I don’t think that’s the case at all. Gearbox is developing a mobile game to take advantage of owning the property, along with whatever they plan to do with Risk of Rain 2 now. Returns is from the original studio and is more of a love letter / farewell to the franchise.
Hopoo, the original devs, were already making this and got to finish working on it after the purchase. It adds new content and refines the gameplay of the original (movement feels better and the game just generally plays better) - it was also designed with modding in mind.
This was a project by the original developers, not by gearbox. The original game, while incredible, had stability, optimization, and probably most importantly, multiplayer issues.
The community had asked for a way to play together online without third party solutions, but the code base needed to be rebuilt to facilitate that.
A long time ago (at least 15 or 20 years) I played a game on PC with physics like this. I specifically remember driving a Dodge Viper, and every crash would crumple the body a little more where it took a hit. At one point I ended up crumpling the entire car into a single tire I could drive around, as the tires were the only thing that didn’t squish.
YES It was a Dodge Viper game, as in that was the only car available I think. And there was a button to either crush the car more or maybe launch it into the air? I’m pretty sure that’s how I managed to crumple it into a ball with wheels just like you. 15 to 20 years ago sounds right
This game is awesome and deserves more credit than it receives. The only thing it lacks imo is built-in multiplayer support (right now you can have mp with a mod but it has some flaws).
Aero is simultaneously half missing and the most detailed aero of any game I’ve played. if you take all the weight out of a piccolina and put a mattress on the roof and push it down a hill it flys.
I QA tested Carmageddon when I worked at Interplay oh so many years ago. It was one of the only games I worked on that I could still play for fun after. I think I still have my boxed copy.
For me it was pretty great. I was young, did not have many expenses and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere and weird people. Play testing games got old really quick and it was rare that any game could continue to be fun after “playing” it all day every day. Carmaggedon was one of those few. It was not even a priority as it was part of a package deal that Interplay would publish it along with some other utterly forgettable game. Brian, the owner of the company, took notice of it when he came to QA one day and found a bunch of us playing a LAN game when we were supposed to be working on other titles. After a few years of game testing I was kind of burned out and was going to quit but got hired into the IT dept. Here I am almost 25 yrs later still doing IT, though not in the very volatile games business.
That’s amazing, thanks for telling. I guess you’re partly responsible for my career in game dev and the pitch black humor my friends must endure.
Hey maybe if you ever have a problem with a server or something you can destroy it with your car.
I’ve looked up swiv 3d. It looks super bland and unexciting. I can imagine getting burned out from that. The predecessor looks better. I used to play tyrion 2000 as a kid.
beamNG was one of the games that drove me to build a new PC this summer with an actually modern CPU. That physics engine is completely unparalleled but damn have you gotta pay for it.
So, I haven’t watched this yet but I just wanted to say this. I opened this video in an isolated, private tab. I’m not logged in, this is the algorithm in it’s default state. And litteraly the first video YouTube recommends me on the right of this one is a one hour and twenty-one minutes video called “Spider-Man 2 is Disgusting, Woke Propaganda”. YouTube’s default recommandation are still horrendously fucked and immediatly sends you to far right content…
I mean, if your business is able to convert people to a mindset that is more supportive of your business and less likely to regulate it, and all your concerned about is making money, then this is the obvious choice is it not?
For me it would be Spider-Man, Cyberpunk 2077, and anything VR.
The polish of a Sony game, something I haven’t had since the PS2, on PC was refreshing. The absolute insanity of pushing the scale of a rendered world to make Night City something that feels genuinely huge. And expanding that into real-world space is something that I had dreams about as a child.
However the 3rd is a bit different for realism, as VR done well doesn’t need graphical fidelity (=/= resolution). Games that require it, like a painting simulator, sure, but there are games like Moose Life which just recreate the old arcade style of game. No realism needed. And this is where I begin to ramble some!
If I were to go back a generation, I’d say the list is much stronger in art-directed styles. The watercolor of Okami, the cel-shading of Borderlands - now timeless classics sheerly due to their artistic direction while other games of the same era are the subject of title. Opposed to Call of Duty or Battlefield, it’s clear that each generation with some stagnation “looks” better than those before it.
But again, what exactly is it that makes current day CoD or BF “different” from something like say, 2007 Crysis?
Crysis has a bit more aliasing. That’s pretty much it? This whole idea of “realism” in video games is just preposterous to me because there are so many examples of amazing art, and then there are drab games aiming for “visual realism” which could have been something much more impressive. Crysis not only pushed the hardware of its time but it also made stylistic choices which have kept the game visually relevant.
I think another example somewhat fitting into this is games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding - clearly more cartoonized games that are surrounded by a world influenced by realism, but rather than focusing in on what visually is most realistic they aim for stylistic choices. I would say that GTA 5’s story somewhat falls in here as well, but it’s something that RDR2 fails at exceptionally for me. On the flip side, the Darksiders series just doesn’t mesh with me stylistically, while Elden Ring is everything that I felt Darksiders could have been (visually). But even Elden Ring is just a few lines more detailed than a game like Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen - render distance taking away from DD:DA’s “realism”, something that Elden Ring particularly shines at.
Ultimately I think this sort of thing comes down to our subjective perceptions. When I was a kid I played a lot of 2D side scrollers and pixel art games, I got a PS2 and experienced a lot of 3D and 2D platformers, and then the PS2 was stolen and I was relegated to flash games until the Wii. I experienced such a wide range of games before the age of 10 that now as an adult I find the aesthetic of a game to be just as important as the gameplay or its story. Quite frankly, I don’t really care if a game looks like Heavenly Sword or Darksiders or some abstract blobs and hitboxes. If it’s designed well, I’m interested, although I do have a harder time with 2D pixel games these days (the Steam Deck helps! It’s the feeling of the right console for the right game that usually prevents me from playing them on PC)
It seems a shame that even today this discourse of “best graphics or bust” is still around. It’s always been surrounding the console war culture and invades games that it had never been an issue for before, but seems nonexistent when realism actually fits a genre. For example, the graphical fidelity of Monster Hunter: World is beautiful but very out of place for the MH series, aiming for “realism”. They did a great job stylizing the game but it doesn’t detract from the more animated MH games.
Now, almost any horror game ever. So many of them push for visual realism because that’s how to get the most effective shock from gore, meanwhile there are some games that are clever about their horror, like Outlast using the perspective of a camera with night vision. Realistically, I think a game like this, or Phasmophobia, or Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice show that horror games don’t entirely need realism and too many use it as a crutch.
I don’t really think realism is “necessary” for any game with a strong art direction, and more often than not the art direction is what keeps the visual strength of a game relevant. That said, I think there are good examples of realism that have existed, but ultimately they seem likely to fade away until a remaster comes to remind a new generation of gamers that it exists, whereas a game with strong art direction seems to tend to have more staying power.
Finally - what is realism, anyway? Photorealism? And how much does realism affect immersion, since that seems to be a component?
RDR2?
Mirrors Edge?
Horizon Zero Dawn/Spider-Man?
Hitman 3?
Call of Duty?
Crysis?
Fallout/Outer Wilds?
Ace Combat?
Counter Strike?
Far Cry?
Alien Isolation?
To me, all of these stray pretty far from “realism” if the definition is avoiding things that look animated? Like the character models or aspects of the surrounding world. I feel like if I were so focused on realism then I would be distracted by the foliage of RDR2 or the animated models of Fallout/Cyberpunk 2077. However other aspects of those games look absolutely incredible, but don’t always mesh with the rest of what’s going on. This is why I feel that art direction is just more important than “realism” - because photos in 2077 just look better with the character models and the world matching than RDR2 does with it’s semi-realistic but still animated human characters in a semi-photorealistic world but it’s still pixelated grass and dirt so there’s obvious spots where a screenshot is a video game, not a photo. Sorry, that was a mouthful!
I guess what I’m getting at is what exactly does attempting visual realism bring to a game that proper art direction wouldn’t do just as well?
Is it just the innate desire to get movies as playable games?
As a kid in the 90s, I couldn't really tell the difference between the capabilities of the SNES or Genesis and a hand-drawn cartoon on TV. As far as I could tell, if it was 2D, those machines could process it, but my brother and his friends just a few years older than me could tell where the limits were. When Mortal Kombat got big, I thought that was the end state for video game graphics. Everyone's just going to do that, because you can't get more real than real people, I thought. Early 3D graphics did age more poorly than the best pixel art the SNES and Genesis had to offer, and we knew at the time that that would be the case too. After years of revisiting those 2D games via emulation, a trip to a local Barcade reminded me of how important scanlines were to the art style of most games from the era, and now I basically only emulate those games with scanlines on and the most accurate emulation available when I'm playing anything earlier than the PS2.
Half-Life 2 was insanely impressive, and the thing that sold it most was the big real-time G Man head at the beginning of the game. Valve took cutting edge research in animating faces during dialogue and implemented it into the game in a way no one had seen before. It did wonders for selling the "realness" of what you were looking at. Just 3 years later, we had Crysis, a game pushing graphics so far that no one could even build a machine that could run it at max settings at the time, but even on medium settings, it was the best-looking game I'd ever seen.
Nowadays, I can look at a Digital Foundry video with side by side examples of ray tracing on and off, with them explaining to me how and why it's so much better, and I often can't really tell the difference unless I squint. I did see an Alan Wake II example that seemed pretty noticeable, but mostly only in the side-by-side, and if I was in the market for Alan Wake II, I likely wouldn't notice what I was missing when ray tracing is turned off. The things that make games look best to me now are when they can add all of that fidelity to the textures and animations of human beings, like in Death Stranding, because we're wired to more easily detect when a human being isn't real than anything else.
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