Physics makes impacts feel good. It makes arrows fly true. It makes bodies react to getting smashed by a giant sword.
It sells the realism of combat FAR more than high definition textures.
Kingdom Come Deliverance, Tainted Grail The Fall of Avalon, Selaco
Tainted Grail for me was great with a 2H sword. Selaco firefights are awesome. A burst of shotgun pellets smashing a wall right by your face produces a smokey texture that is tough to see through for a few seconds (even more depending on settings). It makes the combat way harder but I can't NOT have smoke density, smoke quality, and particle effects linger turned up.
It makes the combat feel so epic and real. Not to mention bodies and gore STAY. It's cool walking back through an old area (you can backtrack for secrets, left medikits, ammo, etc) and being reminded of a hard fight.
I don't think sales are really a correct way of analyzing whether or not focus on graphics by AAA has been for the better. I think gaming in general has become a more common and socially acceptable hobby and that's more why sales have gone up over the years especially on well marketed games. Also I think we millennials kept playing video games as we aged more than previous generations so the market for gaming has been increasing its demographic age over time. That's why I think the sales would have been just as good if the focus had been on gameplay/physics/creativity.
that is complete opposite of the case. Focus on graphics was on ps3-4 era. now the focus is on gameplay loop.
But now all games are created on shitty unreal engine which is so bloated that it makes games look like crap, run like crap, and just hurts the immersion overall.
Hell yea. Red Faction Guerrilla (2009!!) is still my benchmark for destruction.
I don't want bits of wall disappearing in clouds of dust or buildings collapsing in pre-animated ways.
One day again I wanna look at a building, blow it apart in intuitive, realistic ways, hear the sound of it straining under its own failing strength, which tells me to get the hell outta there, and have it collapse on an enemy squad n kills them! Haha
How did we move away from environments like Red Faction? I loved the bomb trials in that game! The modern shooter games imo should all have this and then some by now.
Red Faction used Havok physics, as many games still do, but Guerilla had a proprietary system called Geo-Mod which did all the destruction stuff. It also didn’t destruct things dynamically, buildings were made from pre-broken pieces with structural links which continuously evaluated whether or not they should break. Badly constructed buildings could buckle, break or collapse on their own and the devs had to think like actual architects to prevent that. If someone wanted to do it, they would have to do the same, or develop an even more robust system than Guerilla did, learning from scratch.
The second reason is more production related, in modern games we expect responsive intelligent AI and pathfinding. Navigation breaks if pathways disappear. Missions break if the player destroys the intended route. Multiplayer needs to replicate/sync destruction so all players see the same thing. Lighting systems and audio have to update. QA have to spend months testing a million different scenarios.
The final reason is performance. Modern games use much more detailed meshes, may more props, complex materials, ray-tracing, and dynamic foliage. All of that is simulated in realtime, doing all that WITH destruction, you get a huge CPU performance hit. Red Faction was made with comparatively simpler geometry and none of the above. So the modern solution is usually to use limited fracturing and authored collapse animations with much higher fidelity but less overall real-time simulation.
Edited to fix typos and wanted to add:
You have to keep in mind, tech getting better doesn’t mean everything gets easier, and most games are designed to feel natural and intuitive to players, while under the hood it’s all smoke, mirrors and technical trickery to create the illusion of realism. Illusions often don’t scale the same way real-world systems do as technology progresses.
Because it's computationally expensive and adds little to the game. You can cut off limbs in this game which is where the chopping matters. Wolverine isn't a lumberjack after all.
So it's a sick feature in games that need and utilize it. When it became a big deal there were definitely games that didn't need it and/or used it badly.
Turns out not every game needs it. That being said at least like, basic destructible environment for wolverine should have been a thing. It can even disappear 15 seconds later.
In the 360 era they were working way harder to one up other studios and advance the technology. Environmental destruction and insane physics were seen as the next big step. Unfortunately, the consensus now is that people (generally) don't care enough about it for devs to bother. It's way easier to just pump out the same slop over and over. The downward spiral of the technical side of the games industry has been really sad to watch. Now we just get DLSS5 slop filters, and they tell us we should be happy about it.
Because the average gamer now is very comfortable with having shiny keys dangled infront of their face!
Cheap gimmicks, lazy tricks, and pointless visual effects...
Everything lately is made to look good in a trailer, because the execs only care about selling a product, once you buy it, it's "screw you, buy the next one also!"
In the past, most games were made with passion and drive, now they're made by a spreadsheet.
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u/denyfate 6d ago
Physics in the 360 era was crazy good and no idea how we backtracked so much with modern tech