Early generation of 3D is depressingly bad.

Oh god, you want to talk about tech that looked bad when it first came out, early cell shaded games made me want to hurt things. Preferably kittens.

Does Dreamcast count as early 3D? They had some pretty awesome looking shit on there.

4 years later than FF7, but still:



That's some impressive looking dragon. Record of Lodoss war had some cool stuff too.

Fakedit: For some reason I was thinking it was a 5th generation console like the PSX, I'd forgotten about the saturn. Oops.

 

DraQ in a nutshell.

 

Your posts are depressingly bad.

 

GRPG in a nutshell.

 

3D graphics were uglier than 2D graphics for a good 7-10 years. Developers just used them and hyped them because they take far less effort to produce than 2d graphics. (And avoiding effort is what commercial video game production is all about.)

Then 3D graphics got decent for a few years, but soon after we hit the uncanny valley and 3d graphics involving humans became really, really unpleasant to look at. (see Dragon Age games)

So even if you ignore the many ways in which they changed the hobby for the worse, I'd argue that they were actually a net negative in terms of graphical presentation as well.

 

With today's standards? Sure.

But when 3D games first started coming out, the standards for 3D were very low and the standards for 2D were relatively high (isometric sprites with multiple facing angles for example).

Originally, going 3D did reduce effort, by quite a bit.

But you're right that in the long run it ended up consuming far more resources.

 

I really hate first 3D games. 3D killed Gabriel Knight 3

 

FF7 backgrounds are pre-rendered 3D, not 2D, so they would still have to build the content.

 

Just what I wanted to say, thanks. The same goes for most of the sprites - they are all based of actual 3d model later rendered and stored as image files.

 

True, but of course when doing it pre-rendered, you aim for higher detail to take advantage of the tech, which takes longer time. To do something like FF8/9 today, with backgrounds that look as good by today's standards as FF8/9 did when they came out would probably take a lot of work. I mean, to reach the expected level of detail for pre-rendered stuff today (think Advent Children, and that's old by now, too. Shitty movie, by the way, just talking visuals).

Anyway, they should go back to doing it for certain games. It gave a really nice atmosphere to PSX Resident Evils and Final Fantasies, in a no limits kinda way, and using it today would make for truly awesome looking environments.

 

Fuck you, Dark Forces 2 looks just fine.

 

Yes indeed.

 

What game is that?

 

Book of Unwritten Tales

 

DraQ's sensibilities are disturbed by the posters in this thread.

 

Surprisingly, enemies with blocky angular armor work well when modeled with blocky angular polygons...

 

3D was cool because it could do things that 2D couldn't. I do like sprites, though and I think games like Myth were able to marry 3D and 2D well together.

 

i somehow came to think about Silver when i read this.