Anon is a game dev

I will never understand the obsession around graphics. JUST MAKE IT FUN.

Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:

It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.

Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!

Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.

It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.
Seriously, way too many games are just generic garbage that advertise only on "look how realistic my game is, you're not a true gamer if the games you play don't make your computer sound like a jet engine!"

Anon is not entirely wrong though... we have become pretty lazy regarding optimizing software.

Companies don't want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don't want to pay people to optimize engine
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.
- It's also diminishing returns of investment. The more realistic you want to go, the more work you have to put in. Also more realism will mean certain other things will look even more jarring, so you're having a much higher standard for bugfixes.

That's the HD remaster that came out like 10 years ago. They most certainly did not make that on windows 98.

It also helps that the game uses locked perspective scenes.
- Not just that, but prerendered 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.
Just to nitpick, the HD remaster is a remaster of the 2002 remake, so it's a bit older than 10 years.
- ...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.
- Yeah, but its still using rebuilt HD assets which make it look way better than the original game its based off of.

That's remastered...

I noticed that too, but I do think that the anon is talking about the remaster since he's also talking about Windows 98 and the remaster was out in 2002 while the original game was out in 1996. I know fuck all about the production of the remake, but maybe windows 98 was all they had available to them and maybe they did draw all the textures themselves for it. It'd have to look into that, though.

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
Only if you like smudges due to upscaling and TAA.
MOAR TAA!!!!!!

Normal maps are pretty easy to make, they're just time-intensive.

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

All screens were squares til like nearly 2010. Heck I have an early Nvidia GPU laptop around here somewhere with the most ridiculous looking 1:1 screen from like '08-ish.

Still peak gaming was MW3, CS, BF2-1942-2142. Back in the day, those were so good people ran successful brick and mortar businesses called internet cafés just for the masses to play those things or some oddie to hold w for hours ""playing"" WoW. Gaming sucks so bad it can't sustain a real brick and mortar business culture any more.

The golden era of cafés here was a bit earlier than that. Late Quake 3, early CS. The MMO I remember people playing by the hour to play was Ultima Online, not WoW.

Still, those were fun and don't get as much nostalgia as arcades, for some reason.

If you wanted to offer the same "we'll run these on decent hardware you probably don't have today" each seat would be like 5 grand to build and you'd need to somehow power 20-30 1000W machines running all day, so that's a bit of a challenge when everybody has high speed internet. It was easier to do that when people either didn't have Internet at all or were on dial-up modems that couldn't sustain playable games at all. The hardware you couldn't afford then was networking, which was cheap to set up and maintain for LAN by comparison.
- People around me had mixed motivations in this later era as you called it. My buddies and I used cafés as a time management tool. Any of us could have built a gaming rig but we would have been on it way too much. Cafés were a destination and way to partition off gaming in our lives.
Square? 4:3
- Comparatively, side by side it looks square to me
MorroWind 3?
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Devs have no say on where the budget flows and the owning corporation doesn’t care about your passion for the project.

Fortnite ranked in billions of dollars, when it looks ass good its time to wrap up to get it shipped. You can patch bugs and balancing later but we need a trailer out asap for preoders.

Also back when graphics where actually good and optimized: gameplay still > graphics

Surely a master of unlocking would know

Games are hard, anon.