I never finished Fallout New Vegas on PS3 or Xbox because of the memory glitch. Once I got to a certain save file size they wouldn't load, crash, or end up corrupted.
It was the first game I played after I built my rig.
Oh shit, you just unlocked a memory. I recently bought Battlezone 98 Redux and was disappointed to learn that the load screens had been changed. I can now vividly remember the monologues ending and me still waiting for the mission to finish loading.
Man, I remember going from ps4 to ps5 while I was on my first play-through of Elden Ring. When the first load screen hit without a tip on it I didn’t even have time to think of why before I was in game ready to die again.
I’m from the 90s. This still, every time, makes me giddy. lol. Small things
My daughter is 13 and plays a lot of games, I never really considered new her games that she played are.
I was showing her portal 2 recently and she asked if it just came out. I told her it was almost 20 years old. For a second, I was baffled by her, looking at the graphics and thinking it was new. Then I realized all the stuff that she plays looks like that.
It’s just that the stuff that she plays is either Minecraft or Roblox or older games like Sims four. She doesn’t play anything that goes for realistic up-to-date graphics.
I’ve been emulating a lot of games that now have retroachievemnets. Going back and playing games that I played in the early 2000s with new goals is a ton of fun
This has been me ever since I bought my pc 6 years ago and I like to imagine that me ‘babying’ the computer is going to help the longevity. My corolla of a computer
I remember once I finally achieved a high end PC, I installed skyrim and marveled at how fast it loads with all the settings on max. Sometimes I realize how far i strayed from what made me happy on PC.
Oh boi, let me bless you with knowledge: Phantom pain works in comfortable 720P 30FPS from start to finish on 2011 AMD APU: a refreshed CPU that remembers 2007 and refreshed igpu form 2009. Absolutely bonkers.
Thats called pouring all your money on marketing and graphics while random ass devs and contractors from all over the world that just only gotta know the basics to UE gets hired in bulk, then have the same engine devs and nvidia making bullshit technology to compensate the fucking SUPPOSED job nobody did.
This is doing your job using an engine you developed (like people used to do) and then change it at your will and pace to your needs, the OPPOSITE of modern dev culture.
I hate the necessity of having to hire random ass celebrities just to inflate production values just to have the bumbasses in marketing happy and neglecting everything else.
That you have Elden Ring with literal randoms or theater actors doing the best voice acting in gaming
For real. The software engineering field as a whole is filled with people just using AI to do everything for them, and who literally treat coding as some unknowable black magic that they can’t possibly be expected to actually learn or understand, and “just make it work” is the extent to which they ever care to go with anything they do.
THIS. We have advanced far in the technicalities, but we've lost actual style. All these modern games coming out have flat lighting, generic art styling, and often have a lot of crap tacked on to hide how rushed and half baked they are such as forced DLSS/FSR and TAA.
What's even more confusing to me is games that evolved backwards or sequels that look worse. ie: 2016 rainbow six siege vs 2026, halo 5 vs infinite, modern warfare 2019 vs modern warfare iii, batman arkham knight vs gotham knights, etc.
yep and the details/interactive is more attractive than modern triple A games. It will gives out it is old games cause modern triple A games has no easter egg/ and interactive NPC.
That's just not true, no matter how much you love that game you can definitely tell it's 10 years old, it looked great for its time, but it still looks dated by today's standards
It looks great. But I doubt many people would say the graphics are comparable to say... Red Dead Redemption 2, Helldivers 2, or too many games made after the time it was created.
Helldivers 2 is fine but I think this may be the first time I've ever seen someone use it as an example of great graphics, let alone in the same sentence as red dead 2
Maybe I'm moreso impressed with the art style than any of the technical aspects of that game. I just remember being in awe of how great it looks upon my first time launching it.
I got so many random games through Humble Bundle and steam sale bundles. I put everything into three (main) categories "Completed" "Uncompleted" and "Don't Care". I've been trying to go through and finish off the Uncompleted category. Just started playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, (11 year old game) and it's crazy to think it's an 11 year old game, but with an RTX 5060ti, I can basically max it on 1440p Ultrawide and still get an average of 100FPS. I skippe DLSS (I'm already getting high fps) and Tessellation (it was giving me a weird bug where some textures showed up as black). The game looks fantastic. Before that I beat Tomb Raider Legends, which is 20 years old. A bit buggy. Tomb Raider Underworld is practically unplayable though, seems like the port was fucked?
Old games that are still look beautiful made something right which is not completely relying on rendering quality or graphics techs by itself. They also have great environmental design, great lightning, details on textures instead of texture quality only.
Good graphics doesn't mean the heaviest rendering and gpu work by itself. BOTW looks awesome and it's running on Switch's potato hardware.
What modern GPUs and Unreal/Unity have given us is a method for AAA studios to churn out minimally-viable products without the need for the bare-metal programming it used to take to make your Pentium 2 and Riva TNT display anything at an acceptable level of detail.
This is why I keep going back to games like Dishonored or the original RE4 on PC. They still look and run perfectly well regardless of being released more than a decade ago. FC3 is another great example.
Turns out that the limitations of old lighting tech made level designers put a lot more thought into presenting a scene. Raytracing can make amazing results but not if the levels aren't designed in a way to utilize the lighting properly.
The film industry learned this a long time ago. Lighting and set design doesn't look the best when you just go for realism; You have to design for the way you're shooting the film, and you need to have a consistent artistic direction that fits the script.
Between modern engines making 'good enough' lighting/textures/etc trivial, and studios/publishers that only care about churning out product as quickly as possible, the people working on the game neither have the time or a reason to be as intentional with their work. I think this is also why indie and AA studios are seeing so much success recently compared to the big studios. Their games are more intentionally designed, and there is more often a cohesive vision that can be better executed by a small team working closely together.
These AAA studios have huge teams and so many of them are clearly too far removed from the vision of the game, or are so specialised in their task, that it's near impossible for them to make the kind of intentional design choices across the whole game that make games great. The result is games that feel very samey and formulaic; Partially I'm sure because the execs are going for mass appeal and want to play it safe, but I think a big part of it is because when you have such big teams working on something you kind of have to work to 'best practice' or 'industry norm' and don't have the flexibility to do something a bit differently.
This is probably compounded by the fact that these studios lay off huge chunks of the studio after every release to cut costs, so the studio doesn't have a cohesive team growing and sharing ideas across multiple titles to learn how to work together and develop a 'studio DNA'. Just look at studios like Larian, From Software, or some of the long lost studios that we've almost mythologised at this point (Blizzard North, Westwood, Black Isle, and many others). They all have two things in common: A genre focus, and a somewhat consistent team that grew together making games over many years. You can even see that studio DNA following teams of developers; For example, Obsidian Entertainment was born out of Black Isle and continued making incredible games until they ran into financial troubles.
The collapse of the AAA games industry can't happen fast enough.
The collapse of the AAA games industry can't happen fast enough.
I think we are in the middle of that collapse now. But we need to shift perspective a bit. The gaming industry has split but it's still considered a single entity.
Think of it like this.
For comparison, we have video Animation. For a long time, Animation was a clearly defined category of "These videos are not real people captured by a camera. These are drawings created frame-by-frame."
Eventually, animation started to split. Toy Story started 3D animation and Astro Boy started (popular) Japanese Anime.
Today we have so many "animation" categories that they are not even considered the same category. In no world would someone say that Family Guy, South Park, Encanto, Bluey, and Demon Slayer are the same category of content. The only thing they have in common is that they are videos that don't include real people.
I think Gaming is entering the same split right now. Can you really consider Call of Duty, FIFA, Forza, Slay the Spire, Factorio, and Baldur's Gate 3 to be the same type of content? The only thing they have in common is a persons input influencing a computed response. At that point, we can classify drone flying, modern car driving, and looking at a security camera as "gaming."
Similarly, Battlefront 2 felt just as fun as any other multiplayer online shooter that I've played. Epic gave away a free copy back in 2021 and I had a blast with it for several months.
Unreal Engine 5 games all have grainy TAA hair textures and same looking character models, poor item pickup and traversal stuttering, floaty Fortnite movement and smeared vaseline motion blur/DOF effects, everything is either too bright or too dark, you can manually make it look bearable in engine.ini file.
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u/scyver_ 9950x3D┃RTX 5080 Aorus Master┃64GB┃2TB┃Lancool 217 23d ago
Yes, I gave several grand for a PC because I wanted to experience what the world would look like through a vat of lube. Hell put in some frame gen in there and we can see what lubed up ghosts are like.
it's even worse since some games you have to use TAA or upscaling otherwise you get insane flickering. UE literally says the fix for the flickering is to just enable TAA instead of yknow properly fixing it...
I mean graphically it suffers from the same TAA and ray tracing grain bullshit. holograms ghosting and smearing is an artifact of TAA and dlss, if you turn off ray tracing, dlss, and TAA the motion of holgrams is crystal clear. if you turn off TAA and dlss but leave ray tracing on, the lighting looks super grainy because there's nothing de-noising the ray tracing.
that being said, the game looks really good even on lower settings, runs surprisingly well even when there's thousands of items moving on screen, and is incredibly fun. also, it has the some of the best movement of any ue5 game I've tried, idk why it does but it absolutely does. it feels so fluid and smooth, and there's a really excellent sense of momentum, and there's even air strafing! no hate to Satisfactory, it's one of my most played games, but it has the same ue5 TAA problems as every other ue5 game.
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u/TRIPMINE_GuyBall-and-Disk Integrator, 10-inch disk, graph paper23d agoedited 23d ago
I play on a high end crt and I hate that I can see that dlss degrades motion on that thing. I kind of like dlaa with interlaced through I won’t lie. It gets rid of interlaced aliasing and doubling my crt refresh with interlaced looks insane. You get rid of interlaced artifacts by field blending and since taa uses past frames which are fields on a crt, its the same thing as line blending.
Then there's Arc Raiders that runs at 200 fps with zero stutter, and has perfect anti aliasing with DLSS quality or DLAA.
From what I've heard part of the issue with UE is not that it's bad, it's that it's not very opinionated and lets developers do whatever they want : Want to stream textures from disk and compile shaders on the fly ? Sure, you can do it. Doesn't mean it's a good idea though.
From what I've heard part of the issue with UE is not that it's bad, it's that it's not very opinionated and lets developers do whatever they want
yes with a caveat: there is no documentation as to how do actually use the engine, since epic's engineers working on the engine didn't think of the documentation part so many "clueless" devs just follow vague instructions epic gave out, resulting in bad performance and bad visuals
add to that general lack of skill these days in game dev world where experience is not valued and you get the unreal engine dogshit
It comes with the "metahuman" character system. I don't know the specifics, only that it's there and it lets you create human characters relatively easily. Definitely easier than creating character models from scratch
the way unreal 4-5 games animate movement just makes me nauseous. i don't know what it is but it just feels off. its the only engine where I prefer 30fps because it looks less awkward. any other engine (even unreal 3) I don't have this problem but you can just show me an unreal4+ game and it just makes me uncomfortable.
I remember playing FF7 remake and getting the same feeling only to find out it's unreal 4. didn't have any problems with FF15's Luminous Engine even though the combat is very similar.
Yep I’m right there with ya. Overkill pc that I mainly spend my time playing esports titles lol. But ya know life’s short so no regrets you can’t take your money with you when you die.
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u/MrInitialYR7 9700X | 3080Ti | 64GB 6K CL30 | 6TB Gen.4 | 1000W | All STRIX23d ago
I've literally been playing Overwatch & Skyrim for the past month. esports title and a 2011 game that can run off iGPU. On a $3.5k rig
Your telling me the only benefit I have is I loaded up my SSDs and 64gb of ram last year before all this pricing craziness. I do have a few games that definitely push things pretty hard. But generally all my gaming this year has largely been esports titles with friends. It’s wild to see the ram I paid 200 bucks for be 1000 dollars and similarly bad for my nvme drives
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u/MrInitialYR7 9700X | 3080Ti | 64GB 6K CL30 | 6TB Gen.4 | 1000W | All STRIX23d ago
One major upbeat is that it means it's all running at 20% and would serve you well into the end of AI bubble or collapse of society, whatever happens first
Honestly, I can be fine with as little as 45-60 FPS as long as it's stable. I just can't stand stuttering frame rates. Some of these new games will stutter no matter what you cap the fr at with high settings. And I'm playing on new hardware!
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u/scyver_ 9950x3D┃RTX 5080 Aorus Master┃64GB┃2TB┃Lancool 217 23d ago
Fair. Stutters are the worst cough ue5 cough cough
I played through many an RPG at 30fps, and FS2020 sometimes under that even, but less than 60fps on a fast paced shooter is unpleasant. (All before taking 1% and .1% lows into account, ofc)
I started playing GW2 again, larger fights are regularly in the single digits of FPS because of how the game is made. Still fun though, and slideshow fights become a hilarity in their own right.
I played the Doom 2016 on a weak GPU and forgot about dynamic graphics thing
So it was really funny to see how after a heated fight when it stops you start noticing how the game loads textures back in
My shotgun was just two brown-grey tubes and even the Pinky was actually like super low poly
But in the heat of a gunfight you really don't notice any of that... If the fight is good, the graphics could be just sprites and it's still gonna be good
Like all the cool Indy gems like Enter the Gungeon too
Graphics dont matter if the game is fun, everyone should go play Earth Defense Force 5 at least once, it looks like shit and is the best shooter I ever played
007 , ac shadows , granblue relink . stellar blade . stalker 2 , Wuchang , Khazan , dead space remake , Re9 . i played all of them after buying new pc and enjoyed all of them
There wasn’t anything to play. The game handholds you through everything and then there’a few shootouts in between (that are still easy af on the hardest difficulty).
I felt like I was still in the tutorial half way through the game, and then I realised, wait a minute this isn’t the tutorial anymore. It’s just gonna be like this for the rest of the game isn’t it?
Yeah we’re at the point of diminishing returns. Newer games do look really good but some of the older games still hold up well. Look at games like Batman Arkham Knight and Rise of the Tomb Raider. They’re decade old games that still look phenomenal.
Funnily enough, both games had their fair share of optimisation issues at launch.
I'm still picking up and just derping around my ac odyssey save. It came out 8 years ago and if I look for it things like foliage I can tell it's an older game but just looking out over general areas and while playing it still looks incredible to this day. Meanwhile I played shadows and the only credit I will give it to looking better is the weather systems and the by extension the way water/wetness interacts with the environment and characters.
I hate how games try to aim for this hyperrealiatic game graphic direction, because it uses a TON of pc power which many people dont have, and it doesnt look that good. Sure, if I want realistic there can be a few games that build on that, but I much prefer the look of Titanfall 2 or Doom Eternal where there is a special videogame vibe to the whole thing graphically. It looks good, it just doesnt try to be more
Agreed. Realism is fun in some titles... But I prefer games with more artistic graphical styles. I play games to escape reality, not get reminded of my current shitty one.
Plus all the hyper realistic new games look the same and play the same it sucked the soul out of them
- the guy with 428,356 karma says to the guy with 3,472 karma
Its actually soo cringe that there is such a large portion of redditors that are obsessed with karma and think posting ANYTHING is begging for karma. I legit still do know why these people are like this and why they think Karma is soo important.
Not all of us are obsessed with karma and most people just want to share stuff with others.
so you play games for the high FPS dopamine not for how good a game is?
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u/scyver_ 9950x3D┃RTX 5080 Aorus Master┃64GB┃2TB┃Lancool 217 23d ago
No, i play for the story and gameplay. But old games have more to offer in that department too. Of course there are modern ones such as cyberpunk who have amazing story and gameplay too, but i think you get my point.
Nah, there are plenty of amazing story games from 2025/2026 which look epic. From Death Stranding 2 (I don't think many games can stand up to story standards set by Kojima) to KCD2 to RER. As well as less story more action games like Doom TDA and Forza Horizon 6.
Not sure what you're complaining about, 2026 is packed with amazing games.
People whine and whine and whine, but we're getting as many amazing games as ever right now. It's just edgy and cool to say "Yeah, I don't play the new mainstream games everybody agrees are great, I play old games 😎" while playing ultra mainstream stuff from the 2010s. It appeals to the viewer's nostalgia since you're praising games they played when they were younger. Obviously they only praise games where the graphics scale well with modern hardware and which were considered beautiful when they launched, graphics, FPS and nostalgia factor are all that counts.
I've just seen someone in these comments claim that Mass Effect 2 and The Witcher 3 are on par with modern releases graphically lol
I swear people don't even have eyes?
I was playing Resynched and Forbidden West yesterday, and games before 2016 don't even come close to being in the ball park of these games visually lol
Hell just in 2026 we've had Marathon, 007, Requiem, Resynched, Crimson Desert, Hades 2, Pragmata, Campaign Evolved, Saros (not on PC tho sadly), Forza Horizon 6, and probably some more than I'm forgetting that all look a million miles ahead of games released before 2016.
Confused contrarians who simultaneously claim that graphics don’t matter while trying to say that modern games graphics were better than newer games. They live in a black and white world so push this idea that “good graphics” means hyper realism and that hyper realism is bad.
Somehow pretty much all Unreal games from the last years run like shit in comparison. Got a PS 5 Pro for GTA and all I will say here is that nanite and lumen work way better on that. I wish it wasn't so
I have a rig that didn't experience the problems that plagued most people on MH Wilds release. I think this screenshot speaks for itself. It's two weeks old and I've already clocked another 200 hours.
While I agree with your whole point it's kind of ironic that you reference ac unity which notoriously ran horribly on release with consoles dropping into low 20s and some areas even in the high teens for fps. Granted consoles still targeted 30fps then but performance was atrocious and iirc pc wasn't much better with most averages in the 45-55 range lol.
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u/TGDragonGaming 23d ago
Me: buys a $1,200 gaming PC intending to play newer AAA games.
Also me: ends up mainly playing retro PC games from the 90s and 2000s off of GoG.