>early 3D era
>dozens of amazing pre-rendered environments in almost every game that had them, usually JRPGs
>it seems like every dev can make them effortlessly and they're just being held back by the hardware
>3D tech and hardware advances with time
>suddenly all those crazy unique and soulful environments vanish from vidya
>real 3D environments are all ugly and forgettable for decades
What the frick happened?
Checked out Tides of Numenera?
That's still prerendered/drawn though
No soul anymore.
rages mega textures
added alot to the game. but it is just a desert.
>Wow, all these people know how to draw cool blueprints, but none of then can actually build this frickhuge cathedral they designed.
It's so easy to draw a picture that your graphics card can do it.
>draw
Anon pre-rendered CG is still CG, they still actually built those models and made those textures. They weren't optimized but by today's metrics it's not important, your PC would handle raw PS1 CGI models no problem
You still deal with scale problems when you need to account for a player that could be almost anywhere, plus the industry has veered towards open world games which makes building interesting worlds on time and on budget harder than ever before.
Games have 20x larger budgets than back then and the open worlds are still empty and repetitive while their unique settlements and locations still look like shit
An excess of 2D artists in the industry and a relative lack of 3D modellers at the time when the jump from 2D to 3D was underway. They were put to work painting backgrounds while the 3D trained guys were focused on character models and the like. It was just a happy accident where everything lined up for awhile.
>instantly recognize the setting from the train's design
>think it's AI made or something
>the text is legible
>can't be
I don't remember where this is at in the game.
The text says "FAR EAST GALBADIA STATION"
>reading comprehension
A fixed and ideal shot will always trump fully exploring it and moving the camera around. Even things like anime and manga adaptations, a lot of amazing pages and panels turn out shit in the anime because of how much more involved the process is.
I'm digging this ongoing FFVIII shilling campaign, i hope enough people get hyped, marketers pick up on it, and squeenix greenlights the playstation trilogy remake project. Get hype Black folk
I know a lot of people HATE the FF7R combat, but I think it's really good. If they just remade FF8 with a similar style of combat, I'd be happy. No shenanigans, no time ghosts, just a remake.
in FFVIII, you ARE the ghost janny
FF8 is a game that would actually benefit from Squenix taking a hatchet to it
Online realtime rendering is really hard to do well with even modern hardware. Pretenders could take days to spit out a single image but that wouldn't be a problem. Sending too many components per vertex can destroy a pcei bus.
That doesn't explain why the environments themselves are worse designed, they exist as artistic ideas independent of any technical graphical depiction, the location in the OP would be cool and interesting if it was a drawing, or a low poly game, or pixel art etc, modern game locations just suck as ideas, they're uninspiring and unmemorable on a fundamental level.
Also the way we move around environments has changed in games. As games give you more freedom to jump around like a fricking moron, environment design has to accommodate that. Sometimes you get invisible walls, but that's an awkward removal of freedom that the player can find annoying. Environments have to be designed so you can't get stuck on a box or in a corner, so the camera doesn't freak out anywhere, so there's enough room to comfortably move around and interact with NPCs, all of which requires additional time from both a design and implementation standpoint.
incel mindset
Except technical limitations very much influence designs (environment or character). Take cloud for instance, his spikey blonde hair is due to limitations. It had a totally different look that wasn't going to be possible on ps1 hardware. Imagination is certainly limited by the reality of hardware.
I don't see how that applies in this case, prerendered environments didn't have many limitations
Exactly the fricking point. Pure 3d isn't a matter of just imagination
>What the frick happened?
Higher resolution output demanding actually higher detailed assets than a pre-rendered bg would possibly need, drastically driving up production costs when you have to worry about everything looking good close-up.
>pre-rendered environment
>primarily static, only viewed from one fixed angle/scale
>full 3d era
>have to make everything approachable and look acceptable from every angle unless you want to feel last-gen with a fixed camera viewpoint
what you could actually see/explore of those environments were fairly limited, you were able to imagine more of what could be behind the buildings, or beyond those doors you couldn't enter. but when everything is rendered and available 1:1 there's no more mystery, and detail tends to be spread thin vs all the detail crammed into a single, unmoving view of an area. even FFX is still pretty good even though it was the first game to ditch pure pre-rendered backgrounds, the game is as linear as a piece of string so you tend to only see so much of a given locale.
>modern dev just has the artists physically make the locations for the game, and take high quality photographs of them for use in the game
Sounds like they need to tap up the tabletop wargame crowd.
Would be a neat way to do a Warhammer game for sure. The devs of that screenshot did it simply because it was cheaper and faster to hire a couple artists to make those, than a team of artists doing pre-rendered graphics, despite the cost of materials in creating real dioramas
with a single focused POV its easier to present aesthetically pleasing environments when the artists have control over what the gamerdude sees. the mice on scene can be given the appearance of depth, scale, and width that invites imagination for the player. its why PS1 rendered background looks amazin while the more open FFXVVVVIVIV with freelook camera looks somebody dumped a bunch of assets onto a map with no rhyme or reason. its why every 2d rts looks high quality and every 3d sequel to them looks like programmer art.
framing. most of these settings would look unimpressive from a player perspective. it's the difference between normies taking photos with their iphone and a photographer that knows how to compose a shot.