Thread 724562010

I've been playing UT2004 lately because I had nothing to do awhile waiting and MY GOD what happened to videogames?
This is so good. Crisp looking graphics, clean textures, instant sandbox gameplay that is pure action with tactics and adrenaline, and satisfying weapons and effects. When you get a kill you're rewarded with visual knockback and momentum. Positioning and area of control matters and it's easy to read. Movement is effortless. And content out of the ass + map editor built in.

Even when indie games try to go for a "retro" style they all look like ass or look worse than what it would actually be retro. None of them try to emulate things like this. And runs on anything anywhere.

So discuss why Quake always sucked compared to the UT MP.

>>724562010 (OP)
Games like Halo and Half-Life got more praise.
As a result bad games are considered good games, while good games like 2004 are considered not worth developing.

>>724562247
I've noticed how new games also do not have the ragdoll knockback or momentum effect on your shots. Every game nowadays is just taking pictures of the enemy then they drop to the ground or sparkle away. Makes shooting a rocket not feel like an actual rocket hitting a person

UT99 was better.

>>724562010 (OP)
>what happened to videogames?
Where do we even start?

2007 and the great "casualization" happened.
Wii, iPhone, social media ... which all led to normalfags storming the internet and gaming.
Suddenly, AAA businesses realized that they didn't need to put even half as much effort into their games, and they'd still print money.

This coincided with the already ongoing streamlining of game design, which aimed to speed up development and save costs, since the marketing budgets kept skyrocketing.

Fast forward to 2010s, and off-shelf "general purpose" game engines, such as Unity and Unreal 4, became widely available. Blender suddenly became acceptable within the industry as well, where as before ~2015, no one even joked about using it professionally.
Together with the Youtube becoming bigger and bigger source of DIY tutorials, there was suddenly a bunch of total noobs picking up easily available, free tools, and gobbling together some cheap shit that had a "good enough" vibe and zero optimization.

Low-level programming and manual crafting of game graphics is seldom taught no more. It's all about using pre-made engines, automated tools and AI driven approximations these days, where as ye olde 00s' games were still hand-made, in 3DS Max + Photoshop + text only coding environment. Devs often made their own engines and tools.

While all this was happening, the Deferred Rendering method of doing game graphics became the new standard, providing some neat performance boosts, but also new restrictions, namely breaking the Multi-Sampling AA and making transparency effects more difficult to pull off. This resulted wider adaptation of post-processing AA filters, such as FXAA and now TAA, latter which has become the #1 Hitler of modern game visuals, as UE5 uses it to "smooth out" shitton of low-res, downsampled, dithered 1-bit effects of its, from shading to transparency. Meaning if you disable Temporal AA, the game looks essentially like a PS1 game blown to 4K.

>>724562951
It would be so easy to just do a videogame that looks good and runs excellent
Instead we have shit like DUSK

>>724563325
You can't compare a game made by a whole team to a game made by 1 or a few people. Indies usually don't have the budget to pay the salary of multiple people and the skills to be a manager or boss. I can only see a group of friends working together without caring about money, but what are the odds of your friends being into the same stuff as you or having the same time to commit?

>>724563705
I wonder how big was the UT team back then

>>724563325
You have to understand, making good looking games that also run well take SKILL and EFFORT.
Two things that generation Z and modern AAA industry both severely lack.

Pic related; Kojima's PS2 and PSP era games are stellar research material for any aspiring 3D artist. The Peace Walker models for example have mere few hundred to 1.5k triangles + a few 64x64 textures, with all shading "hand baked" into the images, yet they look far more impressive than most indie retro slop... or even many of the AAA shit with 10s of millions of polys + multiple 4K PBR textures on top.

>>724563705
>muh costs
You can literally make games for free these days.
Engines? Free.
Modeling tools? Free.
Information? Easily available + free.

>>724564071
Yeah but people's time usually ain't free

>>724563893
It may seem small if you compare to modern teams that have hundreds of people, but you can see that if you go solo you have to do the work of all these people. Unless you prioritize something above all else, like gameplay.

>>724562010 (OP)
Yes, FPS multiplayer peaked with UT2004 16v16 Onslaught.

>>724564157
Correct. But guess how majority of all iconic games were born?
That's right: as passion projects a couple nerds worked together in their mother's basement, for months.

Vidya biz is very akin to movie making:
you gain nothing during the development, and even after the release, the result is essentially a gamble. However, these days you can at least seek to fund the project via crowd sourcing solutions. The old methods of acquiring a budget for your project, such as getting a LOAN or pitching your idea to a publisher, are still there as well.

But once again, as an oldass nerd with some legit game development background, I cannot stress how much easier it is to get started and craft something playable this day and age, even compared to mere 15 years ago.

>>724562010 (OP)
it was good for its time but Halo 3 came out three years later and since then we've gotten plenty of COD games

>>724564551
I agree with you, that's why I said that it's more likely to happen if it's a group of friends, but ask yourself if everyone happens to have dev friends who also have the same schedule and motivation. I guess you could try to get people from the internet, but you'll have to get to know them first to see if they'll commit to the end or quit at some point.

I'm not saying it's impossible to do work alone, but for certain games I feel that a team is more appropiate.

>>724564878
>I guess you could try to get people from the internet, but you'll have to get to know them first to see if they'll commit to the end or quit at some point.
Well duh. You say that as if it'd be a new way of doing things, rather than something folks' been doing for the past 20 years.

Expedition 33 famously outsourced a ton of stuff to literal Redditors, from writing to soundtrack composing

>>724564489
>FPS multiplayer peaked with UT2004 16v16 Onslaught
>Instead of any other of the vanilla modes
>ONS
How can anyone be so close to the truth and miss it

for me, it was joining random strange trial maps people made in assault mode and dying 5000 times

>>724562010 (OP)
>Even when indie games try to go for a "retro" style they all look like ass or look worse than what it would actually be retro
indie devs are miserable people trying to do all or most of the work themselves of course 90% of their games will look like crap, especially when you compare them to old Epic + Digital Extremes

Quake already looked better than indie games

>>724565319
I can't even say if you are an ultraboomer who thinks vehicules=bad, or if you think capture the flag and its translocator spam is good gameplay.
And team deathmatch is too simple.

>>724562010 (OP)
yes but not catgirla with the gyatt for the low low price of 8$ for all the zoomies so UT died

>>724566741
Battlefiegger