resident Evil 4 on PC without a goddamn lighting engine. Everything was fullbright!
It was during the PS3 realistic everything has to be brown as hell era where we jump to HD LCD screen that developers focus on pretty graphics over performance
PC ports used to be so rough while graphics effects, assets & sound effects were outright broken or missing!
Even when it did "I'm sorry but you didn't play Doom the right way unless you had bought a Roland Sound Canvas to listen to it on"
The game was p much unplayable until the 1.3 patch
Many games very often pushed the limits of a system. Many games that are actually optimized are the cross-platform ones.
Or why it'd take ages for some console ports to appear.
I think RCT1 was just a hair over 200mb initially? it was written in Assembly specifically so that even the most underpowered PCs (not the considerably more powerful IBMs for the time) could run it at speed.
There have always been exceptionally well coded games. But the fact that they stand out so strongly highlights that everything around them was significantly worse.
And I picked possibly the most memorable retro game that isn't Super Mario or Halo 💀
So to this day, PAL versions of games like Devil May Cry 1 and Final Fantasy X literally just run 16% slower. Not LOOK slower, RUN slower.
Case in point; I double dare you to play Alien Breed 3D II or Turok 3 on their original target hardware and not get a headache.
Nearly.
Are you illiterate? The thread addresses that there are undeniably issues with current stuff, but games all the way back to the 80s often got released half-finished and catastrophically buggy (and unoptimized, which is a separate issue), but in the old days, we didn't get patches.
And I remember a major complaint of Unreal Tournament 3 (from 2007) being that it required too powerful a PC to run well, so not many picked it up.
People put up with that because there was no other multiplayer option, but it was almost never *good*.
Most big AAA games scale down to run nicely on hardware 5+ years old, which is something relatively new in games.
Even with that it is still a stuttery, awkward mess.
"There were no DLC season passses in the 90s!" - no, they just had you buy Street Fighter 2 all over again for another 2-4 characters. And they had mission packs that added almost nothing for $30-40 but it came in a cardboard box so it felt bigger.
And of course 'There were fewer bugs because developers couldn't release patches' is the worst nonsense. Speedrunners LOVE breaking buggy old games
We take so much for granted now (I'm grooving Valheim these days).
99% of the time, a multiplayer game would release, get no updates, and slowly die off. Valve supporting their games long after release was a novelty, not a trend.
one of those being that it PRECIPITATED the creation of the Steam Deck, which may ultimately prove a Trojan Horse for the end of Windows hegemony (in the gaming sphere, at least)
*sprites flicker in and out of existance*
Oh well, I'll play this awesome SNES game!
*things keep slowing down when more than 10 sprites are on screen*
PS1! Help!
*big attacks drop frames rates to 2fps*
The PS3 was often inferior to the Xbox 360 when it came to Third Party Game optimization
the Gen 1 games are so riddled with glitches that some, like MissingNo, have ascended into gaming history
The truth doesn't even feel like an optimization thing anymore, it's that game publishers as a whole have decided that performance is fine where it is and fidelity is the priority.
And that game was amazing! But optimized, it was not.
- By optimizing config.sys and autoexec.bat
- By using memmaker
- By making boot floppy disks specifically to some games
- By upgrading your Processor
- By adding RAM
Doom and wolfenstien needed boot disks just to configure memory for it.
And omg if you flood the screen with mobs the stager and stuttering was insane.
The old game nostalgia is misplaced.
Stuttering, frame-time spikes, sub-25FPS experiences were all the norm & to a far worse degree than today but people act like they're a new thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=881qBsr-9qE
https://youtu.be/vETonlaTZ4c?si=oSBabyJou3h6kZZt
like ffs,
Tekken 1 to Tekken 3,
Gran Turismo HD to GT6
Kinetica to GOW 2
Uncharted 1 to TLOU,
same console, generational differences.
It's ridiculous how good Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory looked on that thing.
I would also say that games are better optimized than ever. On my 8 year old computer last year I could boot up and play Baldurs Gate 3. Nobody would have thought you could play Half-Life 2 on a computer from the year 2000 back in the day.
Also both games are shmups, where game slowdown is an accidental and/or intentional mechanic common in the genre.
Not saying every game is spotless, I’m sure there are other examples.
Though I get the sentiment that it doesn't even seem like a consideration anymore. Especially if it's just for game engine calculated light reflections and such.
Shit, old fighting games like SF2 were so bad, certain stages ran slower than others and fireballs would lag the game on hit.
Like you’ll find me playing and enjoying bad rats before you find me downloading and playing a 100 gb+ video game for more than 5 hours. If even that.
On PC it isn't even expensive to get a huge HDD to clear up space on your SSD if you need to.
Granted, there's some games that are pretty poor (Ark: Survival Evolved) but they're exceptions over rules
Xenoblade 3 should be the modern golden standard for gaming tbh.
Like- the original Pokemon games are barely functional messes that used so much of the cartridge space that they couldn't afford any glitch overrides. When one of those games starts to corrupt, it will just keep barreling on until it blue screens itself.
But- I also remember a wild pokemon just randomly not loading in properly on Yellow as a kid and the whole thing freezing on me and corrupting my save.
I would occasionally get Silver exclusive wild Pokemon occasionally showing up in my copy of Gold as a kid. Like.... I was exclusively a solo player with only Gold and somehow ended up with a Meowth on my childhood team.
Plenty of the games of yore were badly balanced. We just remember them as better experiences.
just because they weren't known about doesn't mean the games were fully optimized, much like how games are today
MM on that gamecube disc was so glitchy too, had to restart Great Bay so many times
The problem seems to be that people don't understand the concept of linear time.
Wild times
None of this day 1 bugfix patch; if it wasn't fixed by the time it shipped, it wasn't fixed and you lost your job when the game bombed.
And old games were every bit as buggy and tended to stay that way, unlike present day where things get fixed pretty fast.
It was so ridiculously unoptimised that it was being used to benchmark PCs made 3 years after its release