Were developers simply more talented back in the day?

Yes, they were

what's with the orangutan arms

everyone was more talented in the 20th century. we switched from education and skillmaxxing to consuming and being proud of being retarded

The market was different, technically maybe current day big devs are also talented as fuck, it's just that their talent is wasted on garbage

Modern games went too far with huge open worlds. Closed world games are easier to develop for a reason, you don't need 1,000,000 assets for a 1,000 square mile map. They have huge sweatshops outsourced to shitholes and resort to premade UE assets and now AI.
It's easy to compare to a much smaller old game, where you didn't need a million details on every model, and stuff like bump mapping did half the job.

>>11861569
/thread

Every industry is about following shit orders now. People who can do things manually get the short end of the stick.

>>11861569
>consuming
One of the most meaningless buzzwords ever. As if games from the 90's weren't also consumer products.

>>11861545 (OP)
that crouch walk looks goofy as shit

Riddick here is using "Stencil Shadows" which are actually incredibly simple and not used anymore since they don't handle complex geometry and softshadows well. This, at least, is not an example of modern developers being shittier than developers a couple decades ago

I mean, they absolutely ARE. But this is not an example of that.
>>11861579
Eh, that kinda touches on the problem with Doom 3 though
Doom 3 used similar lighting tech. And it was highly demanding performance wise. Which is a good part of the reason the game mostly takes place in claustrophobic corridors. In all honesty it was the AAA trend for a long time and still is the trend in many places to make smaller scoped games with incredibly high-fidelity graphics. COD (before they went full multiplayer), TLOU, GOW, whatever modern moviegamer slop that is being played regularly? All eschew open worlds for rails

>>11861545 (OP)
yes, also look at the racial and gender breakdown of modern studios vs studios of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s.

>>11861569
why are Americans, and especially zoomer/alphoomer Americans so proud of being anti intellectual now? They realize they cant all be influencers right there isn't enough air time and money to go around

>>11861545 (OP)
Yes, yes they were.

>>11861634
>why are Americans, and especially zoomer/alphoomer Americans so proud of being anti intellectual now?
I don’t see much future for the Americans. It’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities. Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?

>>11861691
I have panamanian dual citizenship through my wife, another 10 years or so I'm probably moving to el valle there or something this can't go on much longer

>>11861569
game OP posted is from the 21th century you retarded faggot

>>11861545 (OP)
>1st person camera cancer

I don't know go play a king's quest game and ask Sierra huehuehue

/v/ tier thread

>>11861545 (OP)
20-30 years ago major video game programmers got their start fucking around because they were bored doing their masters in mechanical engineering or whatever. To them the calculations to project a stencil shadow onto an uneven surface was laughably trivial compared to the shit they've been drilling daily. They would go on to make game engines and produce quality releases that we remember to this day.
Today the cost of university vs. the likelihood of being hired ruins the cost/benefit. Instead of pissing around with 3D math geniuses are off figuring out how to scam 6figs on AI bullshit from some crappy startup. And all the college dropouts are churning out UE tutorial crap and flooding steam so anything good has to have a multi-mil. marketing budget to shill for it.
Same reason why emulators used to aim for perfection and now it's just about meeting your patreon requirements to keep the money coming. The talent is less interested in the grift so it's just the grifters pretending to have talent.

>>11861545 (OP)
This is Riddick on original Xbox btw

>>11861569
>we switched from education and skillmaxxing to consuming and being proud of being retarded
What the fuck?!

>>11861545 (OP)
they were white and (japanese) yellow

>>11861634
>>11861691
rent free

>>11861545 (OP)
Nah it is how it's always been: some people actually know what they're doing while a lot of people are retards

>>11861545 (OP)
>basic shader effects
>talent
Who are you trying to fool here? All that shit was basic stuff on the xbox. Also hard shadows always looked like shit.

>>11861545 (OP)

around 0:18 he's basically walking at a 45° tilt. Still, pretty cool how the shadow reflects basically everything he's doing.

>>11861545 (OP)
>Were developers simply more talented back in the day?
In some ways, yes, primarily programmers having to know how to actually fucking problem solve, but I think one of the really big problems with recent games is that there's WAY too many cooks in the kitchen and that big AAA games are "over-corporatized," or suffering from "Disneyfication."

That is to say, they are TOO focus tested, they are TOO strictly painted by the numbers, they are TOO calculated to be the most profitable as possible, because they have grown TOO expensive to make.
It's not that there was never focus testing or that people didn't stick to what works or there were never cash-in ventures, BUT, generally it was that the publisher wanted X or Y type of game and then have a studio get to work on one, and while there would be meddling at times, sometimes catastrophically, like just buttfucking the game or perhaps even a whole studio, those games wouldn't ever be effectively DESIGNED by a bunch of suits in a boardroom.

A typical big budget game now has basically an outline of a design document put together by some people who don't play videogames and only know market research, that's then handed to a massive legion of developers to hammer it together according to those exact orders, the vast numbers of people involved erasing the potential for any one individual dev's personality or style to shine through in design.

They generally have good production value, and overall the design of the game is probably competent, the gameplay loop functions and you feel you can engage with it, but what happens is that every such game ends up feeling more and more the same.
Where's the personality and variety? Why are these games from different series and ostensibly even different genres feeling like they play the same, have the same kinds of characters, have the same kinds of stories and themes, the same mechanics and design languages, and the same feel?

They were Disneyfied, just like movies were.

>>11861545 (OP)
It was a new frontier for TECHNOLOGY. They had full reign to just implement whatever cool new advances in graphical/physics tech they could muster, because it would most certainly add a novel appeal to the game.
However, over time, the budgets of games got more and more focus tested. At some point, it was considered that less is more. What good is shooting a watermelon and seeing it explode into 30 chunks, if not every player does that? You're telling me we're paying a developer a full day's salary to put that shit in, when most players just walk past the melon? No, cut that out! Just focus on the ~graphics~ and forget anything we deem ancillary to getting a 9/10 from IGN.

>>11862257
P.S. i didn't know what ancillary means, i thought it was like capillaries or sometihng also i'm dumb

>>11862036
>Nah it is how it's always been: some people actually know what they're doing while a lot of people are retards
Literally any idiot could have made Doom. It's purely a coincidence that it took 30+ years for the Freedoom project to do what id Software did in a matter of years.

>>11861545 (OP)
Yes, because they were people who loved video games. Now they're people who see video games as a replacement for the career they wish they had (Hollywood director).

>>11861609
That's how chads like Riddick walk.

>>11861609
I'm sure all types of walking look goofy as shit to a literal blubber-ass landwhale such as yourself.

We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.

>>11861545 (OP)
>>11861554
yes and me3.

some of them are still making games though. like Carmack.

>>11863651
yes we do

>>11863542
i'm literally the opposite of a landwhale, barely over 100lbs lmao

>>11861597
i think they mean doing nothing but consuming and never creating or learning anything. watching stuff online while making your own content is different from endlessly scrolling brainrot.

>>11863542
projecting

>>11861864
>Instead of pissing around with 3D math geniuses are off figuring out how to scam 6figs on AI bullshit from some crappy startup
Nah true math geniuses are usually in it either for clout or for pure love of the game, and if they weren't safely contained in their little corner of academia they'd probably go the Uncle Ted's cabin route

>>11863832
I'm sure all types of walking look goofy as shit to a literal twink-boy faggot such as yourself.

>>11864019
You're greatly over-estimating the "genius" of numbers fags. There's a reason why there's tons of them and society is ruled by engineers, not them.

>>11863542
>>11863832
>>11864046
kek

>>11861864
>programmers got their start fucking around because they were bored doing their masters in mechanical engineering
Jesus Christ...

>>11864049
I don't think you know what a mathematician actually does if you call them a numbers fag. And trust me, your average engineer is a (admittedly well-paid) retard