this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Games which needs a NASA computer and a half Google server to play it with more than 15 FPS are not necesarly better as some 15 years old games for Win XP, they only have somewhat better graphics.
Remembering old Games, like Black Messiah or Tomb Rider from 2013, which work at >30-50 FPS with a few Gigs HD and less than 4 Gigs RAM, apart of having very good graphics.
New games often also are badly optimized, needing way more min sys specs as needed for the quality they offer.
Someone remember the game kkrieger? A short 3D FPS in a single file with only 96 KB, that is art. It can still be downloaded (abandonware, Windows)
War Thunder coming in being an 11 years old game and still needing a NASA computer to run with graphics that look like the PS2 era.
To be fair Old games that have had a shit ton of updates usually get bogged down overtime Especially if they weren't expecting anything large scale
That what I mean. Companies often do not even bother to optimize the games, in order to sell them as quickly as possible. "Works? Ok, let's start next, our CEO's Ferrari needs a repair."
Problem is companies don't care about making their games efficient, they care about keeping production costs down
As long as it's efficient enough to run on medium settings on the average consumer's machine they won't put any more resources towards improving it
Optimising them requires expensive developer time that probably won't affect their sales proportionally (realistically do most people really not buy games just because they can't run them on max settings?) And they've already got the eye candy for their trailers that consumers can technically achieve so they don't bother
Man I haven't thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!
I agree though. I think it's been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn't caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It's just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.
I'd love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.
That is the point, there are a lot of crappy games in Steam and min sys specs of 8 GB RAM free, even for messi sidescrollers. Fortunately there are exceptions, mainly in somewhat older games, where the devs still had to score with quality and playability on the PCs of that time, such as the aforementioned TombRaider series at that time or the DarkMessiah, The Dark Mod that does not need to hide from many commercial games either, and others that prove that even a crappy laptop that cost me €350 can be used to play them with more than 30-40 FPS and without taking up more than a few Gigs.
Also a good source of free games is the IT Academy DigiPen, wich offers a huge catalogue with hundreds of games of any kind, the best works of the students as free download. Some of these also in Steam, search DigiPen there. https://games.digipen.edu
kkrieger ironically is solely optimized for hdd storage space and quite inefficient regarding other specs, as all the resources not included readily in those 96KB have to be generated in real time by your computer instead of coming shipped with the game as usual.
Sure, but just like in this game, procedural generation is used in many other games. even currently. The art is to find a balance between space savings and system performance. This is not the problem, because too many times they overdo it, both one and the other, often using prefabricated models to complete it with new characters, environments and plots, which look more and more similar even though they are different. companies. Nice graphics but zero originality and linear plot. Optimize it? Why, when it works in their company computer? Fuck the user, if you want to play, buy a bigger PC, period.