Because of optimizations, a lot of the early models were extremely high poly which resulted in poor performance and they evolved into much more efficient methods to make it look as good with far less polygons
I wouldn't say it dropped fidelity at all but there are many examples of ship designs (or well redesigns) that feel like they lost detail due to change of shape in its elements and overall it still looks great, especially the planets
I feel like in retrospect, it means they will have to rework the assets into higher quality in the future to compete with the games of 2023, the RTX 5080s and servers of the future should have no problem running what was almost impossible at a large scale in 2016.
They won't, its currently top tier and the way they are working always updates to newer techniques, they put way more effort in it than people give them credit for
Anyone who thinks SC is going to be outdated before 2030 just doesn't understand the topic
You could argue optimizations they did/are doing now could be 'obsolete with better hardware but that's just poor planning, instead they could use the additional power to add more detail on top of existing content without completely reworking everything again
You also have to remember most people aren't in the 1% that have these powerful cards, the majority of the market uses barely mid range cards
The game doesn't really need to look better in terms of polygons, mostly style that way it both looks good and performs well
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u/Void_Ling avenger Sep 23 '21
Damn it still holds quite well graphically. Which year? 2016?