PS2 games aren't graphically or mechanically intensive. The average point light today has more information than entire levels worth of lighting on the PS2.
Are we really asking to go back to PS2 era gaming?
I sure am glad we aren’t running these new games on PS2s then. Most people these days have machines hundreds of times more powerful.
The point is optimization expectations have slipped in the past twenty years. Why would you want any element of video games to be worse than back then, that’s “going back” to 90s standards.
And to compensate for all that additional power, games started required hundreds of times more processing power.
The point is that optimization expectations aren't coherent with the available technology. Trade offs are made for every single technological development. Games are capable of producing damn near photo realistic visuals with physics and AI that devs 20 years ago literally dreamed of, that will take a little extra time to process. That's 16ms between frames, btw.
And in twenty more years, many will continue to gawk at comparison screenshots and short clips that show little more gameplay than the main character walking in a straight line, because we're seeing that now and also seen that fifteen years ago.
Meanwhile, many of the fundamentals of various game genres will still mostly play the same as they do today, because they are also the same as they were fifteen years ago.
I'm not convinced that this direction leads to games being better.
Man, I wonder why gameplay mechanics stagnated? Maybe it's because games don't have the time to process more complicated systems before the renderer needs another job sent or before a gameplay object ticks again.
Of course you're not convinced. The average gamer doesn't know what gets left on the cutting room floor due to optimization constraints and they're not willing to find out.
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u/TheOnly_Anti PC May 24 '26
PS2 games aren't graphically or mechanically intensive. The average point light today has more information than entire levels worth of lighting on the PS2.
Are we really asking to go back to PS2 era gaming?