EVERY GAME offered 1 mode in previous gens. Thats how we grew up playing console games. None of yall were complaining either. None of this performance vs fidelity garbage. Devs delivered the games how they wanted to deliver them. Games were generally more polished too. This trend of high profile BROEKN games releasing at launch (like cyberpunk) was a lot less common.
Now we have every dev folding to pressure, having to offer 2- 3 modes. Its ridiculous. Each one of these modes is undercooked and underpolished. Performance modes run at sub 720p garbage nowadays. Sub 720p. In 2024.
They are stretching themselves too thin, having to modify the fuck out of their game. That time they use making 3 modes, could and SHOULD be used for polish and fine tuning.
I'm not a developer and you are not either, so it'd be better if somebody with personal experience would weigh in, but the idea of "polishing" graphical settings is likely primarily a burden on QA rather than the entirety of the development group. The process in general is pretty easy to change parameters, and modern engines are designed to be flexible. (Really, they have been since PC and consoles have managed operational parity and export the same general code from a source engine adjusted for each console's API library, rather than "porting" each version of a game by hand.) Much of the change is in dialing up parameters and in procedural shifting of asset quantity/quality, not from by hand modifying textures and models and code.
I have never seen a developer blame the trend of broken or unpolished games on the modes they're setting for output.
Before this gen, you didn't see modes in games before PS5/XB Series because it was assumed console gamers didn't want them. Developers made settings for infinite amounts of modes all the time in the PC release, but for consoles, they rarely allowed those toggles to be chooseable even though the engine was the same across versions. (They also didn't have a lot of latitude to mess around on PS4/XBO gen; you could potentially make a game look worse if you turned things off, but you still probably would struggle to find a livable 60FPS setting.) Still, there were settings and options down in those games, and it kind of bit the consoles in the ass that they hadn't encouraged flexible settings early once the Pro/One X concept came to market; although simple framerate/resolution bumps through brute-force processing was doable (well, doable easy enough on Xbox Series X due to its run system and lax QA concerns, whereas PS4 Pro neglected to enhance games unless they were patched, thus the Bloodborne lament,) patches needed to be made for games to do anything more than the basics of final output.
en.wikipedia.org
In the before-before gens, developers were more often writing "to the metal" (kind of... middleware was pretty prevalent even in the PS2's days, but there were ways to get more out of the console by focusing on each platform's specific skillset,) and so yes, you would get wild performance leaps from games tuned and polished for exactly the framerate and resolution their console of choice was best at. Still, you
did see games with visual settings even back then. PS3/360 games had differences to them depending on if you turned on 1080p Mode (where available, which was rare since these consoles were running on fumes as it was) or used 3D. Many PS2 or Xbox One games have 480p and widescreen settings on top of the standard 480i or 4:3, and some even had "1080i" mode where they targeted 576x960 and then that was upscaled to full screen. Sound modes were also regularly selectable. (In fact, the games that offered the most variety of settings tended to be the most advanced and complex games; you'd think maybe that the cheap games which didn't push the hardware would be the ones that could do progressive scan easiest, but it was more often budget and coding talent which made it happen.) And going even further back, N64 had the Expansion Pak to allow games which supported it to do higher resolution or faster framerates (albeit usually not toggled by the user.)
Woah. This is one of the biggest, most detail-rich tech analyses we've ever put together, but there's little doubt that…
www.eurogamer.net
This is a list of PlayStation 2 games that support alternative display modes such as 16:9 widescreen and/or HD resolutions. Template:Note Only in NTSC-J version. Template:Note Only in NTSC-J and NTSC-U/C versions. Template:Note Not released in NTSC-U/C. Template:Note Only in NTSC-U/C...
playstation.fandom.com
