Aesthetically pleasing early 3D (<= 1998) computer graphics.

[DraQ]

Are you off your meds again?

All the time, man.

Note that I didn't say that it was bad or even mediocre (that started with Q2).

 

[Mutavore]

(posted already but not named) The Terminator : Future Shock (1995)

this sniper rifle scope actually reflects what you're aiming at, I love that detail.

Shogo Mobile Armor Division (1998)

 

[Kem0sabe]

I find that the most aesthetically pleasing 3d games are the ones that take inspiration or outright try to ape the 2d aesthetic

 

[Great Deceiver]

Not sure if it's 3D or a graphical trick, but the first Red Baron (1999) also wowed me for its time, as did many flight simulators:

The first Red Baron is from 1990, and yes it was very impressive for its time.

 

[grudgebringer]

 

[Astral Rag]

Never played Sub Culture but it reminds me of Archimedean Dynasty and Creation



Imagine a game like that with a modern non-popamole engine.

 

[Astral Rag]

Realms of the Haunting, this FPS / adventure hybrid borrowed FP adventure Normality's engine:

Very aesthetically pleasing, good audio, cheesy but enjoyable FMV rich story, regrettably the game's gunplay is only just above your average Doom clone and the enemies are mediocre looking sprites these were painful facts in a time when Quake, DN3D and Blood were also around.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Chasm: The Rift from 1997:

Solid texture work is eternal.

 

[TheGreatOne]

1998 is too late, Thief, Unreal, Soul Calibur and Half Life all were released that year. Thief and Unreal have some of the coolest architecture in all of 3D gaming and Soul Calibur had graphics like this:

1996 should be the cutting point since N64 was released and as games like Quake, Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot all were released that year, the foundation for all future 3D games was laid out and it became instantly the standard. I think there were a lot of FMV games for PC still back in 1996 (as well as games like Disruptor for PS1), but by 1997 the fad was over. Anyway posting 2.5D FPS games like Blood is cheating, though Realms of the Haunting definitely qualifies, I was going to post it myself. Also there are a lot examples in this thread that aren't visually pleasing in the slightest, typical butt ugly early 3D stuff.

Anyway, Crash Bandicoot 2 is from 1997 and it still has very well preserved graphics. The sequel from 98 had even more detailed backgrounds and higher poly count, though it used the same engine. The stages are very varied and the characters are well animated so it looks like the characters and backgrounds belong in the same universe, which isn't something you can take for granted with mid/late 90s games. As far as eye pleasing cartoony 3D graphics and visual cohesion go, I'd say that Crash Bandicoot 2 and 3 look better than many PS2 era 3D platformers.

The hand drawn concept art was also great

If we count 1998 then the original Spyro the dragon as well. Though not counting Dreamcast games, Conker's bad fur day pushed the cartoony 3D style the furthest out of the 32/64 bit era 3D platformers.

 

[DraQ]

Realms of the Haunting, this FPS / adventure hybrid borrowed FP adventure Normality's engine:

Spoiler

Very aesthetically pleasing, good audio, cheesy but enjoyable FMV rich story, regrettably the game's gunplay is only just above your average Doom clone and the enemies are mediocre looking sprites these were painful facts in a time when Quake, DN3D and Blood were also around.

You should try Azrael's Tear.
If RoTH is Doom bashed with point and click adventure, then AzT is System Shock Bashed with one.

1998 is too late, Thief, Unreal, Soul Calibur and Half Life all were released that year.

OTOH 1998 was pretty much the last year when games were made to run without hardware acceleration and still look decent. Maybe let's limit ourselves to games running without hardware acceleration?

Anyway posting 2.5D FPS games like Blood is cheating.

Why? The majority of pretty much every scene in them is still nominally a 3D scene, even if drawn by raycasting engine, and it's not like 3D games don't help themselves with 2D graphics even today.
Ok, raycasting engines are a bit of a grey area, but I'm not sure it's productive to exclude them.

If anything beate'em ups and 2D/prerendered backgrounds combined with 3D characters are cheating - the former have minimal area graphics that is also seen from very constrained perspective, allowing for a lot of trickery and corner cutting, the latter are mostly 2D, with their 3D characters rarely contributing (positively, at least) to any sort of visual impression.

 

[Dryngar]

Hardwar 1998

 

[TheGreatOne]

Fighting games are the opposite of Doom in that regard, where as it had impressive levels the enemies were sprite while in fighting games the 3D models are impressive but the levels are flat planes. I guess cheating's not the right word, but obviously 2.5D FPSs look much better than contemporary full 3D games, which look like ass most of the time. Doom and Build Engine games still look good

 

[Nutmeg]

TheGreatOne,

That's a pretty dishonest screenshot with regards to how Soul Calibur 1 looked on the Arcade. I'm not even sure if that is Soul Calibur 1, but if it is, it's being run on an emulator with a higher resolution, higher anti-aliasing and advanced texture filtering not available on the hardware of the time.

Here's how it actually looked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSxTARQXP5c

But it is a nice example, thank you.

DraQ,

Originally I thought of making "no hardware acceleration" the rule, but

• all console games had some form of hardware acceleration (obviously (from my OP) I had some console games in mind),
  
• the thread would have been almost exclusively filled with raycasters or voxel engines, and
• what artists did with early gpu rasterized graphics is interesting too.

 

[TheGreatOne]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZwt2jhyDs8 there's 60FPS 1080p footage captured with the Dreamcast VGA box. However I wasn't aware that the Dreamcast port (which came out in 1999) looked better than the arcade version:

The Dreamcast version of Soulcalibur is one of the first examples of a home conversion of a game being graphically superior to its original arcade counterpart. Among the differences were the improved graphics (including the addition of 3D backgrounds), tweaked gameplay, new game modes, new costumes, and the inclusion of an extra character, Cervantes de Leon.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Lul, remember when arcades had better graphics than home TV game systems? The bad old days.

Hell, who even remembers arcades these days?

 

[mondblut]

Vehicles and landscapes are easy to appear nice in early 3d. Bring in some actual people that won't make you wake up screaming in cold sweat at nights. LOL at Quake mention, back in 1996 it was a foolproof argument why 3d must be banned forever.

 

[grudgebringer]

Vehicles and landscapes are easy to appear nice in early 3d. Bring in some actual people that won't make you wake up screaming in cold sweat at nights. LOL at Quake mention, back in 1996 it was a foolproof argument why 3d must be banned forever.

Virtua Fighter 2?

Spoiler

 

[Nevill]

Vehicles and landscapes are easy to appear nice in early 3d. Bring in some actual people that won't make you wake up screaming in cold sweat at nights. LOL at Quake mention, back in 1996 it was a foolproof argument why 3d must be banned forever.

How about one of the first 3D fighting games, Battle Arena Toshinden?

Spoiler

Fighting games are fairly easy to make look nice, since all you need to render is just 2 actors.

 

[DraQ]

Originally I thought of making "no hardware acceleration" the rule, but

• all console games had some form of hardware acceleration

I don't really see the problem here.

• the thread would have been almost exclusively filled with raycasters or voxel engines

Well, unless "no hardware acceleration" rule would be interpreted as to preclude any games supporting HW acceleration even if they can be run without it and still look impressive, you'd still have, for example, Unreal throwing some heavy punch around.
As for raycasters, that depends on whether we consider 2.5D style column renderers valid (I'd say yes, tricks or not there is full 3D positioning available to the player in DN3D or even Heretic, while Blood and SW even allow seemingly unrestricted 3D level geometry, although it relies on some programming tricks - from player's perspective they are navigating true 3D environments without any obvious restrictions such as tiles).

• what artists did with early gpu rasterized graphics is interesting too.

I can't really agree, because early 3D acceleration was mostly about smooth texture filtering and making graphics work faster. Pretty much everything else could and has been implemented in software as well (up to and including shader-like effects in TN:SFC that only became widespread and supported on hardware level almost a decade later).
Plus, once the HW acceleration became the norm, we can't really speak about *early* 3D, can we?

 

[potatojohn]

Realms of the Haunting, this FPS / adventure hybrid borrowed FP adventure Normality's engine:

That looks amazing actually. Is it representative?

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Vehicles and landscapes are easy to appear nice in early 3d. Bring in some actual people that won't make you wake up screaming in cold sweat at nights. LOL at Quake mention, back in 1996 it was a foolproof argument why 3d must be banned forever.

Virtua Fighter 2?

Spoiler

VF2's from 1994 but VF3 arcade shown at E3 was graphic wise the most impressive game of 1996.

Spoiler

In 1996 I only saw screenshots in polish magazine Secret Service but it blew my mind even in that form. Waaaaaay ahead of its time.


And now for something completely different... I must find early Daikatana screens (1997?), shit looked so good at the beginning of development, would fit this thread well.

 

[Nutmeg]

DraQ,

It's precisely the limitations of early GPU rendering vis a vis software that make it interesting if a pleasant aesthetic is achieved. This thread is, after all, about limitations.

 

[Astral Rag]

That looks amazing actually. Is it representative?

It is, the environments do look great. The only thing I did was patch the game to the latest version and change the in-game resolution to 640x480.

The game also has nice weather effects, trees sway in the wind, there is rain. Lightning is also impressive, you can switch lights on and off:

 

[baturinsky]

 

[TheGreatOne]

The lightning in Realms of the Haunting is indeed very impressive, that starting area is very athmospheric.

 

[DwarvenFood]

• what artists did with early gpu rasterized graphics is interesting too.

This turned out one interesting thread, and I'm definitely not a fan of 3D gfx. Could you post an example of the above, I must admit I don't know what rasterized would constitute.

Also, I don't really get the hate for Quake, at the time it really did blow away competition graphics-wise offering a "true" 3D environment - from what I remember the first FPS game to do that properly.