Support NeoGAF

[nkarafo]

It's the same gap between Dark Souls and the Elden Ring. Or the gap between Diablo 3 and 4 (in fact, that one is a bit bigger). GTAV was also released 11 years ago so it's distance with GTA 6 will be similar.

These aren't major improvements really. Not much has changed. The time passed between them doesn't seem significant.

But the time between Super Mario Bros and Mario 64 felt like a century of advancements. When i was playing the latter on release date, the former was a relic of a prehistoric era and pretty much obsolete and retro. Can you say GTAV is a retro game nowadays?

Also, i know time runs faster when you are older but damn.

 

[Holammer]

I believe this gif is obligatory for these types of discussions.

 

[Porcile]

I am more impressed that the gap between the release of Super Metroid and Metroid Prime was only 8 years which is crazy considering the leap in graphics and how adapting the 2D gameplay into 3D was a massive shot in the dark at the time. And even crazier when you think that with just a graphical update Metroid Prime Remastered just showed it is still as solid and as well designed as any top-tier modern game 20 years later. Truly incredible stuff.

 

[ManaByte]

And yet Super Mario 64 remains the greatest game ever made. Never diminished from its perfect scores and just as magical when you boot it up today. I played it last week on NSO. Still wonderful.

 

[Jinzo Prime]

It's honestly incredible when you think about it. Hell, Ocarina of Time to The Wind Waker was four years! Tiny Hyrule Field to open ocean in four years is crazy.

 

[nkarafo]

I believe this gif is obligatory for these types of discussions.

That too but the advancements were so many in the Bros to Mario 64 gap. Mario Bros was one of the first scrolling platform games, with simplistic 8bit graphics. We went from that to 16 bit multi-parallax goodness and the peak of pixel art. And then to fully 3D environments you explore using 3D analog joysticks.

What changed between Diablo 3 and 4?

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

Let's all pretend Astrobot Rescue Mission doesn't exist.

 

[SkylineRKR]

Tekken 1 to Soul Calibur was 4 years at best.

 

[ManaByte]

Let's all pretend Astrobot Rescue Mission doesn't exist.

The people pretending that was better the SM64 need to have their gaming license revoked for life.

 

[AJUMP23]

The run Nintendo had from the NES to the what they gave us in the N64 is top tier. If the N64 had gone an optical drive it would have kept FF7, but Mario64 would have crappy load times. Probably worth it in the long run.

 

[alphachino]

In terms of resolution and compute, the advancements are there... the problem is that we are getting closer to hitting the limit of human perception/visual acuity.

20 years ago we all dreamed of photorealism... I believe photorealism can already be achieved in games today albeit at a smaller scale than full open-world. If we aren't there today, we are certainly getting damn close, particularly considering what we've been seeing with SORA and AI in general and how quickly it's all progressing... and the sooner the better because gwaphics is only a means to the end of achieving fully interactive live-action movies.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

The people pretending that was better the SM64 need to have their gaming license revoked for life.

The technological leap is comparable. It's the same feeling of discovery and amazement. As I lived the revolution in its right time, I can tell, unlike people who have not touched either of those games.

 

[ManaByte]

As I lived the revolution in its right time, I can tell, unlike people who have not touched either of those games.

Astrobot can never compare to the revolution SM64 was at E3 1996.

 

[lordrand11]

It's the same gap between Dark Souls and the Elden Ring. Or the gap between Diablo 3 and 4 (in fact, that one is a bit bigger). GTAV was also released 11 years ago so it's distance with GTA 6 will be similar.

These aren't major improvements really. Not much has changed. The time passed between them doesn't seem significant.

But the time between Super Mario Bros and Mario 64 felt like a century of advancements. When i was playing the latter on release date, the former was a relic of a prehistoric era and pretty much obsolete and retro. Can you say GTAV is a retro game nowadays?

Also, i know time runs faster when you are older but damn.

The release between Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy is exactly 11 years as well

 

[ReBurn]

How big is the gap between Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Wonder?

It really makes you think.

 

[DeltaPolarBear]

In terms of resolution and compute, the advancements are there... the problem is that we are getting closer to hitting the limit of human perception/visual acuity.

20 years ago we all dreamed of photorealism... I believe photorealism can already be achieved in games today albeit at a smaller scale than full open-world. If we aren't there today, we are certainly getting damn close, particularly considering what we've been seeing with SORA and AI in general and how quickly it's all progressing... and the sooner the better because gwaphics is only a means to the end of achieving fully interactive live-action movies.

Back in the SNES days the artists are working with limited space, so they only have so much to work with.

In modern gaming there is basically more space than a AAA game studio can AFFORD to fill up. So despite expanded capability, we couldn't have expanded execution because it costs too much. FF7 Classic had way more gameplay and freedom than FFX because the graphics took up most of the money. FFX couldn't have a functional airship and we didn't get another airship until... NEVER. We still haven't got a real airship in FF since PS2.

The modern FF7 Remake and Rebirth is basically Square TRYING to replicate how FF7 could have looked like with modern hardware, except they can only afford to do it by splitting it into multiple games.

They even recently admit that FF6 was TOO BIG to remake. Imagine that. It is basically Square admitting they regressed as a studio.

 

[Angry_Megalodon]

Astrobot can never compare to the revolution SM64 was at E3 1996.

You are comparing mainstream versus niche (VR).

I am talking about a leap in gameplay, level design, and perspective. In that, both games have the same effect elevating themselves over what had been achieved to that date. Astrobot proved that the platform genre is not only feasible in VR but SUPERIOR by a landslide. Same as SM64 was superior to 2D predecessors.

The point of the OP is about evolution in games, not popularity, and I'm stating that evolution still happens, even in niche segments. Said this, it's clear that we are reaching the ceiling of videogames and with each gen there is less room for improvement.

 

[E-Cat]

This perception is the result of a perfect storm of time running slower when we were kids, there being more "flagpoles" (no pun intended) on the path from 8-bit side-scrolling 2D to free-roaming 3D, both from a design evolution and game title release frequency perspective, and also visual fidelity not yet hitting the end of the S-curve of diminishing returns

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

10 years from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy VII, that one blows my mind even more. Not just the leap in technology, but the fact that we used to get a new FF game every 1-2 years.

The run Nintendo had from the NES to the what they gave us in the N64 is top tier. If the N64 had gone an optical drive it would have kept FF7, but Mario64 would have crappy load times. Probably worth it in the long run.

Was it really worth Nintendo losing out on the vast majority of 3rd party support + allowing Sony to dominate the market for 2 generations? Just imagine how different the gaming world would be if Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, etc launched on N64 instead of PlayStation. I don’t think “no loading times” was a good trade off for that.

 

[AJUMP23]

10 years from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy VII, that one blows my mind even more. Not just the leap in technology, but the fact that we used to get a new FF game every 1-2 years.


Was it really worth Nintendo losing out on the vast majority of 3rd party support + allowing Sony to dominate the market for 2 generations? Just imagine how different the gaming world would be if Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, etc launched on N64 instead of PlayStation. I don’t think “no loading times” was a good trade off for that.

Mario 64 was worth the cost. It is what ultimately cost their place in the market.

 

[Perrott]

11 years is what separates the PS4 from the PS5 Pro

 

[calistan]

It's because the medium was still maturing very rapidly. Eleven years before Super Mario Bros, people were amazed by things like Pong and the countless simple monochrome games it spawned.

You see the same thing in the history of cinema. At the turn of the 20th century, people would flock to see basically any moving picture on a screen.

By 1915 you had actual short movies, like Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp. By 1927, epics like Fritz's Lang's Metropolis. The same year, the first talking pictures.

Only 14 years after that you had Citizen Kane, which revolutionised the medium and laid down the techniques used in every film made in the subsequent 80 years.

 

[Johnny Concrete]

We ran out of dimensions. Nothing we can do about that..

 

[Fbh]

Advancements felt bigger back then because we were still in the early days of gaming. As tech matures improvements become gradually lower.

We went from this

To the fucking moon in 60 years

 

[E-Cat]

10 years from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy VII, that one blows my mind even more. Not just the leap in technology, but the fact that we used to get a new FF game every 1-2 years.


Was it really worth Nintendo losing out on the vast majority of 3rd party support + allowing Sony to dominate the market for 2 generations? Just imagine how different the gaming world would be if Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, etc launched on N64 instead of PlayStation. I don’t think “no loading times” was a good trade off for that.

We also wouldn't have had the instant 4-player mayhem that were Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64. I think it was a worthy trade-off in the moment, maybe not for Nintendo as a viable company heading into the PS2 generation, but a lot of good memories were made

 

[nkarafo]

Was it really worth Nintendo losing out on the vast majority of 3rd party support + allowing Sony to dominate the market for 2 generations? Just imagine how different the gaming world would be if Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, etc launched on N64 instead of PlayStation. I don’t think “no loading times” was a good trade off for that.

I would argue it wasn't only about loading times. Some games would be impossible on CD and the tiny RAM these machines had. Some N64 games would stream data from the carts directly. There was an article about how Factor-5 used the high speed and direct access of the ROM cart to circumvent RAM.

 

[Holammer]

The run Nintendo had from the NES to the what they gave us in the N64 is top tier. If the N64 had gone an optical drive it would have kept FF7, but Mario64 would have crappy load times. Probably worth it in the long run.

The stages in Mario 64 are shockingly small and would have loaded in a second or two on a single-speed (150kb/sec) CD drive.
The game is only 6-8MB in total and I expect there to be decompression hidden in the transitions which could be used to mask CD access. Stages in similar PS1 games like Spyro and Gex load in just a few seconds and that's a machine with 2MBs of RAM.

 

[Skyfox]

The next leap for gaming after 3d is now AI.

Game changer.

 

[ManaByte]

Was it really worth Nintendo losing out on the vast majority of 3rd party support + allowing Sony to dominate the market for 2 generations? Just imagine how different the gaming world would be if Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, etc launched on N64 instead of PlayStation. I don’t think “no loading times” was a good trade off for that.

It had absolutely nothing to do with "no loading times". Sure, that might've been the console warrior talking point back then, but the reality is it all had to do with Yamauchi. Nintendo always controls the production of the medium the games on their console are produced on. So by sticking with carts in 1996, they could maintain that profit stream. It's a core pillar of Nintendo's business and will never change, and it remains true in 2024. In 1996 there simply wasn't the technology available and the time for Nintendo to produce a reliable proprietary disc-based medium. They tried that with Sony and the Super-CD and the results were the PlayStation (which still used normal CDs).

 

[German Hops]

The gap between gta6 & gta7 will probably be 35 years or so.

It's crazy to think how slow game developers are now.

 

[Horseganador]

Those times where in 4-5 years there were consoles 40 times more powerful and 20 times more RAM memory are gone.

For me the biggest generational leap was going from Super Mario World to Super Mario 64.

In arcade...Daytona USA was something incredible.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

We also wouldn't have had the instant 4-player mayhem that were Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64. I think it was a worthy trade-off in the moment, maybe not for Nintendo as a viable company heading into the PS2 generation, but a lot of good memories were made

I mean… PlayStation had some great multiplayer games as well. I think the N64 being the multiplayer party machine was more because it came with 4 controller ports + Goldeneye being maybe the first great local multiplayer death match FPS. And loading times didn’t stop Halo from taking that crown (and from Xbox outselling GameCube)

I bet there’s some alternate universe where we’re sitting here saying “did you know Nintendo almost stuck with CARTRIDGES for N64? Can you imagine a world where we never got Mario CD?”

I would argue it wasn't only about loading times. Some games would be impossible on CD and the tiny RAM these machines had. Some N64 games would stream data from the carts directly. There was an article about how Factor-5 used the high speed and direct access of the ROM cart to circumvent RAM.

Yeah, I’m not an expert but I’m sure “everything the same except CDs instead of cartridges” might not have worked. I know N64 had its weird quirks e.g. the retarded memory configuration that caused many devs to use tiny blurry ass textures so they could fit it all in the texture cache + avoid expensive memory access.

 

[Morrie’s wig shop]

Yep, now imagine living through it
Damn, I was 8 years old and in third grade when Super Mario debuted and by the time Mario 64 came out I was a sophomore at St Pete Junior College …whew where o where does the time go..

 

[SleepySlippy]

Between that and Tropical Freeze being 10 years old, I feel like I'm getting old.

 

[Scotty W]

5 years between Hovertank 3D and Quake.

 

[Morrie’s wig shop]

Nintendo didn’t use CDs because Sony had/has major stake in it, that’s it, end of story. It was the reason everyone gave 30 that’s right 30 years ago

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

And yet Super Mario 64 remains the greatest game ever made. Never diminished from its perfect scores and just as magical when you boot it up today. I played it last week on NSO. Still wonderful.

You would say one of the best.

We also have Zelda Ocarina of Time, Chrono trigger and Gravity rush 1 and 2, as the greatest exponents of the video game industry.

 

[ManaByte]

Gravity rush 1 and 2, as the greatest exponents of the video game industry.

 

[poodaddy]

Tekken 1 to Soul Calibur was 4 years at best.

It was five years, I misinterpreted like a goober. Drinking coffee now to fix this.

 

[Yoshichan]

It was 1994 to 2008. 14 years.

wat

 

[ManaByte]

It was 1994 to 2008. 14 years.

Uh... it was five years. Soul Calibur came out in 1999.

 

[DeepEnigma]

Oh look, another diminishing returns thread and how people can't wrap their head around it.

 

[poodaddy]

Uh... it was five years. Soul Calibur came out in 1999.

Shit, I'm sorry, my retarded brain read that as Soul Calibur 4 lol. Move along, nothing to see here, coffee less morning brain cannot be trusted.

 

[Morrie’s wig shop]

Wait, wait….. Alan Wake to Alan Wake 2 is 13 years, anyone use this one yet lol

 

[IAmRei]

I am more impressed that the gap between the release of Super Metroid and Metroid Prime was only 8 years which is crazy considering the leap in graphics and how adapting the 2D gameplay into 3D was a massive shot in the dark at the time. And even crazier when you think that with just a graphical update Metroid Prime Remastered just showed it is still as solid and as well designed as any top-tier modern game 20 years later. Truly incredible stuff.

You make me wants to play metroid again. I usually finish at least one game from metroid series, any of it, just once per year. I guess now is the time to do it again..

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

It's the same gap between Dark Souls and the Elden Ring. Or the gap between Diablo 3 and 4 (in fact, that one is a bit bigger). GTAV was also released 11 years ago so it's distance with GTA 6 will be similar.

These aren't major improvements really. Not much has changed. The time passed between them doesn't seem significant.

Wait until a little further down the line when AI programs similar to Sora start to be used in videogame production. You're gonna see some serious shit.

 

[SpiceRacz]

You are comparing mainstream versus niche (VR).

I am talking about a leap in gameplay, level design, and perspective. In that, both games have the same effect elevating themselves over what had been achieved to that date. Astrobot proved that the platform genre is not only feasible in VR but SUPERIOR by a landslide. Same as SM64 was superior to 2D predecessors.

The point of the OP is about evolution in games, not popularity, and I'm stating that evolution still happens, even in niche segments. Said this, it's clear that we are reaching the ceiling of videogames and with each gen there is less room for improvement.

Mario 64 is arguably the biggest evolution in gaming ever. It basically informed how, not just platformers, but basically all 3D games were designed from that point forward. I adore Astro Bot. One of my favorite games of all time. The two aren’t comparable in terms of influence or how they moved their genre forward.

 

[Don Carlo]

Thanks for making me feel old OP

 

[pepodmc_]

except they can only afford to do it by splitting it into multiple games.

naaa, they split the game in three parts to make more money, just that.

 

[Hudo]

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun released on 20th of August, 1999. More than 24 years ago.