The game is called “Getting Over It.” It’s a platformer where you need to climb a large mountain of ridiculous things using only a hammer to maneuver yourself.
Haha, sorry - I just assumed everyone had heard of this wonderful nightmare! Like the other commenter said, it’s called “Getting Over It”. It has cool narration as you’re playing - you’ll fall down and then get a talk about overcoming failure.
Did games get any better though when the graphics got better? I remember being so hyped seeing PS3 game footage pre-2006, then after a few years it was like “oh shit, we have to go back!”
I saw some arguments over the last few years. It seems that the gaming industry focused so hard on good graphics that they forgot how to make the rest of the games. Honestly some faithful re-releases with updated graphics of ancient 8 and 16 bit games, would probably sell fairly well.
I messed up a little indie and A are basically the same thing. An example for things that are AA are smaller publishers and developers that still have a decent monetary backing like Devolver Digital, Warhorse studios, Obsidian (moreso when they were contracting out to larger developers like Bethesda but also with their own titles),Bohemia Interactive, platinum games (who make Nier). Essentially lower budget, generally less marketing, smaller but still decent team sizes between 50 and 100 people is considered to be AA. Whereas larger companies like rockstar, blizzard, Activision etc are AAA because they have that huge monetary backing of investors, many teams and sub companies that divvy up the work on multiple large scale projects at a time.
Some did and some didn’t. I’m pretty salty as the FF7 remake because, to me, it feels like it’s missing the heart of the original game. And the chocobo shit which I loved. I just wish they’d stop cheapening things when they remade them ffs. They just make them look nice and it feels like they put no other effort into it. Which is idiotic because they already have the whole game mapped out. Just remake it how it fucking was goddammit >:(
Meanwhile, BG3, the new Spiderman games, and the new Zelda games were (to me) fantastic. The perfect mixes of gorgeous graphics and actually solid gameplay that felt like they had some love and soul put into them.
So it’s a mixed bag and at the end of the day pretty graphics can’t trick people into liking games that should have been better. We complain about Skyrim being ported all over the damn place but at least they don’t drop half the original content every time. That’s such a sad low bar but there it is.
PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.
Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).
PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).
And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn’t really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we’ll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.
You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.
Games have gotten prettier, no argument, but I still feel like we’re playing the same games we were playing 20 years ago just with slight QOL improvements.
Yeah, I feel like everything we have now could have been done on the PS3 and Xbox 360. At least gameplay wise. Before that they were quite limited in terms of RAM. The big open world games probably couldn’t have been done prior to that gen. Stuff like Assassin’s Creed 2 or Far Cry 3 wouldn’t have been possible at all on PS2, I feel.
The closest they had was GTA SA which had huge nearly empty areas to hide the loading of the main city areas.
I’m just going to butt in and say that Far Cry 3 is the most ridiculously perfectly optimised game I’ve ever played. I managed to get it running on internal graphics of an old laptop in 800x600 resolution with potato settings and it was genuinely still enjoyable. I think I played through it halfway like that before I got my pc back.
actual 3D waves. The mesh for the water surface was actually transformed and reacted to your character moving through it creating waves—you could slosh the whole small pools around by running around in them. No shader trickery there.
explosion fireballs that were 3D and freaking reacted to the environment. Throw a grenade on the floor, the fireball is hemispherical. Throw in into a ventilation shaft, you get a pillar of fire shooting out from the opening. It was absolutely mind-blowing!
physics engine that allowed physics-enabled objects to be thrown around, bouncing from the walls etc. In 1999. Bizarrely, the objects couldn't rotate so they always retained the same orientation. It saw use in level design where you could destroy the supports of some stone blocks and let them fall down to block some large pipes.
flame thrower flame reflected from the walls. You could shoot around a corner or set yourself on fire in confined spaces with it.
no apparent limit for texture resolution. I remember people modding it with 1k and 2k textures (originals were like 64x64 or 128x128). In 2002.
Yes, it was cubemaps and with mirrors it was exact same rooms with npc copying your moves, but it looked really good, and no need for rt hardware when we got same picture, remember half life 2 reflections and light, nowadays when AAA game dev make game with such graphics it requires ray tracing and dlss to run properly
While true for straight up reflection and glass the raytracing doesn’t do much despite being much more expensive, it is just jaw dropping to see refraction and indirect lighting. Before to have indirect lighting be vaguely credible it had to be all fixed and baked into the textures. Now we can do that with destructible stuff and moving light sources.
I got the game and both DLCs for $8 on steam. An absolutely unbelievable deal for that much content.
This play-through, I made the mistake of beating one of them before I finished the main campaign, and now I’m so overpowered that the main quest isn’t super engaging. I’m trying to just knock it out now before starting over.
I had originally started it on the most difficult setting, and was only doing the main quest, but that was like, pretty tough because I was only like level 3 trying to finish the bloody baron quest. So I started over on a reduced difficulty and then made the mistake of trying to ‘complete’ areas before moving into new areas. I basically way over leveled and now pretty much everything weaker than god is paper and just melts.
Next play through I’m either going to try a ‘pure witcher’ play-through where I want to always make the ‘most-witcher’ like decision every time, or, alternatively, I’m considering going ‘utter fuckboi’ and just try to bang any and everything that isn’t nailed down. Either way it will be on the max of max difficulties. Speed running could be fun to but I want to have a 100% run before that.
games made with agile teams and with passions are probably good, regardless of when they were made. i’m young but growing up i only had access to really old computers and saw that most of the stuff that was made back in the day was just garbage shovelware. it was hard not to get buried in them.
most triple A developers today are far more skilled in both writing and optimizing the code however when the management is forcing you to work long hours you’re gonna make more mistakes and with tight deadlines, if you’re doing testing and bug fixing after developing the entire game then it’s going to be the first thing that’s getting cut.
that being said i wish they really did something about the massive size games take on disk. my screen is 1080p, my hardware can barely handle your game on low in 1080p so everything is gonna get downscaled regardless and despite how hard you wanna ignore it data caps are still here, why am i forced to get all assets and textures in 4k 8k? make it optional goddamit.
AAA games are turning into luxury/super cars. At the top end, they’re just not made for average consumers anymore where you need money for infrastructure to even drive the thing. But then you also have plenty of Indie/AA studios creating games that surpass AAA from 10-15 years ago with much smaller teams cause tools and skills make it feasible. Of course there’s also the starcrafts and the counterstrikes that are over 20 years old and will never die, the Toyota Camrys and Honda Civics of games, they just get perpetually refreshed
Most devs either don’t or can’t bother with proper optimization. It’s a problem as old as Unreal Engine 3, at least, I remember Unreal Tournament 3 running butter smooth on relatively weak computers, while other games made with UE3 would be choppy and laggy on the same rigs, despite having less graphical clutter.
I could write a whole essay on whats wrong with UE from a players perspective. But here’s the skinny.
Light Bloom, Distance Haze, TAA and Upscaling, no visual clarity, Roboto Font for 90% of all UIs, lower framerate for distant objects, no performance diffrence between highest and lowest graphical settings.
The only good looking and optimized UE games come from Epic themselves, so basically just Fortnite (RIP Paragon). Most of the games released by third parties are Primo Garbagio. They run like ass and look like ass.
There’s nothing wrong with it. It just doesn’t fit everywhere. There’s a thematic difference between Action platformers, Horror and Milsims, yet they all use the same font and UI. Imagine if most games would use Naughty Dogs “Yellow ledges”. It would get old very quickly.
But UE is the common denominator for all those problems. I actually don’t know any positive examples for UE. Satisfactory, maybe, but it still checks most of the issues. They are just less prevalent because the game itself is good.
I mean, if the world makes it very convenient to use such instruments and call the task finished, this is not okay. I wish at some point we would come to conclusion that we need to optimize the code and software products to reduce CO2 emissions or something, so devs’ laziness finally becomes less tolerated.
Ok, that got me. I still remember the days of ZX and that funny noise… But I do have a question for one part of the meme: can someone explain to me why on Earth the updates now weigh these tens of gigs? I can accept that hires textures and other assets can take that space, but these are most likely not the bits that are being updated most of the time. Why don’t devs just take the code they actually update and send that our way?
I’ve got 2gig fiber, not 56k dialup. It’s Steam’s bandwidth now. They paid Valve their 30%. Why bother with insane compression that just makes it feel slow for us?
That is also a factor I do not understand. Bandwidth costs the storefront money, would Steam and others not want to decrease this load? And well done you with that fiber, you dog! I also have a fiber line but see no reason to upgrade from my tariff (150mib, i think?) that covers everything just to shave that hour of download time a year.
I am perfectly fine with paying developers, as I buy only the games i do like after some testing ) Going the repack route is unpredictable - no updates, may contain whatever viruses repacker is interested in adding (and given the particular one is likely Russian, I do have my reservations at this crazy time…), etc.
I mean, I understand when they chuck everything into a single file, but they used to know how to make their updaters unpack and replace only the stuff that needed updating, instead of just throwing the whole fucking file at you, redundancy be damned.
For instance, stuff in Quake 3 engine is kept in .pk3 files. You don’t need to download the full, newest .pk3, you send a command to remove/replace files X, Y and Z within it and call it a day.
Yeah but then people go completely ballistic when games require you to install their own launches I don’t think Steam would necessarily be able to handle the myriad of different formats that would be needed to make that work. So either you have custom lunches or you don’t have particularly efficient patches.
That’s because games don’t need “their own launcher” to apply updates like that. Ask anyone that’s been playing on PC, patches were these self extracting files or “mini installers” that you just needed to point to the installed game’s folder. Even vanilla World of Warcraft let people download the patches for offline install, it even included a text with all the changes applied.
People don’t want the fiddling on of that. I just want to be able to install the patch and then it be there.
That’s why lunches are a thing there’s no other reason to have them.
You might enjoy the technical solution but 99% of people don’t care. I never understand why people seem to think that the 1% of the most experienced people are the standard when they are anything but. Most gamers build their own PCs, they don’t want to have to understand about file systems and formats and compiling. They just wanted to work and then they want to play their game.
For modern games, from what I’ve seen, they’ve taken a more modular approach to how assets are saved. So you’ll have large data files which are essentially full of compressed textures or something. Depending on how many textures you’re using and how many versions of each textures is available (for different detail levels), it can be a lot of assets, even if all the assets in this file, are all wall textures, as an example.
So the problem becomes that the updaters/installers are not complex enough to update a single texture file in a single compressed texture dataset file. So the solution is to instead, replace the entire dataset with one that contains the new information. So while you’re adding an item or changing how something looks, you’re basically sending not only the item, but also all similar items (all in the same set) again, even though 90% didn’t change. The files can easily reach into the 10s of gigabytes in size due to how many assets are needed. Adding a map? Dataset file for all maps needs to be sent. Adding a weapon or changing the look/feel/animation of a weapon? Here’s the entire weapon dataset again.
Though not nearly as horrible, the same can be said for the libraries and executable binaries of the game logic. This variable was added, well, here’s that entire binary file with the change (not just the change). Binaries tend to be a lot smaller than the assets so it’s less problematic.
The entirety of the game content is likely stored in a handful (maybe a few dozen at most) dataset files, so if any one of them change for any reason, end users now need to download 5-10% of the installed size of the game, to get the update.
Is there a better way? Probably. But it may be too complex to accomplish. Basically write a small patching program to unpack the dataset, replace/insert the new assets, then repack it. It would reduce the download size, but increase the amount of work the end user system needs to do for the update, which may or may not be viable depending on the system you’ve made the game for. PC games should support it, but what happens if you’re coding across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo switch? Do those consoles allow your game the read/write access they need to the storage to do the unpacking and repacking? Do they have the space for that?
It becomes a risk, and doing it the way they are now, if you have enough room to download the update, then no more space is needed, since the update manager will simply copy the updated dataset entirely, over the old one.
It’s a game of choices and variables, risks and rewards. Developers definitely don’t want to get into the business of custom updates per platform based on capabilities, so you have to find a solution that works for everyone who might be running the game. The current solution wastes bandwidth, but has the merit of being cross compatible, and consistent. The process is the same for every platform.
The console argument does actually make a lot of sense to me, thank you for the detailed response. It would still (seemingly) be possible to structure the project in a way that would allow replacing only what you actually need to replace, but that requires more investment in the architecture and likely cause more errors due to added complexity. Still, i cannot forgive the BG 3 coders for making me redownload these 120gb or so! )
The issue is the compression. There’s hundreds of individual assets, the process to compress or more accurately, uncompress the assets for use takes processor resources. Usually it only really needs to be done a few times when the game starts, when it loads the assets required. Basically when you get to a loading screen, the game is unpacking the relevant assets from those dataset files. Every time the game opens one of those datasets, it takes time to create the connection to the dataset file on the host system, then unpack the index of the dataset, and finally go and retrieve the assets needed.
Two things about this process: first, securing access to the file and getting the index is a fairly slow process. Allocating anything takes significant time (relative to the other steps in the process) and accomplishes nothing except preparing to load the relevant assets. It’s basically just wasted time. The second thing is that compressed files are most efficient in making the total size smaller when there’s more data in the file.
Very basically, the most simple compression, zip (aka “compressed folders” in Windows) basically looks through the files for repeating sections of data, it then replaces all that repeated content with a reference to the original data. The reference is much smaller than the data it replaces. This can also be referred to as de-duplication. In this way if you had a set of files that all contained mostly the same data, say text files with most of the same repeating messages, the resulting compression would be very high (smaller size) and this method is used for things like log files since there are many repeating dates, times, and messages with a few unique variances from line to line. This is an extremely basic concept of one style of compression that’s very common, and certainly not the only way, and also not necessarily the method being used, or the only method being used.
If there’s less content per compressed dataset file, there’s going to be fewer opportunities for the compression to optimize the content to be smaller, so large similar datasets are preferable over smaller ones containing more diverse data.
This, combined with the relatively long open times per file means that programmers will want as few datasets as possible to keep the system from needing to open many files to retrieve the required data during load times, and to boost the efficiency of those compressed files to optimal levels.
If, for example, many smaller files were used, then yes, updates would be smaller. However, loading times could end up being doubled or tripled from their current timing. Given that you would, in theory, be leading data many times over (every time you load into a game or a map or something), compared to how frequently you perform updates, the right choice is to have updates take longer with more data required for download, so when you get into the game, your intra-session loads may be much faster.
With the integration of solid state storage in most modern systems, loading times have also been dramatically reduced due to the sheer speed at which files can be locked, opened, and data streamed out of them into working memory, but it’s still a trade-off that needs to be taken into account. This is especially true when considering releases on PC, since PC’s can have wildly different hardware and not everyone is using SSDs, or similar (fast) flash storage; perhaps on older systems or if the end user simply prefers the less expensive space available from spinning platter hard disks.
All of this must be counter balanced to provide the best possible experience for the end user and I assure you that all aspects of this process are heavily scrutinized by the people who designed the game. Often, these decisions are made early on so that the rest of the loading system can be designed around these concepts consistently, and it doesn’t need to be reworked part way through the lifecycle of the game. It’s very likely that even as systems and standards change, the loading system in the game will not, so if the game was designed with optimizations for hard disks (not SSDs) in mind, then that will not change until at least the next major release in that games franchise.
What isn’t really excusable is when the next game from a franchise has a large overhaul, and the loading system (with all of its obsolete optimizations) is used for more modern titles; which is something I’m certain happens with most AAA studios. They reuse a lot of the existing systems and code to reduce how much work is required to go from concept to release, and hopefully shorten the duration of time (and the amount of effort required) to get to launch. Such systems should be under scrutiny at all times whenever possible, to further streamline the process and optimize it for the majority of players. If that means outlier customers trying to play the latest game on their WD green spinning disk have a worse time because they haven’t purchased an SSD, when more than 90% + have at least a SATA SSD, all of whom get the benefits from the newer load system while obsolete users are detrimented because of their slow platter drives, then so be it.
But I’m starting to cross over into my opinions on it a bit more than I intended to. So I’ll stop there. I hope that helps at least make sense of what’s happening and why such decisions are made. As always if anyone reads this and knows more than I do, please speak up and correct me. I’m just some guy on the internet, and I’m not perfect. I don’t make games, I’m not a developer. I am a systems administrator, so I see these issues constantly; I know how the subsystems work and I have a deep understanding of the underlying technology, but I haven’t done any serious coding work for a long long time. I may be wrong or inaccurate on a few points and I welcome any corrections that anyone may have that they can share.
Do you have any recent examples? Am genuinely curious, given that it’s something that’s been a problem in the game’s industry for a long time, particularly at places like Activision.
Totally, that’s what I’m trying to lampoon, sorry if the sarcasm didn’t come through on that aspect. I maintain my premise, there’s a tremendous amount of harassment devs put up with for the ‘privilege’ of working in the games industry, a key aspect that makes me support unions and worker organization.
GMod LAN parties. To be fair, I'm sure I could have the same fun now. Only everyone's schedules are different and we can't get together for a good 24 hours of intermittent sleep, play, and loud music.
I like how starting from Fallout 4 you can just loot without opening the loot ui, so you can still see it being empty and open the loot ui and be disappointed it’s empty.
I don’t think logo design is enough to claim they have lost their “soul”. Aren’t Bravely Default, Octoparh Traveler, and Triangle Strategy pretty well liked and reviewed? And have some cool innovations on narrative and mechanics?
I won’t say that the logo design and naming convention isn’t off-putting, but it only reflects a current style, not the games themselves.
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