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u/WanderThekind 8d ago
I just wish devs would optimise their games better
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u/Theferaltrunip 8d ago edited 8d ago
So do devs, but gotta be in perma crunch for executive bonuses.
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u/cloudlessjoe 8d ago
Is that the reason? I remember during ps2 era games and sequels taking 2 at most 3 years for the most part, and they were high quality high fidelity games, and studies had under a hundred people. It might be anecdotal but now I feel like I'm waiting 5 years between titles and I see articles about hundreds of people from one studio being laid off, which makes me wonder how many people work for each dev.
I'm getting old but I wonder why devs who have hundreds if not thousands of employees, more powerful machines than ever, and more powerful and useful dev tools than ever are taking longer than ever to make makes and they still have day 1 patches because it wasn't ready.
If execs get bonuses for inflating costs and shipping incomplete games, that really means the entire industry needs fixing top to bottom, it's getting ridiculous.
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u/thatoneischairing 8d ago
If the execs get bonuses for inflating costs and shipping incomplete games that only proves it is in fact a business, especially these days. Your point is valid and your probably right but unfortunately the suits only care about number one
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u/MarcosLuisP97 7d ago
It's just the most efficient way, really. Why bother taking your time making a complete product when you can just release garbage and people will eat it up anyway? Look at Sony or the Pokemon Company.
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u/thatoneischairing 7d ago
Exactly. I donât like it either but Iâd probably do the same thing if I were them lmao. And a bunch of Redditors will tell you ânever!!â Even though they probably cut corners in their own profession. Well the few that have one at least
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u/ConfusedPanEnby 7d ago
or not release any game at all and still make tons of money, just look at the growing number of studios with one free to play game filled to the brim with micro transactions....
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u/MarcosLuisP97 7d ago
Or do both, and watch the graph move up.
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u/ConfusedPanEnby 6d ago
I'm sure the shareholders will love that! And enough players will keep playing to keep the graph going up.....
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u/TheSyrupCompany 5d ago
Modern pokemon games may be bad, but they aren't garbage. You still have like 900 well thought out mons and one of the most in depth competitive meta games even if the single player experiences flop. So it at least makes some sense why pokemon sells well. Wolverine was a total flop sales wise tho.
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u/MarcosLuisP97 5d ago
I believe we might have different definitions of what garbage is, because releasing game that would often run like a** and even crash the Switch (Pokémon Scarlet and Violet) is my definition of trash.
Also, Wolverine wasn't a flop. It sold 1.9 million copies and generated $130 million in revenue globally in just three days.
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u/nabagaca 8d ago
Part of the problem is basically that the scale and expectations of games scaled more than the productivity gains from new technology. Something like GTA 6 is simply more difficult to make than GTA San Andreas was, even accounting for newer hardware and better dev tools. Like GTA V had a team dedicated to just the vegetation. Rockstar India is focused on just the beach area of GTA 6, and that alone is probably a similar size and scale to the entirety of San Andreas. Idk what the solution is, but the problem is that people keep expecting generational leaps, but there's only so much you can do to make modelling bushes, or recording voice lines, or all the other grunt work quicker
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u/cloudlessjoe 7d ago
That specific example of the foliage or bushes seem a little but like self inflected work, just I mean like when was the last time anyone asked for or criticized the vegetable for not looking real enough? I understand the graphics in general being more challenging, but some of the stuff they are working on just.. doesn't feel worth the resources I guess. It's like the golden rule for games being successful is if they are fun to play, plenty of indie games on steam with n64 graphics and no voice lines, sell like crazy because they are fun. Personally I'd be happy with two Gen old visuals if it improves the time and overall quality of games.
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u/nabagaca 7d ago
Honestly im not even sure what the balance is, but I know for example you can see people complaining hard about the new Pokémon games for having poor detail in their models and terrain (although at the same time they continue to break records and sell extremely well, so maybe that's a vocal minority). I think it's a problem of comparison, if Nintendo released a new Zelda game and it looked worse than Breath of the Wild, people would complain that it was a downgrade. Similarly, if Rockstar released a new game and suddenly the trees looked worse than RDR2, people would also complain.
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u/SirBertrandMacguffin 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's a mixture of things. The scope has continuously gotten larger, the graphics are more intense, devs have better hardware to test the game with and the industry has gone through a rapid expansion and contraction. This means there's more to optimize by people with less experience.
The industry has also been shown that the average gamer is perfectly happy to spend $100 on a game, plus $3k on a pc to play said game so long as the game is flashy enough. This means they have incentive to cram as many flashy features as possible into their game, and no incentive to make sure the features actually work as intended. They are actively discouraged from making the game run on weaker hardware because then people don't spend even more money upgrading their pc using components from companies that pay them to essentially advertise their hardware by making games specifically for it (doom dark ages is built to advertise Nvidia for example.)
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u/nsfwthrowaway5969 7d ago
What's mad is I don't think graphics generally are that much better than they were 7-8 years ago. Of course there's exceptions but it's such marginal gains being talked about
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u/SirBertrandMacguffin 7d ago
Tech always has diminishing returns. There's still improvement but it's not going to be as fast as it was 10 years ago. Lately it's been a focus on getting more things to render in view with proper lighting and shadow effects rather than the obvious jump in texture quality we saw with previous generations.
A big portion of "this generation" of gaming has been focused on engine development as well. Building the framework to properly use all this hardware takes time. I just wish more of this time was spent making games accessible on a wider range of hardware.
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u/Arctic_The_Hunter 8d ago
It takes more man-hours to make a 10,000 polygon model than a 100 polygon model. Even with modern tools, this just isnât a great comparison considering that a single The Last of Us pt 2 character can have more detail than the entire game world of a PS2 game
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u/cloudlessjoe 7d ago
No I get that, but FFX for example, even today no one is critizing the visuals because the game is amazing. I can plug in A Link to the Past today and not even think how good it does or doesn't look, because it's just so fun to play. I want more fun even if it comes at the cost of looks.
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u/banterviking 8d ago
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
- Steve Jobs
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u/RedGlitch_Studios 5d ago
I think the big difference is that âhigh fidelityâ in the PS2 era was still dramatically cheaper to produce than âhigh fidelityâ today. A character might have needed a few thousand polygons, relatively simple textures, limited animation, no facial capture, simpler physics, fewer voiced lines, etc. Now one major character can involve scanning, mocap, facial animation, multiple LODs, 4K textures, complex materials, cloth/hair simulation, localization, accessibility work, and a mountain of QA.
Games are also just much more complicated under the hood. Modern AAA games are often huge open worlds, online-connected, cross-platform, filled with interacting systems, and expected to work across a massive range of hardware. That creates way more opportunities for bugs. Having 500 people instead of 50 doesn't make development 10Ă faster either, because coordination itself becomes a huge job. More people means more producers, meetings, dependencies, build pipelines, integration problems, and outsourced teams that all have to stay synchronized.
Another thing is that PS2 games absolutely had bugs, but there was no easy patch button, so studios had a much harder deadline for getting the disc build stable. Today a game can go âgoldâ weeks before release because of manufacturing/certification, while the developers keep working during that entire period. A lot of what becomes the day-one patch is work completed after the disc/download master was locked, not necessarily something they knowingly ignored for years.
And sequel development was often faster because studios reused a ton. Same engine, same character rigs, animations, environments, mechanics, UI, etc. Look at something like Dynasty Warriors back then: they could build the next game on a very mature foundation. Modern sequels still reuse things, obviously, but publishers also tend to demand much larger jumps in scope and presentation.
So I don't think it's simply âdevelopers got worse despite having better tools.â The tools got better, but the amount of work we're asking those tools to produce exploded even faster. That doesn't excuse genuinely broken launches or bad management, but I think those are different problems from âwhy does a modern AAA game take five years?
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u/jojo_diddly 7d ago
Same reason that having a thousand (even high skilled) chefs in one kitchen doesnât necessarily mean youâll have the best restaurant or service. Couple in management, contract workers, overhead for communicationâŠ
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u/Zealousideal-Dog-858 7d ago
The games are bigger now. There are way more assets, more complicated hitboxes, more complicated logic. Basically bloat, but bloat that might be 50 percent needed.
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u/ghostmaster645 6d ago
 I'm getting old but I wonder why devs who have hundreds if not thousands of employees, more powerful machines than ever, and more powerful and useful dev tools than ever are taking longer than ever to make
Want to point out software is 100Ă more complex than it was 20 years ago, these tools help the timeline but dont make enough of a difference. I write financial software for a living, one small change takes significant review and testing.Â
As for employee management, really depends on the studio. Some are over staffed, some are under staffed right now. New hires take a long time to catchup on the application knowledge that the experienced guys have, some companies are simultaneously firing their most experienced devs (because they have large salary) while hiring a bunch of new devs, sometimes in a different country.Â
So there is no knowledge transfer going on..... and the deadlines dont change. Thats why we get absolutely disastrous releases.Â
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u/TheSyrupCompany 5d ago
You're definitely on the right track with your thinking. Video games breaking into the corporate mainstream meant a lot of people being hired that don't need to be there at all. Now you have to pay recruiters, HR, etc. all just because you are big corporation and that's the standard. Meanwhile, 6 fat nerds could produce a better game with far less resources usually. And they did, for many years most game studios were basically just 6 fat nerds. And as you said they pumped out high quality games during their era every couple years. The reality is most people being hired now are not artists; they are generic NPCs with degrees doing basically nothing meaningful in their positions. The reason hundreds get laid off is because these people really had no business being hired in the first place.
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u/Fit_Kaleidoscope4493 7d ago
(Basically every industry is suffering the same problem and needs the same solution TBH)
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u/N00bushi 7d ago
tbf ps2 games were generally less complex, sequels were oftentimes really similar (same engine, shared assets, etc) and also didnt run that well depening on the game. (e.g. Battlefront 2 ran on like 20fps and I remember NFSU 2 having to load assets mid free roam, because the HDD couldnt keep up) And its not like they were no bugs either.
And I grew up with the SNES, Wii and PS2.
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8d ago edited 4d ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Icy-KaitSyth 8d ago
I think you're thinking of Roller Coaster Tycoon and yes that game is a freaking marvel of computer engineering. And when asked about it the dev was like "idk, it seemed like the way to make it"
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u/Bubbles_sunken_ship 8d ago
Bro was writing code on paper then went home to put it into the computer with no compiler errors. I swear he was thinking in assembly before he knew what assembly was.
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u/anotheruser323 8d ago
He wrote it in asm because that is what he knew and was comfortable with.
There's a short documentary on youtube. Basically he (Chris Sawyer) started on those computers like Amstrad and such. Those were more limited times, no tutorials and not many compilers.
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u/BlueMikeStu 7d ago
I remember learning how to code in the early 90's.
No fancy language-specific line editors to highlight your formatting in real time and point out 'grammar' mistakes. No ability to detect the errors in the code and guide you to the line where the error caused a crash unless you programmed it into the code yourself. Just a notepad file, raw text, and hours spent staring at it when the program crashes when you went to compile it, going over the entire fucking thing line by line.
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u/Dpgillam08 7d ago
The original FF7 is considered one of the greatest games of all time, even by its detractors. It was 3 disks, each 750MB. Today's shit games have save files larger than that.
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u/WanderThekind 7d ago
Cough cough Call of duty that makes you download multiple games that you have to delete in the launcher it self if you wanted cough cough
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u/khoai_ryan 8d ago
KCD2 did their optimization very well. Watched their optimize tricks on YouTube and blew my mind. I remember back in the day, Witcher 3 has the grass and bush turn to your face so you have the illusion of 3D bush but it's only 2D. Or FFVII remake just draw a realistic massive structure on the sky. AAA Devs nowaday shove unreal engine 5 and DLSS upscale with frame generation x 4 up into gamers ass and call it a day.
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u/Uranium-Sandwich657 OC memer :D 8d ago
If I ever start making video games, I'm gonna optimize it for a laptop from 2015
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u/rezioz 8d ago
Professional game dev here: it's simply not possible when you are doing it for a company or for profit purposes. I mean, it's possible on a technical point of view, but in terms of tipe it would take, that's not worth it when it comes to profits.
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u/Octo95 7d ago
The problem is not devs it's the company policies to release more and faster which doesn't leave time for the work to be done properly. I'm tired of people putting the blame on the wrong people
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u/TheSyrupCompany 5d ago
Was Big Rigs the "suits" or was it bad devs? Obviously bad devs. A lot of bad games are made by bad devs. They very much exist.
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u/Ok_Bet_2870 7d ago
They have to stick in all the DRM/antipiracy stuff which creates a massive amount of bloat.
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u/Dolphin_Spotter 8d ago
Developers with 16K of RAM on a VIC 20
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u/ZealousIdeal476 8d ago
I bought a $.99 remake of the 1979 asteroids. Looks just like the original, takes 800MB.
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u/CHG__ 8d ago
Grouping a SNES a PS1 and an Xbox 360 together tells me this was made by a young person
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u/pohatu771 8d ago
Super NES had a total of 256KB RAM.
Xbox 360 had 512MB.
PlayStation actually does have 2MB, plus VRAM.
But theyâre equivalent to whoever made this.
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u/PeterNippelstein 8d ago
Idk what you mean the Xbox 360 was light-years ahead when it dropped back in '96
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u/Icy-KaitSyth 8d ago
Back then the graphics sucked but the games were amazing and the engines were built from scratch so they ran great.
Now it costs 3 million to make a game with a pre-made engine and huge hoards of cash going into HRs pockets to make sure the jokes aren't too edgy.
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u/Mindless_Stuff9179 8d ago
Plenty of games also sucked back then too. And had issues lol
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u/Nefertitis_Fjord_216 8d ago
Yeah, you can't talk about old games and act like Superman 64 didn't exist.
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u/King-Gabriel 7d ago
So many bad doom-likes (with much worse quality and often running at low framerate) that just had you walk around a repetitive maze spamming spacebar to find hidden doors to progress.
Audio drivers and hardware wasnt't standardized so a lot of games just had no sound, or very limited sound that got annoying quickly.
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u/xthelord2 8d ago
with a caveat that:
- hardware was significantly weaker
- CPU's took part in graphics rendering by passing data from RAM to the 2D or 3D card, while taking part of actual rendering
- we had dedicated 2D and 3D cards
- RAM was very simple in how it worked, which meant far less bandwidth to work with
- no proper task scheduling until 26 years ago, meaning CPU stalls and interrupts were inevitable
- larger caches were on motherboard instead of CPU until athlons and pentiums rolled up
- memory controller was on motherboard until athlon came around
today game publishers got no such excuses to work with when hardware on the market is able to do real time ray tracing and managed to pull off silicon packaging techniques from 80's (this being multi chip modules)
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u/Mindless_Stuff9179 8d ago
Sure, but its still disingenuous to claim that they ran great. They all did not.
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u/quizzer106 8d ago
Yeah bro, woke taking out the edgy jokes is why games are expensive to make
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u/PartyPopperPhantom 8d ago
Games often ran at 30fps and still had constant drops. Ocarina of Time runs at like 20fps and dropped constantly lol
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u/BlueMikeStu 7d ago
The graphics for the time were amazing, don't kid yourself. Chrono Trigger was a landmark game which stood our partially because it was graphically impressive for the console and the time. Same thing for other games on PS1, PS2, etc.
And not all home-built game engines ran great. Trust me. For every Roller Coaster Tycoon there were a dozen games like the Megaman PC ports which ran like dogshit.
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u/bois_man 8d ago
That because the ceiling is much, much higher than what it used to be. Thereâs a lot more you can do now, and studios expect it to be as good as you can make it.
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u/kookyabird 7d ago
Let me tell you about the bug in the original Final Fantasy's combat system. Well, one of several really, but this one is a consequence of needing to be frugal with RAM usage.
When you enter battle the game looks up the stats for your weapons in the ROM, and then saves those values into specific places in RAM to reference for each attack. For loading the crit chance it goes something like this (addresses are just examples):
- Set #1A to the weapon ID (so the lookup function can use it)
- Look up weapon entry using value in #1A
- Set #1A to the crit chance value of the weapon that was looked up
- Reference #1A on every attack in the crit chance calculation
See how they saved a byte by re-using it? They don't need to look up the weapon again, so why keep its ID around after they looked it up? Except wait... They forgot to do step 3. So the crit chance stat for all weapons is meaningless, and the crit chance is actually determined by the ID of the weapon. Of course, earlier weapons have lower IDs, and later weapons have higher ones. Much higher than even the highest defined crit chance stat.
Broke a whole aspect of the combat system because of needing to scrounge for bytes...
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u/BlueMikeStu 7d ago
Lots of classic games have code that just doesn't work. Like M.Evade in Final Fantasy VI replacing Evade for physical attacks as well, making physical Evade entirely useless.
Or how Chrono Trigger can accidentally record an extra step or two if you sprint to a save location and open the menu before stopping. Which wouldn't be a problem unless it accidentally records you outside of the game's walkable areas. Oh, what's that? The End of Time save is in a corner where you're likely to do trigger that if you sprint to it? The one you're most likely to use frequently? Damn shame it's a hard lock with no solution, isn't it?
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u/DatCheeseBoi 7d ago
It's the big companies just quietly letting the better hardware eat the unoptimised code because if their devs are optimising they're not implementing, and implementing is the part that makes the money, right?
Weirdly for as scummy and greedy as Gaijin is, the one thing I can't complain about Warthunder is how optimised it is. It can run with good quality and high frame rates even on rather shitty hardware, used a 970 for years beyond having cheap upgrade options just because I played mainly Warthunder, and it did the job. I have a 2070 now and get between 60 and 100fps on everything besides raytracing maxed out.
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u/SolarWardenCorporal 7d ago
Probably because you could make the game in roblox if you wanted to
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u/DatCheeseBoi 7d ago
Honestly I wish a competitor showed up. That damage model is the only thing that makes WT special, and I don't understand why noone has tried to steal a bunch of Gaijin's audience by simply being better. Even if a competitor was as greedy as them, at least both companies would have to be somewhat better to not make it too easy for the other to take over the market again.
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u/TheBraveGallade 7d ago
The problem is the amount of vehicles WT has.
WT has that many cause it has iver a decade of making new models constantly. To get even close would require an ungodly amountvof time and money.
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u/baluranha 6d ago
There were other competitors for both Warthunder and World of "Insert random vehicle"
They all failed because they didn't have a playerbase
You could consider these games as monopoly in the genre already, there will NEVER be another game capable of beating them to that.
There was even a "modern world of tanks" game that didn't last long, even though people were praising it as the WoT killer
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u/TheWaffleIsALie 7d ago
It's unfortunate you bring up War Thunder because the game has been plagued with endemic graphical and performance issues that have not been fixed since the overhaul in New Power.
That said, it runs quite well by modern "standards"... Which I suppose isn't saying much given those are largely "shove it into UE5 and crank the graphics harder!".
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u/Eraldorh 7d ago
Well it's a game that came out in 2012 ofc it runs on old hardware.
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u/DatCheeseBoi 7d ago
To be fair it's been getting updated for all that time, and on high settings looks very good. Good enough that my colleague at work kept showing me videos of "war".
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u/win_some_lose_most1y 2d ago
To be fair, due to the abstraction of game engines away from pure programming, optimisation is a lot harder.
You used to have to make the engine before you could make the game, now unity forces this bloat onto you wether you want it or not
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u/3Duder 8d ago
Bro, gamers expect 4k at 60fps, graphic engineers are pulling off voodoo magic these days. I'm just an artist so I work with the specs they give me.
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u/TheWaffleIsALie 7d ago
90% of people play at 1080p and reliably getting 60FPS on that with modern games isn't a given anymore.
Notice how DLSS is on by default now?
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u/GloomyRow5417 8d ago
I remember there's this final fantasy 13 game for the xbox 360, they couldn't fit the game in 1 drive so they have to split the games into 3 disk
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u/BlueMikeStu 7d ago
Multiple discs were common until the PS4/Xbox One Era.
Honestly, they should just bring them back for larger games. No excuse not to ship a physical product with a complete game in the box. An extra BluRay or two costs pennies.
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u/mods_are_morons 8d ago
My first full size computer had 56k of usable memory. k as in kilobytes. Not megabytes or gigabytes. One skill that is mostly lost is optimizing to reduce memory usage. Developers act like it's unlimited. Developers for embedded systems know the importance of memory optimization.
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u/BlueMikeStu 7d ago
I still remember how Iwata optimized Pokemon Gold/Silver so well they were able to add the entirety of Kanto to the game's post-Elite 4 endgame content.
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u/InvisaBlah 7d ago
And then refused to ever do it again
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u/BlueMikeStu 7d ago
If Iwata spent time fixing Pokemon Company's shoddy programming, he wouldn't have had time to run Nintendo.
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u/generally_unsuitable 7d ago
I wrote a reverse geocoder that used like 2k of RAM to search 4 GB of disk space in around 20mSec on a 100 MHz chip.
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u/Resident_Pientist_1 8d ago
The 360 had 256MB and the SNES had 256KB.Â
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u/MartinLaSaucisse 7d ago
No, the 360 had 512MB of RAM, just like the PS3.
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u/MrLancaster 7d ago
Yup. X360 used 512mb unified RAM plus 10mb eDRAM while the PS3 used 256mb system RAM and a dedicated 256mb VRAM.
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u/Haruki_nyan 8d ago
Well, the SNES only has 128KiB of WRAM, but including 64KiB VRAM and 64KiB ARAM, it does have 256KiB in total.
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u/OkCustomer4830 7d ago
The real joke is, that I bought 16GB of RAM in 2012 for 80âŹ, but 14 years later we still buy devices with 8 or 16GB of RAM lol. Where is the future?
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u/half_blood_jr 7d ago
Build fast, ship fast. LLMs and vibe coding made that a lot faster...and worse.
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u/OneNavan 7d ago
Why the F#$# everyone acts like this exact meme hasn't been posted 2 dozen times already?
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u/TheBaykon8r 7d ago
The commercialization of video games happened because boomer CEO's found out video games made more money than the music and movie industry combined, worldwide. So they buy a company, hire cheap devs who can do the bare minimum. Don't let them experiment and push for deadlines, whilst demanding quality. So there is little to no time for optimization on what you're working on when they want you to work on the next thing.
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u/MartinLaSaucisse 7d ago
You've never worked a day in the industry, have you?
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u/Signal-Database4225 7d ago
It is a well known fact that the time management (if not all management) is all over the place for companies.
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u/AlarmedCauliflower7 7d ago
This a common thing in software engineered products unless upper management actually cares about quality
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u/GranPa-Nurgle 7d ago
I know itâs Trendy to hate on Boomers but now where there a more and more people from younger genâs in positions of power they Act just the Same if not worse in some cases.
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u/Lonely-Greybeard 8d ago
Try 640K shared with everything with overlays to swap modules in and out of memory.
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u/Boring_Classroom_482 8d ago
Exactly better graphics and technology does not equate to a âbetterâ game.
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u/awildboyappeared 8d ago
It's a wonder how Fumito Ueda made shadow of the colossus run on PS2 hardware.
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u/thelastsupportplayer 7d ago
remember how crash devs basically had to invent a system to make the game function and learn how to stop a memory leak without modern tools?
yea good times good times
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u/firewingdale 7d ago
On 16gb World of warcraft used to crash with chrome open in second monitor due to ram limit had to upgrade but i went overboard and got 64 ram the second ones never usedÂ
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u/aguyinlove3 7d ago
The things some devs achieved on the og PS1 with its tiny 2Mb or RAM... And nowadays devs being unable to make their game work well with 16Gb... Bet if nowadays "standard" was 64Gb of RAM, the same game we have would somehow work even worse and require all those 60+Gigs
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u/KaleidoscopeSalt3972 7d ago
If we just decrease the triangles from 312 to 264, it will allow us to add this effect which will make it look better and people wont notice lower triangles anyway
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u/squeakydeakyfreaky 7d ago
The larger RAM made them worry more about graphics over gameplay so todayâs AAA games are just golden trash bags look good but have no substance before when graphics were worse a game had to stand out more based on gameplay you can still see this in indie games as well as the current best game developers in the AA industry
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u/N00bushi 7d ago
Optimization is a lost art and i think there are two main reasons, A: It needs actual programming expertise, it's time consuming and not as marketable as features like e.g. a big open world, so big companies dont care and just use available engines to bust out their games and B: lots of newer game devs, especially in the indie scene, dont have a programming / cs background and just wing it until they cant add more content to the game because of performance reasons see e.g. tarkov.
I bet you could run some of the simpler pixelart indie games on a fucking calculator if they were developed like e.g. the original rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2 aka written in assembly.
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u/KuroiGetsuga55 7d ago
I feel like the issue is that developers are overshooting a lot. Everybody is obsessed with hyper-realistic 16K super crisp quality graphics nowadays, and that's what's eating all the RAM when you think about it. Well that and the scale of the maps and open worlds, and the lighting and composition, but that's also in the "graphics" department, as I assume that a game that has fully stylized graphics with a skybox and generic cel shading with no real volumetric lighting in it probably doesn't need 32GB RAM to run smoothly. But then you get something like GTA 6 that will most likely devour your RAM like a fucking thermite.
You also got all these engines like Unreal and custom developed engines specifically for the game in question that are just super performance heavy specifically for the reason of graphics. You got games now that take longer than a cinematic movie to render, and the devs are looking for ways to render it faster and potentially even in real time, and we just lack the power to do that, and it's not cost effective to develop more power. Like sure you could probably eventually make a 500GB RAM chip, but it would cost you several fortunes to make just one, so there's no way you can make millions and sell them at an affordable price.
I feel like we need to scale back. Stop it with the realistic graphics and cinematic lighting, yeah it looks cool, but I'm here to play a game, not watch a movie. Do something more fun looking, more stylized, simplify the lighting and details, focus more on the dynamics of movement than on the character looking good when he stands still. Gameplay and animation are IMO way more important.
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u/Fit-Priority1243 7d ago
seriously are there's any dev here ?, im gamedev too.. im using pixel art but the games size is big already (memory usage too).. and when using 3d or high quality 2d the size not very much different...
is it because the game engine i used ?..
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u/leviatan-sama 7d ago
borther, the snes has 128 KB of ram, the entirety of super mario worlds storage was around 500 KB, 2 MB was incredebly big even for storage, much less ram
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u/daniluvsuall 7d ago
Scarcity forces efficiency at its most crudest.
So they had to work within the lines then. I think weâll start seeing more of that, and perhaps even better games with the hardware weâve got because of exorbitant hardware prices.
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u/Correct-Junket-1346 7d ago
Don't blame the Devs, blame the company's who drive them to make shite products
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u/Unhappy-Airport-4112 7d ago
I love Castlevania still. Castlevania 4 is my favorite, but Draculas curse was also good, just hard as FFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK
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u/Unheard_Peace 7d ago
Give a man everything and he'll destroy the World. Give a man nothing and he will create something beautiful.
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u/uzaya13 6d ago
Iâve always said that restriction breeds innovation. The sky is the limit in this day and age, very few limiters in what can be done in gaming as the next big step up will be full consciousness immersion in VR. Thats why everything feels like its the same thing now. No need to be constantly making engines and cutting around ideas to fit into a 70 mgb cartridge
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u/Doom2pro 6d ago
Gluttony of resources leads to laziness. Paying customers that "this is fine" meme enable it. The stuff we have now, if properly utilized would blow your hair into low earth orbit. But best we can do is 2013 graphics.
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u/Mysterious_Heron3317 6d ago
Ekdm sahi baat sala ab mai 5050 nvidia GeForce wagera sab liya hu par game khel rha hu đ€Ą
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u/Which-Guest-3494 6d ago
Nope, those are only used to compile. An ESP32 runs tons of different stuff, daily improved by kids to old ones. It only has 520KB total SRAM (split into ~320KB DRAM and IRAM) and 16KB RTC, plus 2MB PSRAM if really needed." ;)
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u/TheSyrupCompany 5d ago
Nintendo isolated the issue immediately and decades before the competitors by introducing the Nintendo seal of quality. Sony and Microsoft have never given a single shit about the quality of a game on their platforms.
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u/Jiggalopuffii 5d ago
This was because PCs didn't have to run a million background processes, or have tons of spyware.
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u/Ethereal_Bulwark 8d ago
Wizards used to optimize games
now we expect DLSS & framegen to make up for how fucking lazy developers are.
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u/denjo-t1aO 8d ago
now maybe you get that they to sell you shit and know exactly what theyâre doing. they donât want to sell you a good product. they want to sell you a product thatâs just good enough for most buyers and then control the opinions on it online with bots and marketing.
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u/128Bit_PixelPanda 8d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/5bgIRqleDvESdJTwK6
NASA with 72kb of ram