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Amazing video game technological achievements
- Thread starter FireBeaver
- Start date
Not just the lighting but also the way drapes and curtains reacted when walking through them was a technical achievement that I'd put right up there with other periods of game development such as Half-life 2s physics and Unreals water effects.
Stiler
Member
Forgot another game that I think should be mentioned, the Myth series.
It used physics for a lot of things, range units (like archers and dwarves) were affected by height (IE higher ground = longer range, plus wind), everything reacted to the environment or other characters. Blood even flowed downhill along with the gibs.
Shame that many modern RTS games (even Total War) don't do this kind of thing, and that was back in like 97...
You could fire an arrow and the other guy could move a bigger unit in front of the units you were firing at to block them. Tree's naturally were terrible to fire arrows at. You could even use fire arrows to light dry grass on fire. Rain even affected fire, so your fire arrows would get put out sometimes, your cocktails as well.
The game even had real time reflections in the water.
It used physics for a lot of things, range units (like archers and dwarves) were affected by height (IE higher ground = longer range, plus wind), everything reacted to the environment or other characters. Blood even flowed downhill along with the gibs.
Shame that many modern RTS games (even Total War) don't do this kind of thing, and that was back in like 97...
You could fire an arrow and the other guy could move a bigger unit in front of the units you were firing at to block them. Tree's naturally were terrible to fire arrows at. You could even use fire arrows to light dry grass on fire. Rain even affected fire, so your fire arrows would get put out sometimes, your cocktails as well.
The game even had real time reflections in the water.
Inviusx
Member
Soon.
Soon to be disappointed you mean?
Some of the stuff Metroid Prime did on the Gamecube was pretty insane, even small things like how the ripple effects when shooting and running through water weren't textures but the actual surface model of the water moving.
All that, and it ran at 60fps. It's like with their first gamecube game, Retro managed to wring maximum performance out of it.
Lancelot
Member
Severance (aka Blade of Darkness).
One of if not the first game with real time lighting/dynamic shadows. This was before doom 3.
What about Daggerfall? Can't remember if it was seamless or not, I remember going in/out of buildings without loading screens though, unlike the later Elder Scrolls games.
Loved Blade of Darkness! It's the souls series grandfather.
Enclave too, so great!
Lancelot
Member
Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron 2 on GameCube. Still impressive to this day.
Loved this so much! Still have it until this very day.
miller.skippins
Banned
Soon.
don't count the chickens before they are hatched.
Wolf Akela
Member
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (PS1)
DF's video made me realize how amazing this was. It offers a huge seamless world where the only loading was the initial one. It's one of the earliest examples of texture streaming. You had an ability that can completely transform the geometry of levels in real time. On top of it all, the game already looked nice, and it ran 20-30FPS very often. PS1 games usually had simpler, smaller areas, and often ran in 10-20FPS.
Ehrgeiz (Dungeon Mode) (PS1)
I literally cannot think of any other example of a PS1 game that ran natively at 480i at a rock solid 60FPS (rarely ever dropped). Most PS1 games ran at 320x240, usually 10-30FPS. The only loading times are when you enter a dungeon, and when moving floors meant changing the palette. Your equipment also reflects on your character model. Even before I was familiar with all the technical visual stuff, I already noticed how smooth it moved and how crisp it looked compared to every other game I've played.
DF's video made me realize how amazing this was. It offers a huge seamless world where the only loading was the initial one. It's one of the earliest examples of texture streaming. You had an ability that can completely transform the geometry of levels in real time. On top of it all, the game already looked nice, and it ran 20-30FPS very often. PS1 games usually had simpler, smaller areas, and often ran in 10-20FPS.
Ehrgeiz (Dungeon Mode) (PS1)
I literally cannot think of any other example of a PS1 game that ran natively at 480i at a rock solid 60FPS (rarely ever dropped). Most PS1 games ran at 320x240, usually 10-30FPS. The only loading times are when you enter a dungeon, and when moving floors meant changing the palette. Your equipment also reflects on your character model. Even before I was familiar with all the technical visual stuff, I already noticed how smooth it moved and how crisp it looked compared to every other game I've played.
More_Badass
Member
Is Red Faction Guerrilla really that forgotten?
RamaTheVoice
Member
Wasn't Guerilla more focused on building destruction than terrain destruction though?
As opposed to the first game I mean.
More_Badass
Member
Building destruction is what they're talking about regarding Bad Company and Crackdown
Technically it didn't use voxels. They just called it a voxel engine cause it sounds cooler.
It did have a bunch of effects that were ahead of it's time though.
Lancelot
Member
It looks impressively pretty, I'm not saying it doesn't. But what is the actual technological achievement? The Order, Infamous: Second Son, Driveclub... they all look really good. It's clear that even the base PS4 hardware can produce visually amazing games. What does Horizon do that pushes the hardware beyond what is expected of it?
That came out 2 years later than Riddick EFBB (still prefer Riddicks mechanics though, super weighty and realistic, and as Immortal_Daemon mentioned the blood/ damage system etc was amazing, even to this day)
I think its main tech achievement is running at locked 30 fps 99% of the time. For an open world game, it's extremely impressive, especially if you consider how good the game looks.
Vindicator
Member
Stardust on the Amiga 500 looked insane with those raytracing sprites and especially the warp-tunnels, music was awesome too.
Great work by Bloodhouse before they merged with Terramarque to form Housemarque.
Great work by Bloodhouse before they merged with Terramarque to form Housemarque.
Slick Butter
Member
Tarin02543
Member
First time I saw Virtua Fighter I was blown away. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it looked freakin' cool. Hard to believe it's been over 20 years.
Same here, this was my epiphany moment, when I started to dream about how the next 3D could look like.
OK, sure.
It's not any old game with good graphics. It's an open world game that looks like a linear tech power house showpiece.
MoonsaultSlayer
Member
There's a reason Kojima co-opted Guerilla's engine for Death Stranding.
Unfortunately, I don't have the actual technical answers you are looking for, but when I compare it to the linear, exclusive, AAA, Uncharted 4, it comes out ahead.
I'm amazed every time I turn it on or visit a new section of the map (which is huge with diverse environments and weather conditions).
Alx
Member
First time I saw Virtua Fighter I was blown away. I had no idea what I was looking at, but it looked freakin' cool. Hard to believe it's been over 20 years.
Yeah, seeing real-time 3D like that felt really high tech, almost out of place. Like "is it ok to use such advanced technology for games ?". It took me a while before I dared put my first coin in there.
I agree with you completely. My post was sarcastic, lol.
Reineldinho
Member
Gunstar Heroes on Mega Drive / Genesis uses some kind of black magic to display more than 64 colors on screen simultaneously (and it was not Amiga's HAM, that's hardware specific)
Super Street Fighter 2 on Mega Drive / Genesis was it first (and only) 40MB cartridge. Similar to Sonic Chaos, which was the one and only 8MB cartridge on Master System.
And my favorite, the animations of Aladdin on Genesis made Disney animators and handed over to Virgin produced something really beautiful at the time (not only the animations, but the backgrounds and the music, that's the definition of Triple AAA game right there)
(at work, so I can't add pictures or videos, sorry)
Super Street Fighter 2 on Mega Drive / Genesis was it first (and only) 40MB cartridge. Similar to Sonic Chaos, which was the one and only 8MB cartridge on Master System.
And my favorite, the animations of Aladdin on Genesis made Disney animators and handed over to Virgin produced something really beautiful at the time (not only the animations, but the backgrounds and the music, that's the definition of Triple AAA game right there)
(at work, so I can't add pictures or videos, sorry)
Then the technical achievement is its performance despite its looks, not its looks themselves. As I said, sure. That's a totally valid point. But posting a few screenshots and saying "it looks great!" wasn't in the spirit of the thread. I still think that there are far better examples in this thread of games that went above and beyond what's expected from the hardware they run on, again, I never said that Horizon wasn't a high-end game...
Thanks for the sarcasm, by the way. Really edifying.
Two years later...
Anytime, man.
For real, though, the game running as butter smooth as it does while fighting two Thunderjaws and a group of Tramplers, all while looking as stupidly good as it does, is an incredible achievement, maybe not quite as incredible as others in this thread but definitely worth being mentioned.
Oh PLEASE!
Even on the character model which is the closest thing that KH does to Toy Story there is an absolute and objective difference in detailing, look at Woody's ear for example... in KH is an angular mess while in Toy Story is a surface as smooth as silk.
It's very very simple to do a "matter of fact kind of thing" and it's to pose this question, can a console do a 1:1 reproduction of the film Toy Story in real time? The answer is no therefore a game like Kingdom Hearts which has to count a lot of other things like game logic and all that stuff CANNOT look as good as the movie.
They are going for a different approach so don't expect that.
For me it's MGS2, weather was incredible, AI also felt groundbreaking to me.
I'm pretty sure Jak and Daxter 1 was the first game to use the specific technique it employed for open worlds, where the data was added to the disc in a specific order and in specific places strategically so that the game would always be loading in the background and thus create an open world. GTA 3 then did the same thing.
Tetsujin_MK
Member
^ Essentially this. They didn't rebuild KH1 from scratch, they reverse-engineered from a retail disc. This is also how Bluepoint handles remasters, apparently.
Fun fact a Comanche game was planned for SNES (with voxel graphics and all) in 1995 but eventually cancelled:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op5EkC7GbxQ&feature=youtu.be&t=8283
That's running way, way smoother than what I expected from a Super FX 3D game. Granted, the rendering resolution of the terrain is comically low and only about half of the screen space is used (looks like the other half is meant for the HUD). Makes you wonder if voxels were a better fit for 3D graphics than polygons for the system.
I don't know if DKC was the first game to use pre-rendered graphics for its sprites and tiles, but it sure blew minds back in the day.
It was the first to use it on such a scale, but not the first game to employ pre-rendered assets in some capacity.
Here's the grey area:
Toy Story 1 has the better IQ (anti-aliasing, probably resolution, etc) and the better geometry density. These are long-standing advantages of pre-rendered CG.
KH3 will have better everything else, more or less.
Better graphics actually, TS1 didn't look that good.
Mr. Phellps
Member
Portal's portals
Not just seamlessly warping around the map regardless of how far apart the portals are, but also displaying the connected rooms on whatever surface the portal is without visual compromises was absolutely amazing.
Not just seamlessly warping around the map regardless of how far apart the portals are, but also displaying the connected rooms on whatever surface the portal is without visual compromises was absolutely amazing.
