What the hell happened to physics in video games?

I remember in the 00s, and even a bit into the early 10s, that highly interactive physics was a big component of many games, or even a selling point. Games like Half Life 2, Battlefield Bad Company, Crysis, Dark Messiah, or Red Faction heavily integrated it into the gameplay. Even games that weren't *big* on this stuff let you have some fun with it, and little things like being able to punch or push around lots of world objects in Halo 3 gave the world some life that nugames lack. How did we go so far backwards?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous
    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      game budgets are 100x what they used to be
      corpo can't allow people to make experimental games

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Corpos can't create anything. Not games, not movies, not planes that don't crash, nothing. The more suits are involved in something, the worse it is.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Physics in games was big in 00s because it was pretty new. Nowadays anyone can do out the box physics in engines like unity so you need to put the effort in making a specialised engine like with Noita if you want to do something impressive.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I think OP is referring to a decline in the amount of physics interactions in modern games though.

      It makes sense that no one tries to sell their game because it has fancy physics these days but even games made in modern game engines tend to lack a lot of interactive physics objects. Maybe I'm just unlucky but recently I've played:
      >DMC5
      >Resident Evil 2 remake
      >Resident Evil 3 remake
      >Wo Long
      >Nioh 1 and 2
      >Hogwarts Legacy

      And all of the above felt like they had really static backgrounds and environments with objects rarely even reacting to being hit.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        only bethesda games really offer stuff like that, even then it's incredibly limpdick

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        hogwarts had a couple of physics "puzzles", using levitate to place boxes on switches or position them to climb on, and the rolling ball merlin trials. But they felt so mediocre, I can see why you forgot about them.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Because having hi def lesbian romance is way more important than "design" or "gameplay". Seriously, why are zoomers addicted to lesbo shit?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Lesbians are hot and if you are a self-respecting straight man, you only watch lesbian porn (or solo girls). Watching another man frick a woman is basically cuckoldry. Watching two women doing it is hot.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        You're talking about porn specifically though. How many people are out there spending money on girl v girl videos where all they do is hug, kiss, and lay on the bed facing eachother while talking about the challenges in their lives?
        I'm betting it's not a market with much demand.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          How many people do you think spend money on guy x girl videos where all they do is hug, kiss, and lay on the bed while talking about their lives?
          I mean, anyone who does is genuinely pathetic anyway. Though so is anyone who pays money for porn. That shit is free.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >how many people watch RomCom movies and TV shows
            moron detected

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Women and homosexuals watch romcoms, moron. Straight men do not unless they're whipped hard and made to by their girlfriends.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Incredibley patrician taste. Seeing other men's dicks is the ultimate turn off.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I remember watching things like the tech demos for Star Wars: Force Unleashed and being blown away at the time. The game didn't end up utilizing the physics as much as they could've, but I thought we'd have some incredible stuff by now. The Euphoria engine that Force Unleashed and GTA IV had was fairly impressive, too, but even now it seems games have regressed to basic ragdoll physics for characters like it's still 2004.
    Instead, games such as the first Crysis, the BF Bad Company titles and Red Faction Guerilla are still some of the best titles to implement physics.

    ?t=49

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    video games peaked around 2011-2012

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      zoomer cope

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      1998-2007

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Physics do not sell games, AI do not sell game, Graphics sell games.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >top tier graphics
      >top tier physics
      >good AI too
      And this was basically 15 years ago at this point, you'd have think they could still pull off all these things together.

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Video game devs of today are the people who say “uhh who cares about that stupid stuff, gameplay loop and graphics make a good game” and then get butthurt when you don’t play their poorly written lesbian power fanfic. The days of genuine nerds who want to share the worlds they envision in their head with the fans of their games are long gone.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    CPUs shifted to multi-core/multi-thread emphasis but physics need to be processed sequentially.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it only served as a sales driver when you could still push the tech forward. CPUs have stagnated for too long. you can't do that much more on a 2020 CPU than you could on a 2010 CPU so you can't jump up to the next level of fidelity with physics. to simulate what looks like twice the complexity you need 8 times the processing power (because physics happen in 3 dimensions so the performance declines in cubic fashion). think about how CPUs have improved over the last decade. maybe we got an 8 times improvement, maybe 16 times but certainly no more than that.

    the perhaps bigger factor here is that games are made for consoles first, and 8th gen killed any chance of physics improving. the garbage CPUs in 8th gen consoles meant that for physics and AI we never left 7th gen. with 7th and 8th gen combined spanning 15 fricking years the industry has simply "moved on" from physics. knowing that they couldn't beat any of the games listed ITT the devs that previously pushed physics found something else to do with their time. some focused on other aspects of game development, others switched profession altogether.

    9th gen consoles have sick CPUs, all things considered, but due to what I described in the first paragraph I believe real progress in game physics will come from machine learning and thus from the GPU, not the CPU. see Zibra Liquid for a glimpse at the machine learning driven revolution in real-time simulation that's coming within the decade.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Physics reached their peak in GTA IV and ig everyone just stopped trying including rockstar

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >old ster and jerma
      SOVL
      Club Tornado and Truck Punchline are my top 2

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Devs are lazy candy ass homosexuals. HL2 physics are still unmatched

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I guess it's nightmare to work with for current devs. What if objects got stuck in the level or bugged out, what if things ended up blocking the way, trapping the player; what if it look silly in dev's elaborate, dramatic, mocap focused cutscenes, etc.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Goofy Havok physics became a meme and people started shitting on games with them. It was more like a fad that just faded out when opinion turned against it.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    physics = physics bugs = bug testing = publishers have to pay for bug testing

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >physics performance is mostly determined by single thread CPU performance
    >last gen consoles had CPUs that couldn't even compete with single core performance of desktop CPUs from 2006
    Blame last gen consoles. If devs tried to do anything that even slightly invoked physics, that shit would've had no chance of running on last gen consoles. Now it's been 10 years since those things released and devs have noticed nobody fricking cares about it, so they're not bringing it back, unless some dev goes out of their way to implement it and it somehow becomes a thing again.

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Physics are common place in games now, they just dont shove it in your face like they did in the 2000s. VR games are being marketed now with "physics" as the selling point, but its just worn out seeing "le wacky physics lol" as the whole point of the game.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I liked having physics shoved in my face, if you show me some cool vidya physics demonstrations and I am always happy, something about it just tickles my autism. I miss the era of it being new and interesting and devs really pushing to prove they have the best physics engine.

      We still don't see decent fluid physics or destructable environments, there is still a lot more that can be done that nobody wants to do.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    homosexuals and woke basedboys and fuglies got into the gaming industry and ruined it for everyone.

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >halo 3
    >spending 10 minutes pushing a concrete barricade so you can try to jump into a little alcove
    Good times

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    PS4 and Xbox One stalled the industry for over a decade by using literal laptop cores that were weak even back in the day.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Canned animations took over, even when physics based systems are used its done very controlled relative to the environment seamlessly switching to an animation when it can.

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Trine 3 and 4 was developed around physics interaction.
    I don't know about Trine 1 and 2.

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