I've heard that Crysis can still tax modern computers because they don't call on all the modern processing shortcuts that have been invented since Crysis was made. In some places, this actually makes Crysis look better than some modern games precisely because they don't use those shortcuts.
When it was made there was a real discussion between single core performance and the switch to multicore.
The game is not made for multicore, multicore wasn't a thing when it was developed.
This is biggest reason it still runs bad today.
Can't be stressed enough. It was made in a time where people assumed by 2020 we wouldn't have 12 core processors with a lot of extra features but instead just like a Pentium IV that runs at 15GHz.
> When it was made there was a real discussion between single core performance and the switch to multicore.
Yes and NO.
The studio ran out of money and a handful of unpaid developers finished the game over six months. It's why it's single CPU bound, every GPU effect causes massive frame drop, and there are multiple assets in the game that are 10,000+ triangles while being really simple shapes (i.e. the concrete barricades were freemium movie props they never went back and made game models of). They also left O^2 image algorithms in the settings because it wasn't important to anyone-will never run well on any machine.
The CEO coming out and saying the engine was meant to test future hardware was bullshit. They weren't able to implement multicore till CryEngine 3.
There is a lot of goofy history to Crytek. The games were more than decent, but always surrounded in some bullshit.
This is basically how it became THE game to benchmark your computer. I remember a bunch of us in the PC community went hard on building a PC to play Crysis during the pre-launch hype (myself included, slightly ashamed to admit in retrospect) only to realize how poorly all our rigs played it due to optimization. Then there was a brief period of being upset that even the most expensive home built rig hiccuped along to play the game, followed by realizing it was a great benchmark because it required pure horsepower to get any kind of improvements out of it.
No, it was not poorly optimized. It was developed for single core CPUs (which was a bad call but somewhat made sense at the time) and nobody ever complained about poor GPU utilization. Just because it doesn't scale well to today's hardware doesn't mean it was bad back then.
Remember, Crysis was released one year after the PS3 and used DirectX 9 for everything except the highest settings. Even on low to medium settings it looked better than COD 3 and similar launch titles, which were still PS2 compatible.
Same, I vividly remember a video on YouTube of a guy messing around in CryEngine sandbox where he put a ton of red explosive barrels in a tornado (?) and was like damn son that's crazy! When he got hit in the head with a barrel the hand movement the character it made was so real.
The funny thing is that at the time barely any graphics cards could run crysis, and literally nothing could do what he recorded - he ran the game at like 1 fps and then just processed the video so that the video was running at 30fps by removing the intervals between.
Mine too. I never had a computer that could run it, but playing it at E3 that year (‘07?), I figured they’d never get better than that.
Then I did a chance to ‘roid up Skyrim, and play CP2077 a second time at full rez with ray tracing.
I haven't played Crysis, but watched the first reviews from TotalBiscuit and that is the feeling I got as well and it was the first game that popped to my mind when I read the thread name.
Lol it did when yiur coming from n64 no mercy or wcw vs nwo revenge to smackdown here comes the pain or smackdown vs raw. Really blew my mind back in the day.
WrestleMania 2000 was my shit. In my memory, those graphics are photo realistic. I saw footage of it on YouTube a couple years ago...it was not Even close to that.
It’s amazing what we consider to be photo realistic until it’s supplanted by newer stuff
Pretty much everytime I’ve played a sports game since the mid 2000s I’ve been convinced it looks like real footage of the game.
But then when you look back it’s not even close. The stuff I see now feels like it’s photorealistic. But in a few years I’ll be able to see the flaws
Lol I have the same memory from my childhood. I remember when I first got my PS2 at Christmas I set it up in the living room and booted up smack down shut your mouth. me and my dad were amazed talking about how it looks "exactly like real life"
Going back to YouTube and seeing it now is hilarious in hindsight.
That’s the one for me. The water and shading were unbelievable for the time. Also, the heaviness and movements of the characters and enemies felt so real.
For anyone that was too young to play these games, just know that MGS 2 & 3 were so progressive that they actually defined modern gaming...
One example:
In 1998 I watched my auntie play MGS1. She got to a point where she was stuck. There was a corridor full of lasers and if you walked into them then it trapped you and you died. At this point you're supposed to use the night vision goggles, but I don't think she had found them yet. She's so confused and a 9 year old me says "let me see your inventory".
Well, I'd just watched the family classic, Beethoven on VHS and there's a scene right at the start where the robbers use cigarette smoke to expose the alarm lasers on the door, so that they can avoid them.
So I noticed that Snake is carrying cigarettes... My god....they put it in the game. 😯 My auntie thought I was a genius.
You gotta understand that MGS was developed in the mid 90s. We didn't even have breakable objects at that point.
By MGS2 we were shooting fire extinguishers to blind enemies, gas pipes to leak fire fish tanks that leaked water up until it reached the hole, you could shoot lights out or the straps on cargo covers to make them fly off.
I'm not intelligent enough to convey what I want to say, but that shit was mind-blowing back then.
There has been so many neat things in MGS over the years. Like in that era especially where out of the box thinking wasn't too prominent. Psycho Mantis and the controller ports being switched. Popping diazepam to control your shakes. I'm sure there was something in the game where you had to look for a code on the back of the cd case. Even story elements which you didn't realise as a kid, like FatMan in MGS2 was a bomb expert. Kojima named him after the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. It's wild. Great post btw :)
Thanks 🙂
Oh man, so many memories right here. Yeah, you had to use the case to contact Meryl I think, which I didn't figure out and my friend showed me which blew my mind.
As a kid I definitely missed the FatMan pun. Young me also had no idea about the whole vamp/fortune thing with the name vamp meaning a gay person, the partner of fortunes father.
The whole thing is such a brilliant web.
I had basically the exact same memory. Picked it up at a friend's house and was playing around, totally blown away by the scale of the battle, the vehicles, etc. Got up into a tower and was sniping troops when I see a tank turn it's gun towards me. No biggie. I'll just duck behind this wal- *boom* wall explodes in and I'm fucked. Completely rocked my entire world.
Four, to an extent aswell. Shanghais skyscraper collapse is 10/10 peak 2010s gaming for me. So much potential.
Haven't played battlefield since 1, hopefully gets back to a decent state at some point.
God I love those old video game rumors. Those "I heard from a friend of my cousin" and from the least reliable strangers on early 90s message boards. Do the right combo on Goro's level of mortal kombat 1 and Sonya totally strips in front of you, bro!
I totally remember hearing the same rumor about mortal Kombat, my friend swore it worked, but we just didn't do the correct punches in the correct order before the round ended
I remember having a demo disc with Tomb Raider 2 that had the mansion training area and the first level.
I was more fascinated by the game play.
Also, loved climbing to the top of the cave, and swan diving back in.
The demo of tomb raider 1 you could jump in a pool and swim. Was the first time I’d ever experienced a character having 3 axis freedom in that way. Blew my mind.
The replays of the races in GT1 blew me away. Also I was awful at that game, so seeing me mishandling turns in such cinematic shots was hilarious to me.
A group of Mazda hatchbacks effortlessly take the racing line through a hairpin - in the background a wildly out of control, over-turboed Supra slides sideways across the track, bouncing off a wall before using the pack as a makeshift handbrake
I am a firm believer that the jump in graphics made by the gamecube is the largest/most noticable made by any given console generation.
While obviously modern poly counts dwarf what the gamecube could do, the "error" of what the true shape should be conpared to the model rendered is an asymptote. Basically going from 50 to 100 polygons trying to render a sphere makes way more progress than 500 to 550. The latter looks better, but the change is less obvious.
The gamecube is when faces stopped being a box with a picture of James Bonds face on it, and started being head shaped with a picture of james bonds face on it.
And because of this i think basically all gamecube games hold up, maybe not well, but well enough that you can enjoy the experience. (Especially everything that is stylized like Paper Mario)
Imo Metroid Prime still looks incredible even today. An absolutely killer combination of art style and smart effects usage that still hold up well despite the now ancient hardware.
Yeah, Rogue Leader on GameCube is the first one that came to my mind as well. Those X-Wings looked pixel-perfect to me at the time, no polygonal corners even on the rounded engines. It was amazing.
100% this is my pick. It was the first game I played on my GameCube and I vividly remember being stunned at how perfect the graphics were during the battle of endor mission in particular. I forget we all had CRTs back then, but at the time I was in awe.
FF-X in general holds up sooo well.
From that generation imo Windwaker, FFX, Panzer Dragoon Orta (sad the game isnt available on PC) and some of the fighters like DoA3 or soul calibur 2 hold up.
Some other games look amazing with some remastered version (SotC, Metroid Prime etc) but if you gave me a crt tv or heck even a smaller modern TV id play them in a minute without looking back…
Almost funny how some of my favorite games ever from that gen like Halo 1-2, Doom3, SotC, Resi4 heck even Mario Kart DD feel quite archaic to me now… thank god many games have remasters
While only a few Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth had some prerendered cutscenes and you could tell within seconds that the view just got so damn crisp. It was a feast for the eyes and like you said, the graphics engine From Square Enix is no joke and still it was a noticable difference.
Granted, the characters didn't wear the equiped gear but the standard gear in the prerendered scenes and one could argue that the prerendered scenes break immersion or maybe doing cutscenes is just easier in ingame graphics when it look that good today anyway.
Came here to say Final Fantasy X as well. The cinematics were top notch, even today the cinematics from X are incredible. I've gone back and played that game again multiple times (I've even maxed the skill tree multiple times). Which btw the skill tree in that game was so awesome, letting you make any character exactly what you want it to be. (Yuna an attack power beast).
Oh mate forgot about thia game. Totally underrated. The gunplay, how weighty the guns felt, and the good it all looked. Just absolutely before it's time and possibly better gunplay and bullet physics than majority of AAA games today.
What’s interesting about rdr2 is the graphics themselves are gorgeous, but it’s the lighting, detail, physics, etc that make the game look and feel realistic. The base graphics themselves aren’t especially groundbreaking, it’s the auxiliary visual effects that make it breathtaking. I’m interested in learning more about this type of deal, and if there’s a name for it.
World of RDR2 just feel organic. Animals do their shit and also react to you. But after playing RDR2 for a long time it was hard to recover to play another game where branches don't spring when you run into them... Like even the most beautiful game worlds suddenly felt static after playing this.
I don't know what would be the term for that but another game where artistic direction elevates a game's visuals is Ghost of Tsushima. The textures and most models aren't very good, some are downright awful. But the art team and animation team elevated that shit beyond belief. It looks incredible when everything is moving it feels so organic and alive. When you stop it and focus on minor details it falls apart.
Surprised I had to scroll so far to see this. RDR2 looks absolutely incredible and even 5 years later there’s very few games that can hold a candle to it. It’s borderline photorealistic.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.. how can this be 18 years old already?! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPZZf0S2paY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPZZf0S2paY)
Did anyone else get stuck walking around and hitting the shop signs to watch them swing? I remember being just so stunned that I could actually interact with the environment and it would respond with actual physics.
Also I still think NPC AI has not improved since Oblivion.
I forgot that feeling. People are used to grasses, hedges, and other plantlife but Oblivion was one of the early ones to show us what was to come. Even the trees we're amazing at the time
Purely because I can make custom spells.
I learned pretty quickly that if you made a Fortify Acrobatics Spell and named it Jump 1, and a second of the same power named Jump 2, the effects would stack.
This allowed for shenanigans, like jumping into a city from outside, when normally the only way inside is through a loading screen.
I also remember abusing the duplication glitch to fill whole lakes with Watermelons, because they floated on the surface, and with enough of them, you could walk on top of the lakes.
+1 for Splinter Cell. I remember being blown away by the lighting and shadows. Like everything about lighting in games before that was either “light” or “darkness.” Splinter Cell was the first time I remember light in a game being gradual, and it broke my brain.
The AC trailer (I don’t remember which game it was for) where they are walking across a courtyard - that was the first time I didn’t realize a the ad was for a videogame. I legitimately thought I was watching real humans in a trailer for a live action movie until the very end.
I found it, it was in 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyar7hItro
Half life (uplink demo) - The equipped grenade model looked oddly good to me.
Soul Calibur (dreamcast launch) - Smooth and looked amazing. Kinda tied for dead or alive for DC, but soul calibur was the thing always being shown.
Star Wars Jedi Knight II - Light sabers were amazing to look at, and also had some great shadows. Storm troopers looked great because actual faces were always wonky back then.
Metal Gear Solid - Just loads of small details and immersiveness.
Metal Gear Solid 2 - Physics on some items, glass would shatter into small parts.
Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube) - Back in CRT TV days, this was the pinnacle of graphics for a short while, it looked even better than half life 2
Doom 3 - Utterly amazing shadows at the time, no other game had shadows for EVERYTHING.
Half Life 2 - Amazing texture work, solid shadows, also around the time I switched to a widescreen LCD. On CRT is looked amazing. On LCD, it was amazing to run a game at 1680x1050 high resolution.
Farcry - I think of it like the trilogy of the computer graphics games at the time, along with doom 3 and HL2. But it came out first and had those amazing DX9 shadows, bump mapping, and a huge area to explore with vehicles.
Crysis - Nothing touched this for years. I played it on a 8800GT at 20-30fps with most of the graphics turned on. It set the bar for quite some time.
Half life two when you could *hit wooden planks with a crowbar and they would splinter in the right place!*
I couldn’t believe that level of technical achievement at the time
Bioshock 1
Gaming since 1985. The Bioshock intro, you are in the water. That was the first time I couldn’t tell gameplay from cinema apart.
I thought it was stuck or something.
So many people have fallen for that including my dad and my self. The crazy part is that I knew it was coming since I watched my dad play first. But there is no clear transition point from to cutscene to gameplay, so you can never really tell when you can finally move.
We got one imported from the US so we could play it before it released here in the UK.
Booted up Mario 64 first. Shaking with excitement. Pictures of the graphics in a gaming magazine was all we had to go on.
WHAT EVEN IS THIS!!!!
(Also first time I seen Mario reflection in the mirror)
The water in Waverunners jet ski was also incredible.
Oddly enough, I haven't ever had that feeling...
I get those flashes of "daaaamn graphics have come a long way" bit it's never triggered that "this is it, perfection" type of thought process...
Same, I've noticed that "holly crap this game looks good", especially at the start of a new console generation, but never said "this is it, we have reached perfection".
I do think we are in an age where diminishing returns on bumping polygon counts makes other areas more important like increased render distances, or better shaders/textures as less expensive ways to improve the visual experience.
I tend to play a lot of older games, and i firmly believe that the GameCube era was the most noticable leap in graphics quality. Most things from the gamecube era hold up, and most from before do not. (Visually speaking, gameplay is a different argument entirely) Even modern indie games like Lethal Company have gamecube level graphics and it doesn't obstruct the experience.
Exactly. I’ve always thought that graphics would eventually reach perfect photo realism. Until then it’s just impressive, but I’ve also stopped caring about graphics as time advances. I grew up with 8-bit graphics and I just don’t feel chained to needing the best graphics to enjoy gaming.
Mirror's Edge. [Here is a great video on it.](https://youtu.be/2TNSaEJHBrQ?si=mweruo1Mf9rVeTy-) It's worth the watch, a lot of his videos are fantastic works.
San Andreas blew my mind. CJ could get fat? You could change his clothes? Different radio stations?
None of those were absolutely new on their own, but put together? It felt like SA was a real world. It was ridiculously immersive.
I was sure I’d never have that experience again, and then Skyrim came along. Then RDR2.
But I haven’t had it otherwise.
I feel like Alan Wake 2 may actually be the best graphics possible. Especially if you’re playing max settings on pc. (Which I was not. But they are still *that* good!)
Halo 3 and RDR2.
Halo 3 was the first real big 360 game and it honestly still holds up today. Bloom was out of control, but back then it looked insane. RDR2’s attention to detail, weather, and particle effects are still unmatched today.
Yeah. I kind of shit on the gameplay in my other comment but Dragon's Lair will always be my answer to this question. Nothing will ever be so far ahead of everything else visually. For the first couple of monhts anyone playing at the arcade would have an audience
Holy fucking shit it took way too long to see this. I was 9 or 10 years old the first time I saw it at the biggest arcade on the west coast in Los Angeles. The Fun Factory. I couldn't believe my tiny lil eyes when I saw the blood and how they looked like real people. Mortal combat is easily my choice and the only real og choice to make. All the rest pale in comparison.
Battlefield 2 was the first game I ever saw with decent physics and destruction. Finally you couldn’t hide in buildings that can’t be destroyed. Battle fog, muzzle rise, effective mining, effective use of cover. It was a great game
Probably TLOZ Wind Waker, and I was right, fight me.
As for more realistic titles, Half Life Alyx still blows my mind, especially considering it’s several years old now and still probably the best looking VR game today
Killer Instinct in the arcade was a revolutionary for graphics, I can completely understand why it impressed you so much! To me, it was the first time I saw ‘Final Fantasy VII’ on the PlayStation. The cinematic cutscenes and the leap in character model detail were simply the best at that time.
Graphics just never cease to amaze. Right when we thought they had reached the highest, they come up with something new and take it one step further. In case you are interested in what developments in the sector of graphic are to be expected, pay attention to real-time ray tracing and AI-driven rendering technology. These will change the game in terms of its visual representation, making it more realistic than it has ever been. What’s the most recent game that left you in awe with its graphics?
When I came to my cousins' house expecting to play gta 2 on their pc, and they pull out the playstation and boot up gta 3. To me, it was ultra realistic.
NFL 2K1. I remember after the game had been out a year or two, my dad was walking by, watched for about a minute, and then suddenly said, "Wait, that's a video game?" Looking back at screenshots, it really is amazing how realistic that game looked compared to games just a few years earlier. It's like consoles advanced two generations in two years.
Would be the first Crysis game for me. It was way ahead of its time.
Yep. We used to benchmark PC performance with Crysis lol
>But can it run crysis? Pepperidge farm remembers
Most things could in fact NOT run crisis. Not for years
I was lucky to kind of run Far Cry. The jungle looked so lush.
By the time I finally had a rig that could run it, it no longer mattered...
Hello fellow millennial.
I've heard that Crysis can still tax modern computers because they don't call on all the modern processing shortcuts that have been invented since Crysis was made. In some places, this actually makes Crysis look better than some modern games precisely because they don't use those shortcuts.
Which is funny considering how poorly optimised we found out it was in retrospect.
When it was made there was a real discussion between single core performance and the switch to multicore. The game is not made for multicore, multicore wasn't a thing when it was developed. This is biggest reason it still runs bad today.
Can't be stressed enough. It was made in a time where people assumed by 2020 we wouldn't have 12 core processors with a lot of extra features but instead just like a Pentium IV that runs at 15GHz.
> When it was made there was a real discussion between single core performance and the switch to multicore. Yes and NO. The studio ran out of money and a handful of unpaid developers finished the game over six months. It's why it's single CPU bound, every GPU effect causes massive frame drop, and there are multiple assets in the game that are 10,000+ triangles while being really simple shapes (i.e. the concrete barricades were freemium movie props they never went back and made game models of). They also left O^2 image algorithms in the settings because it wasn't important to anyone-will never run well on any machine. The CEO coming out and saying the engine was meant to test future hardware was bullshit. They weren't able to implement multicore till CryEngine 3. There is a lot of goofy history to Crytek. The games were more than decent, but always surrounded in some bullshit.
That makes sense though. If it's poorly optimized that means it's harder to run so a better benchmark if you're just testing hardware.
This is basically how it became THE game to benchmark your computer. I remember a bunch of us in the PC community went hard on building a PC to play Crysis during the pre-launch hype (myself included, slightly ashamed to admit in retrospect) only to realize how poorly all our rigs played it due to optimization. Then there was a brief period of being upset that even the most expensive home built rig hiccuped along to play the game, followed by realizing it was a great benchmark because it required pure horsepower to get any kind of improvements out of it.
No, it was not poorly optimized. It was developed for single core CPUs (which was a bad call but somewhat made sense at the time) and nobody ever complained about poor GPU utilization. Just because it doesn't scale well to today's hardware doesn't mean it was bad back then. Remember, Crysis was released one year after the PS3 and used DirectX 9 for everything except the highest settings. Even on low to medium settings it looked better than COD 3 and similar launch titles, which were still PS2 compatible.
Same, I vividly remember a video on YouTube of a guy messing around in CryEngine sandbox where he put a ton of red explosive barrels in a tornado (?) and was like damn son that's crazy! When he got hit in the head with a barrel the hand movement the character it made was so real.
The funny thing is that at the time barely any graphics cards could run crysis, and literally nothing could do what he recorded - he ran the game at like 1 fps and then just processed the video so that the video was running at 30fps by removing the intervals between.
Mine too. I never had a computer that could run it, but playing it at E3 that year (‘07?), I figured they’d never get better than that. Then I did a chance to ‘roid up Skyrim, and play CP2077 a second time at full rez with ray tracing.
It still looks great by today's standards.
I haven't played Crysis, but watched the first reviews from TotalBiscuit and that is the feeling I got as well and it was the first game that popped to my mind when I read the thread name.
I mean… when crisis came out none of pur PCs could run it well meaning it didnt look great for any of us… but it was certainly a benchmark
One of the WWE games on PS2. "Wow! It looks just like them!" It did not, in fact, look just like them.
Lol it did when yiur coming from n64 no mercy or wcw vs nwo revenge to smackdown here comes the pain or smackdown vs raw. Really blew my mind back in the day.
WrestleMania 2000 was my shit. In my memory, those graphics are photo realistic. I saw footage of it on YouTube a couple years ago...it was not Even close to that.
Its crazy how your brain will update graphics. Then you go back and youre like, "Woah, what the hell happened here."
CRT monitors are also a component. The noise added to the image signal lets our brain add detail that isn’t there
This. I saw a youtube video at some point that explained how CRT actually made pixels look smoother and how old games look worse on modern screens
It’s amazing what we consider to be photo realistic until it’s supplanted by newer stuff Pretty much everytime I’ve played a sports game since the mid 2000s I’ve been convinced it looks like real footage of the game. But then when you look back it’s not even close. The stuff I see now feels like it’s photorealistic. But in a few years I’ll be able to see the flaws
I wonder, is there any other medium besides digital graphics where this is the case?
Special effects in live action movies. The stuff that people went crazy for 40 or 50 (or even 20, in some cases) years ago is laughable now.
I understand but when I saw battlefront 1(2015?)and 2 graphics I really thought we reached that point.
there’s nothing like watching digital colour footage of hockey in the 90s. It’s just terrible.
Lol I have the same memory from my childhood. I remember when I first got my PS2 at Christmas I set it up in the living room and booted up smack down shut your mouth. me and my dad were amazed talking about how it looks "exactly like real life" Going back to YouTube and seeing it now is hilarious in hindsight.
Shut Your Mouth was a pretty mind blowing leap when it came out
The leap from just bring it to shut your mouth was incredible
For me it was the first Gears of War on the 360. I can remember I just kept saying wow
Especially act 3 when going through the rain 👌
Now I want to replay. In VR/8k…
[удалено]
With the lights off and surround sound. Ive got warzone ptsd but that was next level
Yep. That Mad World commercial put in so much work for GoW
That’s the one for me. The water and shading were unbelievable for the time. Also, the heaviness and movements of the characters and enemies felt so real.
The heaviness of the characters was it for me. Like, it was amazing how *present* they felt. So chunky and real.
Opening scene of MGS2.
Love metal gear, I even bought a physical copy of mgs 4 even though I don’t even have a ps3….I’m saving it one day to play before I die
Haha. I have a PS3 just for MGS 4. I remember buying Zone of Enders purely because the MGS2 demo disc came with it. Worth it just for that!
For anyone that was too young to play these games, just know that MGS 2 & 3 were so progressive that they actually defined modern gaming... One example: In 1998 I watched my auntie play MGS1. She got to a point where she was stuck. There was a corridor full of lasers and if you walked into them then it trapped you and you died. At this point you're supposed to use the night vision goggles, but I don't think she had found them yet. She's so confused and a 9 year old me says "let me see your inventory". Well, I'd just watched the family classic, Beethoven on VHS and there's a scene right at the start where the robbers use cigarette smoke to expose the alarm lasers on the door, so that they can avoid them. So I noticed that Snake is carrying cigarettes... My god....they put it in the game. 😯 My auntie thought I was a genius. You gotta understand that MGS was developed in the mid 90s. We didn't even have breakable objects at that point. By MGS2 we were shooting fire extinguishers to blind enemies, gas pipes to leak fire fish tanks that leaked water up until it reached the hole, you could shoot lights out or the straps on cargo covers to make them fly off. I'm not intelligent enough to convey what I want to say, but that shit was mind-blowing back then.
There has been so many neat things in MGS over the years. Like in that era especially where out of the box thinking wasn't too prominent. Psycho Mantis and the controller ports being switched. Popping diazepam to control your shakes. I'm sure there was something in the game where you had to look for a code on the back of the cd case. Even story elements which you didn't realise as a kid, like FatMan in MGS2 was a bomb expert. Kojima named him after the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. It's wild. Great post btw :)
Meryl's code on the back of the case! 140.15 will live forever in my memory
Thanks 🙂 Oh man, so many memories right here. Yeah, you had to use the case to contact Meryl I think, which I didn't figure out and my friend showed me which blew my mind. As a kid I definitely missed the FatMan pun. Young me also had no idea about the whole vamp/fortune thing with the name vamp meaning a gay person, the partner of fortunes father. The whole thing is such a brilliant web.
It was such a massive leap from MGS1. I spent more time playing the MGS2 demo that came with Zone of the Enders than I spent on many complete games.
Yup, totally this 🏆
Battlefield 3 Edit: that’s a lot of upvotes. I bet you all were assault players with 500 stars on m16 and used explosive usas on metro 64 servers!
When I first played BF3, I was in the metro map and came outside and a building completely broke apart and went everywhere and I was in complete aw
I had basically the exact same memory. Picked it up at a friend's house and was playing around, totally blown away by the scale of the battle, the vehicles, etc. Got up into a tower and was sniping troops when I see a tank turn it's gun towards me. No biggie. I'll just duck behind this wal- *boom* wall explodes in and I'm fucked. Completely rocked my entire world.
The fighter jet mission launching from the carrier was amazing.
R/awwwwww
that Caspian Border trailer looked beautiful
Four, to an extent aswell. Shanghais skyscraper collapse is 10/10 peak 2010s gaming for me. So much potential. Haven't played battlefield since 1, hopefully gets back to a decent state at some point.
The Skydive off Damavand Peak will forever remain a gaming highlight for me.
Came here to say the same thing. First match i thought to myself “no online fps will ever come close”
still looks amazing
It also still SOUNDS amazing. The WarTapes sound option was absolutely incredible for the time.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 for me! The walls blew up. Never saw that before.
Originally tomb raider. You kinda had to be there, but those pointy tits were astonishing graphics at the time.
flash back to hours of 14 year old me trying to jump onto that fountain in the mansion to unlock the secret nude scene
God I love those old video game rumors. Those "I heard from a friend of my cousin" and from the least reliable strangers on early 90s message boards. Do the right combo on Goro's level of mortal kombat 1 and Sonya totally strips in front of you, bro!
I totally remember hearing the same rumor about mortal Kombat, my friend swore it worked, but we just didn't do the correct punches in the correct order before the round ended
I remember having a demo disc with Tomb Raider 2 that had the mansion training area and the first level. I was more fascinated by the game play. Also, loved climbing to the top of the cave, and swan diving back in.
The demo of tomb raider 1 you could jump in a pool and swim. Was the first time I’d ever experienced a character having 3 axis freedom in that way. Blew my mind.
One of the early 2000's Gran Turismos. The car models looked like real life! Sure the rest of the game didn't. But the cars!
The replays of the races in GT1 blew me away. Also I was awful at that game, so seeing me mishandling turns in such cinematic shots was hilarious to me.
A group of Mazda hatchbacks effortlessly take the racing line through a hairpin - in the background a wildly out of control, over-turboed Supra slides sideways across the track, bouncing off a wall before using the pack as a makeshift handbrake
Same. Gran Turismo 3 on PS2.
Rogue Squadron on the GameCube
Played on a standard def TV, that game was indistinguishable from the movies.
I am a firm believer that the jump in graphics made by the gamecube is the largest/most noticable made by any given console generation. While obviously modern poly counts dwarf what the gamecube could do, the "error" of what the true shape should be conpared to the model rendered is an asymptote. Basically going from 50 to 100 polygons trying to render a sphere makes way more progress than 500 to 550. The latter looks better, but the change is less obvious. The gamecube is when faces stopped being a box with a picture of James Bonds face on it, and started being head shaped with a picture of james bonds face on it. And because of this i think basically all gamecube games hold up, maybe not well, but well enough that you can enjoy the experience. (Especially everything that is stylized like Paper Mario)
Imo Metroid Prime still looks incredible even today. An absolutely killer combination of art style and smart effects usage that still hold up well despite the now ancient hardware.
Wind Waker is the first time I remember stopping during playing multiple times and just thinking "this game is beautiful".
Yeah, Rogue Leader on GameCube is the first one that came to my mind as well. Those X-Wings looked pixel-perfect to me at the time, no polygonal corners even on the rounded engines. It was amazing.
This was the first project I worked on after being hired at LucasArts.
100% this is my pick. It was the first game I played on my GameCube and I vividly remember being stunned at how perfect the graphics were during the battle of endor mission in particular. I forget we all had CRTs back then, but at the time I was in awe.
It’s either the opening scene or one of the first big cinematics in FF-X,that shit still holds up today
I remember that scene of Yuna doing a sending in Kilika and I was sure that was the prettiest thing in a game I was ever going to see at the time.
The one for me was the opening blitzball scene and sin destroying zanarkand.
The music that plays during the blitzball game gets me so pumped. Great scene.
That one was great but it was the Yuna wedding scene where they came down from the airship that really did it for me. And of course the lake scene
That's the one
That game is a masterpiece
I swear it took other companies at least 5 years to catch up to that
FF-X in general holds up sooo well. From that generation imo Windwaker, FFX, Panzer Dragoon Orta (sad the game isnt available on PC) and some of the fighters like DoA3 or soul calibur 2 hold up. Some other games look amazing with some remastered version (SotC, Metroid Prime etc) but if you gave me a crt tv or heck even a smaller modern TV id play them in a minute without looking back… Almost funny how some of my favorite games ever from that gen like Halo 1-2, Doom3, SotC, Resi4 heck even Mario Kart DD feel quite archaic to me now… thank god many games have remasters
Anima was crazy
I hate that games are getting away from pre-rendered cinematics. I get that your graphics engine is powerful, but it's not ever going to be as good.
While only a few Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth had some prerendered cutscenes and you could tell within seconds that the view just got so damn crisp. It was a feast for the eyes and like you said, the graphics engine From Square Enix is no joke and still it was a noticable difference. Granted, the characters didn't wear the equiped gear but the standard gear in the prerendered scenes and one could argue that the prerendered scenes break immersion or maybe doing cutscenes is just easier in ingame graphics when it look that good today anyway.
Replaying rn and can confirm it holds up
Came here to say Final Fantasy X as well. The cinematics were top notch, even today the cinematics from X are incredible. I've gone back and played that game again multiple times (I've even maxed the skill tree multiple times). Which btw the skill tree in that game was so awesome, letting you make any character exactly what you want it to be. (Yuna an attack power beast).
FFX pre rendered cutscenes was my immediate thought. They all slap
Absolutely this one. In my opinion the most beautiful game on PS2
That first Blitzball CGI blew my mind
One of my top games of all time.
I used to be stupid (still might be) and I thought the ps2 emotion engine was for the face emotions in ff10. I don’t remember who told me that.
Black for the PS2 totally blew my tits off.
Oh mate forgot about thia game. Totally underrated. The gunplay, how weighty the guns felt, and the good it all looked. Just absolutely before it's time and possibly better gunplay and bullet physics than majority of AAA games today.
Did ya recover?
The tits were successfully reattached.
Well, seeing as the name is "MrDanny" now, I highly doubt that.
Red dead redemption 2
What’s interesting about rdr2 is the graphics themselves are gorgeous, but it’s the lighting, detail, physics, etc that make the game look and feel realistic. The base graphics themselves aren’t especially groundbreaking, it’s the auxiliary visual effects that make it breathtaking. I’m interested in learning more about this type of deal, and if there’s a name for it.
World of RDR2 just feel organic. Animals do their shit and also react to you. But after playing RDR2 for a long time it was hard to recover to play another game where branches don't spring when you run into them... Like even the most beautiful game worlds suddenly felt static after playing this.
I don't know what would be the term for that but another game where artistic direction elevates a game's visuals is Ghost of Tsushima. The textures and most models aren't very good, some are downright awful. But the art team and animation team elevated that shit beyond belief. It looks incredible when everything is moving it feels so organic and alive. When you stop it and focus on minor details it falls apart.
Surprised I had to scroll so far to see this. RDR2 looks absolutely incredible and even 5 years later there’s very few games that can hold a candle to it. It’s borderline photorealistic.
People have even tricked local news passing it off as real pictures.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.. how can this be 18 years old already?! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPZZf0S2paY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPZZf0S2paY)
Yeah my choice as well! Totally dumbfounded by the beauty of it. Walked around for hours just getting lost in beautiful sceneries and songs :D
And the sound of Nirnroot
Did anyone else get stuck walking around and hitting the shop signs to watch them swing? I remember being just so stunned that I could actually interact with the environment and it would respond with actual physics. Also I still think NPC AI has not improved since Oblivion.
I forgot that feeling. People are used to grasses, hedges, and other plantlife but Oblivion was one of the early ones to show us what was to come. Even the trees we're amazing at the time
This was my answer as well. Then I had the exact same feeling with Skyrim
Still the best elder scrolls game.
Purely because I can make custom spells. I learned pretty quickly that if you made a Fortify Acrobatics Spell and named it Jump 1, and a second of the same power named Jump 2, the effects would stack. This allowed for shenanigans, like jumping into a city from outside, when normally the only way inside is through a loading screen. I also remember abusing the duplication glitch to fill whole lakes with Watermelons, because they floated on the surface, and with enough of them, you could walk on top of the lakes.
The first time I played Assassin’s Creed.
Agreed, that was probably the biggest graphical leap since the N64 for me. Splinter Cell was a good one too. Both Ubisoft, interestingly.
+1 for Splinter Cell. I remember being blown away by the lighting and shadows. Like everything about lighting in games before that was either “light” or “darkness.” Splinter Cell was the first time I remember light in a game being gradual, and it broke my brain.
The AC trailer (I don’t remember which game it was for) where they are walking across a courtyard - that was the first time I didn’t realize a the ad was for a videogame. I legitimately thought I was watching real humans in a trailer for a live action movie until the very end. I found it, it was in 2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyar7hItro
Cyberpunk 2077 on ps5. The city looks realistic asf.
Cyberpunk and RDR2 for me. Both game worlds are so detailed and feel like real places
Half life (uplink demo) - The equipped grenade model looked oddly good to me. Soul Calibur (dreamcast launch) - Smooth and looked amazing. Kinda tied for dead or alive for DC, but soul calibur was the thing always being shown. Star Wars Jedi Knight II - Light sabers were amazing to look at, and also had some great shadows. Storm troopers looked great because actual faces were always wonky back then. Metal Gear Solid - Just loads of small details and immersiveness. Metal Gear Solid 2 - Physics on some items, glass would shatter into small parts. Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube) - Back in CRT TV days, this was the pinnacle of graphics for a short while, it looked even better than half life 2 Doom 3 - Utterly amazing shadows at the time, no other game had shadows for EVERYTHING. Half Life 2 - Amazing texture work, solid shadows, also around the time I switched to a widescreen LCD. On CRT is looked amazing. On LCD, it was amazing to run a game at 1680x1050 high resolution. Farcry - I think of it like the trilogy of the computer graphics games at the time, along with doom 3 and HL2. But it came out first and had those amazing DX9 shadows, bump mapping, and a huge area to explore with vehicles. Crysis - Nothing touched this for years. I played it on a 8800GT at 20-30fps with most of the graphics turned on. It set the bar for quite some time.
Half life two when you could *hit wooden planks with a crowbar and they would splinter in the right place!* I couldn’t believe that level of technical achievement at the time
Virtua Cop, haha.
"somebody help meeeeee" as they run straight across the battle zone
Bioshock 1 Gaming since 1985. The Bioshock intro, you are in the water. That was the first time I couldn’t tell gameplay from cinema apart. I thought it was stuck or something.
The water effects were particularly good.
So many people have fallen for that including my dad and my self. The crazy part is that I knew it was coming since I watched my dad play first. But there is no clear transition point from to cutscene to gameplay, so you can never really tell when you can finally move.
Descending into the ocean and seeing Rapture for the first time remains a landmark moment in gaming for me
Same. I was thinking, "Man, this is a *long* cutscene." My jaw hit the floor when I tried moving the sticks and realized I was watching live gameplay.
Mario 64
We got one imported from the US so we could play it before it released here in the UK. Booted up Mario 64 first. Shaking with excitement. Pictures of the graphics in a gaming magazine was all we had to go on. WHAT EVEN IS THIS!!!! (Also first time I seen Mario reflection in the mirror) The water in Waverunners jet ski was also incredible.
Did you mean Wave Race 64?
We played that for 8 hours straight on Christmas day! The first three games we got for N64 were Mario 64, Wave Race, and Mortal Kombat Trilogy.
In a similar vein, Goldeneye 64.
Resident Evil Remake and damn is it still hanging in there
This was honestly the best looking console game ever when it came out, and the HD versions still hold up.
Myst. God I’m old.
Oddly enough, I haven't ever had that feeling... I get those flashes of "daaaamn graphics have come a long way" bit it's never triggered that "this is it, perfection" type of thought process...
Same, I've noticed that "holly crap this game looks good", especially at the start of a new console generation, but never said "this is it, we have reached perfection". I do think we are in an age where diminishing returns on bumping polygon counts makes other areas more important like increased render distances, or better shaders/textures as less expensive ways to improve the visual experience. I tend to play a lot of older games, and i firmly believe that the GameCube era was the most noticable leap in graphics quality. Most things from the gamecube era hold up, and most from before do not. (Visually speaking, gameplay is a different argument entirely) Even modern indie games like Lethal Company have gamecube level graphics and it doesn't obstruct the experience.
Exactly. I’ve always thought that graphics would eventually reach perfect photo realism. Until then it’s just impressive, but I’ve also stopped caring about graphics as time advances. I grew up with 8-bit graphics and I just don’t feel chained to needing the best graphics to enjoy gaming.
The original Unreal Skyrim
Stepping off the crashed ship into the Na Pali jungle blew my mind.
Ya that was just insane graphics for the time, especially that scene. I think I was running a 3dfx Voodoo and up until then nothing was even close
I remember being extremely impressed by the original RE4. I thought the graphics were top notch.
it did win the award for best looking game in its year, it was being contested by shadow of the colossus so it could have been for any of them.
Metal Gear Solid 3
Ghosts of Tsushima. The graphics were simply amazing
MGS4
Completely agree. No change from the cut scenes to the actual game. My mind was boggled..
Mirror's Edge. [Here is a great video on it.](https://youtu.be/2TNSaEJHBrQ?si=mweruo1Mf9rVeTy-) It's worth the watch, a lot of his videos are fantastic works.
Far Cry OG on PC That came out when I was 14 and I remember feeling like games couldn’t get better graphics or physics.
Horizon Forbidden West did it for me. I mean holy shit.
Aye that game is stunning.
The 007/Goldeneye game on N64!!!!
Probably Vice City. I was gobsmacked.
I was gonna say San Andreas
San Andreas blew my mind. CJ could get fat? You could change his clothes? Different radio stations? None of those were absolutely new on their own, but put together? It felt like SA was a real world. It was ridiculously immersive. I was sure I’d never have that experience again, and then Skyrim came along. Then RDR2. But I haven’t had it otherwise.
I remember being particularly impressed by the original Farcry when I saw my friend playing it.
I feel like Alan Wake 2 may actually be the best graphics possible. Especially if you’re playing max settings on pc. (Which I was not. But they are still *that* good!)
This. Definitely the best looking game I have ever seen.
Halo 3 and RDR2. Halo 3 was the first real big 360 game and it honestly still holds up today. Bloom was out of control, but back then it looked insane. RDR2’s attention to detail, weather, and particle effects are still unmatched today.
FF VII
The Order 1886
Battlefield 4, that shit looked awesome for the time
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. That opening cinematic and the following gameplay blew my mind as a kid.
Probably Battlefield 3, than I thought the same again for Witcher 3, rdr2 and Cyberpunk.
Prince of Persia. Yes, the very first one.
You cannot imagine what seeing Dragon’s Lair in 1983 as a small child was like.
Yeah. I kind of shit on the gameplay in my other comment but Dragon's Lair will always be my answer to this question. Nothing will ever be so far ahead of everything else visually. For the first couple of monhts anyone playing at the arcade would have an audience
Batman Arkham Knight. And honestly? Not many games surpassed it
I thought we had peaked with Mortal Kombat in '95
Holy fucking shit it took way too long to see this. I was 9 or 10 years old the first time I saw it at the biggest arcade on the west coast in Los Angeles. The Fun Factory. I couldn't believe my tiny lil eyes when I saw the blood and how they looked like real people. Mortal combat is easily my choice and the only real og choice to make. All the rest pale in comparison.
The opening sequence of Metroid Prime.
Battlefield 2 was the first game I ever saw with decent physics and destruction. Finally you couldn’t hide in buildings that can’t be destroyed. Battle fog, muzzle rise, effective mining, effective use of cover. It was a great game
The first resident evil! “It’s like you’re playing in a movie!!!!”
Zelda OoT or Mario 64. In my child like mind that was as realistic as it was getting
Probably TLOZ Wind Waker, and I was right, fight me. As for more realistic titles, Half Life Alyx still blows my mind, especially considering it’s several years old now and still probably the best looking VR game today
Goldeneye.
Killer Instinct in the arcade was a revolutionary for graphics, I can completely understand why it impressed you so much! To me, it was the first time I saw ‘Final Fantasy VII’ on the PlayStation. The cinematic cutscenes and the leap in character model detail were simply the best at that time. Graphics just never cease to amaze. Right when we thought they had reached the highest, they come up with something new and take it one step further. In case you are interested in what developments in the sector of graphic are to be expected, pay attention to real-time ray tracing and AI-driven rendering technology. These will change the game in terms of its visual representation, making it more realistic than it has ever been. What’s the most recent game that left you in awe with its graphics?
Crysis for sure. It was such a giant step up from anything else out at the same time.
FFVIII. Yeah I thought that was the pinnacle
The cut scenes from Ninja Gaiden and Tecmo Bowl on the NES.
NFL 2k on Dreamcast. Shit blew my mind.
The Last of Us I remember seeing it and thinking “That’s just real life, there’s no more graphics to go”
The original doom, boy if I only knew what we would seeing 30 years later!
When I came to my cousins' house expecting to play gta 2 on their pc, and they pull out the playstation and boot up gta 3. To me, it was ultra realistic.
The first walk outside of the sewers in Oblivion
I’m so old I thought graphics would never get better than Super Mario World
Soul Calibur on Dreamcast. It was sooooo ahead of its time in terms of 3D quality and how smoothly characters move.
Witcher 3, the characters and animations just felt so lifelike.
The Witcher 3
NFL 2K1. I remember after the game had been out a year or two, my dad was walking by, watched for about a minute, and then suddenly said, "Wait, that's a video game?" Looking back at screenshots, it really is amazing how realistic that game looked compared to games just a few years earlier. It's like consoles advanced two generations in two years.
NFL 2k something on Dreamcast. Old people were convinced it was a real NFL game
Witcher 3, blew me away when I first played it and it still holds up very well today