Original Halo was released in 2001, 23 years ago.
Super Mario Bros was released in 1985, 39 years ago.
There is less time between the release of the first SMB and Halo than Halo and the present day, 16 years…
It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down. Back in the 80s and 90s a 5 year old game looked horribly outdated. Now we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.
Technology has slowed down, but there’s also diminishing returns for what you can do with a game’s graphics etc.
- The original Halo ran at 480p on the Xbox. 4K UHD has 27 times the number of pixels as that. The resolution increase from the NES to Halo was about 5.35 times.
- Games nowadays on PCs are often capable of running smoothly into the hundreds of frames per second, but of course for example the difference between 21 and 30 FPS is more noticeable than the one between 231 and 240 FPS. (Looking at you, OoT)
- Render distances are much larger with less obvious compromise on LoD.
- Stuff like ray-tracing is of some graphical benefit but is hugely computationally taxing, and there’s nothing you can do about that. It’s just more diminishing returns.
- Physics engines are much more complex.
- At some point, a limiting factor just becomes art direction and budget. You can have all the fancy techniques you want, but you still need to make detailed textures, animations, etc.
- The amount of polygons starts to hit a ceiling too where the model is basically continuous to the human eye, so adding more polys might only help very subtly.
- Color depth is basically a solved problem now too compared to going from the NES to the Xbox.
You can think of sampling audio. If I have a bit depth of 1, and I upgrade that to 16, it’s going to sound a hell of a lot more like an improvement than if I were to upgrade from 48 to 64.
I think something worth noting about older games too is that they didn’t try and deal with many of their limitations head on. In fact many actually took advantage of their limitations to give the feeling of doing more than they actually were. For example, pixel perfect verus crt. Many 8 bit and 16 bit games were designed specifically for televisions and monitors that would create the effect of having more complexity than they were actually capable of. Other things like clever layout designs in games to limit draw distance, or bringing that in as a functional aspect of the game.
The technical limitations seem largely resolved by current technology, where previously things were made to look and feel better than the hardware allowed through clever planning and engineering.
I assume this was supposed to say “more noticeable,” not “less”:
but of course for example the difference between 21 and 30 FPS is less noticeable than the one between 231 and 240 FPS
- At some point, a limiting factor just becomes art direction and budget. You can have all the fancy techniques you want, but you still need to make detailed textures, animations, etc.
Very possibly generative AI will alleviate this, although it has yet to produce convincing 3d models or animations.
It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down.
We haven’t slowed down. We simply aren’t noticing the degrees of progress, because they’re increasingly below our scale of discernment. Going from 8-bit to 64-bit is more visually arresting than 1024-bit to 4096-bit. Moving the rendered horizon back another inch is less noticeable each time you do it, while requiring r^2 more processing power to process all those extra assets.
No we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.
The classic games look good because the art is polished and the direction is skilled. Go back and watch the original Star Wars movie and its going to be more visually acute than the latest Zack Snyder film. Not because movie graphics haven’t improved in 40 years, but because Lucas was very good at his job while Synder isn’t.
But then compare Avatar: The Way of Water to Tron. Huge improvements, in large part because Tron was trying to get outside the bounds of what was technically possible long before it was practical, while Avatar is taking computer generated graphics to their limit at a much later stage in their development.
yeah it’s like with F1 racing you hit 99% of your min lap time but then it take a million dollars of R&D for each second reduction in min lap time after that.
True. Was playing Arkham Knight the other day and thought this nine year old game looked better than at least half of current gen games.
Last time I was amazed with graphical progress was with Unreal in 1998. And probably just because I hadn’t played Quake 2.
From then on until now it’s just been a steady and normal increase in expected quality.
Doom 3 might have come close (and damn, that leaked Alpha was impressive) but by the time it was released it looked just slightly better than everything else.
There’s only 4 years between FF7 and Halo
Combat Evolved came out 23 years ago. That’s older than Super Mario Bros. was when the Wii launched.
Retro isn’t a number. It’s two disconnects. There is always something new - innately distinct, previously implausible, promising of future trends. When new things change enough, stuff that existed beforehand becomes old - tangibly dated, behind the times, automatically uncool. When that new stuff in turn becomes old, the old-old stuff becomes retro - distinct from merely out-of-fashion, illustrative of shifting perspectives, capable of being judged on its own merits.
This is why it’s possible to make brand-new games that are still “retro games.” The indicators of a particular era no longer feel poor-quality or unpleasantly limited once they’ve lost direct comparison to modern novelty. Low resolution is a style choice now that it’s plainly not performance-related. Limited color is an affectation. 3D can be taken for granted, so games doing it badly are doing it on purpose.
I say all this to argue: Halo’s not retro because it’s not even retro. It’s just fucking old. The last big disconnect was in the goddamn 360 era. GTA IV looks like an upscaled PS2 game and GTA V still feels like a mid-budget PS5 game. PBR shading, local lights-- I don’t think GTA V specifically had screen-space reflections, but it was definitely A Thing by the end of the PS3 / 360 era. Volumetric fog was in PS3 launch titles.
Meanwhile so many open worlds have become “one of those games where you fuck a map,” which solidified in Assassin’s Creed. What are the exceptions? Soulsbornes? Yeah guess where those took off. Halo’s just one generation prior to linear titles like MW2. No other MW2. It’s the slightly-lower-contrast, slightly-less-scripted predecessor of a whole bunch of games that were trying to one-up it. Calling any of those “Halo killers” fundamentally distinct feels like arguing “Doom clones” were in a different genre.
Christ, even the retro-as-a-style thing has its inflection point in the 360 era. Cave Story was a big fucking deal. XBLA gave small indie games a taste of revenue. GBA homebrew shifted neatly to shoving emulators on PSP.
It is increasingly difficult to make any game that was unprecedented ten years prior. The toolkit gets wider and wider, but even a sudden massive increase in rendering power wouldn’t allow much that we haven’t expertly faked. I feel like the PS4 came and went without any distinguishing features whatsoever. (I don’t even remember if it was the bold black rectangle or the italic black rectangle.) Contrast this with how Super Mario Bros launched against an Atari that boasted several sprites, and then the NES’s last official game was on shelves beside Tekken 2.
The counterargument to this might be that anything without live-service gacha bullshit is now old. In which case… burn it all down and start over.
At least they used the correct armor.
It irks me when they use the armor from Halo 2 or the remastered game to represent Combat Evolved.
You think you’re old? I was playing Bungie games when they were only on Mac.
