Normal maps are pretty easy to make, they're just time-intensive.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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That's remastered...
I will never understand the obsession around graphics. JUST MAKE IT FUN.
Graphics can be part of the fun. What's so difficult to understand?
And the most fun graphics are stylized graphics!
Good graphics are fine, but not at the expense of creativity and fun.
Graphics and jiggly physics.
If it's just the tits, it's not physics; it's fetish.
It's the ass as well.
It looks so marketing driven.
We are in decades of video games. Look at very old game and assess how "ugly" they are by today's standard while at their time they were "the best graphics ever seen in history!" or something.
And so, the big question: we were having fun with games decades ago already. If graphics were part of the fun, your brain should explode under the immensely higher level of fun you have on modern games vs 20y old games. And… well…nope. Same as before, just higher expectations.
very well said. I think the last time i got excited about graphics was when Final Fantasy X came out lol. then they kept getting more realistic but never actually became real, they stayed video games. even VR. so... maybe graphics are what we need to keep working on
Of course, I don't want my game to look like utter dogshit, and graphics can be apart of the fun, but my biggest concerns with games are how they play and what the story/characters is like (if it's that type of game).
There can be times that I can appreciate more realistic looking games, but honestly it's boring to see so many games try the same style over and over again, especially when it isn't executed well. And if worrying about graphics causes my game to be an unoptimized game with a lackluster story, then I'd rather people just stick with a less detailed style to preserve the the fun (imo) part of games, which is literally everything else.
REbirth sure does look better than Fortnite, and REbirth sure does need a ton less of GPU and CPU.
Anon is not entirely wrong though... we have become pretty lazy regarding optimizing software.
It's not laziness, it's bottom line and chasing the dollar. Management doesn't give a shit about optimization, just MVP (minimum viable product). Speaking as a developer, the mindset of 'we will fix it after deployment' is fucking everywhere.
Except in 99.9% of cases nothing gets fixed after deployment either. That's just an excuse not to admit that from the get-go.
Yyyyyuyup
Companies don't want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.
you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don't want to pay people to optimize engine
That's not the problem. But why spend time and money to optimize your assets if the gamers will buy better hardware instead and you can even strike a deal with a big vendor.
There is also the fact that graphic reached the point where marginal improvments require disproportionate amount of firepower.
Plus the im pretty sure that a lot of new features are made moreso to ease the work of developers and graphics improvments are nice side effects ( i think i read that ray tracing lightining is actually easier to do , alghtough you do need hybrid solutions while the games do not require ray tracing but that part is changing and we do have first games that require ray tracing ) . I think thats the reason we see a small renesance of AA games at this moment.
If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.
From Software and Hideo Kojima would disagree. The highest form of passion for your game is to create an engine that gives it the exact gameplay formula you want it to have.
Of course corporate greedfucks cannot understand this, they only care about how many villas and yachts the profits will get them.
I disagree here, making an engine you'd sell must be top notch in every aspect (or close to), an in-house engine only needs to get the job done for your game. Probably two orders of magnitude in needed workforce, depending on your needs ofc.
Very very few actual profitable companies roll their own engines.
Supercell has their own, but it’s because they started before there was anything available.
Indie games make their own engines but it’s more of a hobby or passion project, not something that can employ two dozen people to develop it.
It’s not really that great of a business.
Epic is estimated to have made $275M revenue on Unreal engine in 2023, vs $4.7B on Fortnite
Unity made $614M revenue on engine & tools in 2024, in ads and monetization they made $1.2B
These are stable industry standard engines, if you start work on your challenging engine today it’ll take years to develop, gain game-developers interest and trust. And still you’re competing with giants that use their engines as loss-leaders.
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its harder to hire new devs if engine is built in house, because no one outside the company understands how to use said engine unless its open for the public to use. thats the biggest drawback of in house engines (other than the increased develepment life cycle to develop one)
its why for example, many 3rd party ports/remasters of old games use unity for example.
Using an inhouse engine makes sense only if you can retain a lot of talent. or have several projects that use it as a base.
Or your engine can do something that’s hard to do with Godot, Unity or Unreal
Which is increasingly unlikely.
This is only a problem if you want unsustainable growth/enshittification and to treat your devs like shit with bad pay and endless crunch time.
Kojima is an example of giving dev too much freedom that its basically further putting you into the red had he been strung along for the ride during metal gear solid 5's development and the money spent optimizing fox engine. Theres a fine line between endless crunch time/micromanaging, and letting your devs do work. Take another company like capcom as japanese company dev retention is high. RE Engine is used over several games now. and people agree it performs like shit for open world games.
to put up a few examples, The upcoming Metroid prime 4 is an example when a company gives devs too much freedom. The original japanese studio didn't know what hte fuck they were doing, so Nintendo pulled them off hte project, and gave their project to retro, who was working on the "Project harmony" game, which looked very bad, to the point that nintendo was fed up with the hands off approach and Kensuke Tanabe reinserted himself back as director to get prime's development back into production getting Prime 4 out later this year.
Part of the reason for the huge microsoft layoff that happened a few days ago is mainly because of microsofts more handsoff approach they gave their developers. they gave ninja theory 5 years to develop Hellblade 2 (which is a relatively long time). They gave Compulsion games 5+ years to develop South of midnight. neither game remotely probably paid of their development cost, in juxtaposition to a studio like Obsidian, who has in the same time frame, released 5 different games, some arguably more expansive than the previous 2 studios games, due to being well managed.
and I'm not really pointing fingers here, but keep in mind, its not solely due to unsustainable growth/enshittification and treating devs like shit and endless crunch time causing this problem. It's mainly lack of better people/resource management because there are countless numbers of studios who get significantly more time than they should on a project with not much to show for it.
Is it though? I mean big companies most probably tweak whatever engine they use too, and the whole game is closed source, so company specific stuff is obiqutous to say the least.
Good points otherwise IMO.
yes, but tweaking whatever engine they have, still uses a lot of the underlying engines code, which more freemarket devs will use. There's a huge reason why a lot of the companies who build engines in house are in japan, because labor laws in japan makes it so developer retention is usually very high.
Kojima and fox engine is an example of a well designed and optimized engine, but konami didn't like it because of how much millions kojima spent developing both it and MGS5 hence the bad blood between them
That's the HD remaster that came out like 10 years ago. They most certainly did not make that on windows 98.
Just to nitpick, the HD remaster is a remaster of the 2002 remake, so it's a bit older than 10 years.
Yeah, but its still using rebuilt HD assets which make it look way better than the original game its based off of.
...which is a half-assed port of the GameCube remake.
If you get it, expecting it to be the same kind of remake as Resident Evil 2, prepare to be extremely disappointed.
It also helps that the game uses locked perspective scenes.
Not just that, but prerenderd backgrounds, too.
All games could look like this if they got 48 hours to render each frame and their entire realtime render budget went to three character models, total and nothing else.
I mean, I dispute that games don't look better than that in the first place, too. Grainy embedded screenshot aside, the RE1 remake definitely doesn't look any better, even with all that, than the newer remakes.
Surely a master of unlocking would know
Am I stupid? Don't a lot games look like this in real time rendered graphics nowadays? What's anon talking about.
Yeah seriously, anyone can make beautiful prerendered graphics that look good running on any game system released in the past ~20 years (which is what RE1 uses). Doing in realtime is the hard part.
Anon, as usual, don't know what they're talking about
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I blame REmake for my impossibly high standards of what a remake should be
Re-makes are not the same as re-masters are not the same as re-releases.
I know, but look me in the eye and tell me REmake 3 is as good as REmake 1. You can't even tell me it's as good as RE3
And REmake 2 doesn't feel like a redo of RE2 but a completely separate game with RE2's story. So I felt a little robbed
Full disclosure: I've only played a little bit of REmake 2 and none of the originals or REmake 3. I have a friend who has, and he says that REmake 3 was a pretty big letdown.
REmake 3 might have been acceptable if it was a bonus feature of REmake 2 and not its own game. As its own game it is insulting
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