How did games come out so quickly back then, like sequels every year, and each one was a cultural landmark
>>12494785modest budgets and competent programmer
>>12494785look at the assets in the picture. they're very simple. a 3 man team of one programmer, a modeler, and a painter could crank out levels worth of assets in short time.
>>12494785Lower standards, those zombies for example have very low-res textures and simple models, and the idea of body physics, let alone dynamic animations and ragdolls, weren't a thing. Pre-rendered environments were also fairly popular, once you made the original 3D model it was simple to create the room's assets from any angle you wanted.Nowadays if you released a tripe-a slop game that had a simple title screen, people would have a screaming fit that would make them rupture their colons as they soil themselves in rage.
Because they'd hire an 18 year old for a summer job and tell him to port Street Fighter to the ZX Spectrum in six weeks with nothing to work with but a cab he had to play and memorize.
>>12494785Because back then, developers still did actual workNeeded a character model? Writer comes up with a character, concept artist draws the concept, 3D artist makes the actual model, animator animates it, and finally a technical/lead artist ensures it actually works in-game and matches the intended style.Today a team of writers comes up with a character based on consumer surveys and research, a separate committee checks that it won't offend the wrong people, a contracted freelance concept artist draws the concept, an outsourcing manager tells a sweatshop in Vietnam to make the model and when she's dissatisfied with it she has to somehow communicate via email and Google Translate with a two to three business day response time what exactly they need to fix, after about six weeks of back and forth it's finally sent to a different outsourcing company for animation, and finally an intern has to somehow figure out how to import the whole thing into Unreal.Really the biggest problem today isn't even just the amount of people involved, it's the lack of responsibility. Back in the day if your characters looked like ass, for your next game you'd either train your modeller better or fire him and hire another guy. Today it just gets blamed on the lack of resources to better manage the outsourcing team.
>>12494785anyone can come up with the answer for this if they think for 2 seconds, stop being retarded
>>12494785RE2 has a very long and rough development to the point they restarted from scratch at one point
>>12494785Whites and honorary Aryans were the only ones working on them.
>>12494785Sequels didn't come out every year.Sequels often iterated on the same engine and gameplay as the predecessor, shortening overall development time. Games were shorter in general.They were cultural landmarks because the concept of video gaming in and of itself was still a highly novel concept.
It didn’t take a decade and a 9 figure budget to make 1 game back then.
>>12494785It's outright less work to make things to the levels of definition which were common at the time.This in turn is because you COULDN'T have the highest definition ever, you actually had to ration storage, and even with the advent of CDs which could hold hundreds of megabytes of data, you still had to ration your memory and processing.Resident Evil using pre-rendered backgrounds is an extremely good example of this. They couldn't have thousands and thousands of surfaces in a realtime rendered scene, but if they pre-render the backgrounds, and the foreground elements, they could have much more detailed character and object models.>>12494956Also this.
>>12494952x2
>>12494951This>>12494956And this. Making an engine took up most of the time
>>12494956>Games were shorter in generalGraphics are really more what stuff get bigger than anything. You can perfectly well have a PS2 game with 30 minutes of gameplay tops but it will have 30x the graphics size of a Gameboy game.
>>12494785they were made by talented japanese or white men.
>>12494785Time keeps accelerating, doing things just takes more time these days. A month's worth of work was being done in a week back then. Soon we will hit the point of singularity and everything will be fine.2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17...
>Picrel>2004>It's not 3 nerds planning out 2D tiles for a stage and obsessing over where to place an enemy spawn or how big a jump should be anymore.
I think the bigger question is>Why has the industry turned into excessive waste in as many facets as possible when we used to be able to do more with lessLimitations used to make people much more creative and efficient, each system generation for decades has been adding much more fat than muscle.
Less tech bullshit to worry about, long ago you didn't even have lighting in vidya, and even after quake, you didn't have that much shader shit to care about.Now with better tech, everyone expects "muh cinematic quality", and it takes a lot of man power to get that to happen.
>>12495371yeah you're right. the ZX Spectrum is all you need.
>>12495425I read some of the Making Of stuff about TLOU2 and it's absolutely insane how much time and money is wasted on these gigabidget games today. They had people spending years modelling things like roofs and walls inside and out with all the layers of wood, plumbing, plaster, etc. so they could shave it away in places to make it look realistically dilapidated. All this for a backdrop in a cafe or something players scoot through in 30 seconds. Good texture work would get you 95% of the way there with a fraction of the resources and no one would ever notice the difference.
>>12495426Alleycat BRUTALLY mogs GTA6
>>12494785Because games were easier to make and therefore took less time. For example, Mega Man 2 was made in just 2 months. It's easy to have a new game every year if it only takes 2 months and a handful of people to make the game.
>>12495425>long ago you didn't even have lighting in vidyayou mean like how devs had to hand paint lighting in their levels?
>>12495887NTA but yes, that was way easier.
>>12494785Fewer distractions.
>>12495887Is that vagrant story
>>12494821>look at the assets in the picture. they're very simple. a 3 man team of one programmer, a modeler, and a painter could crank out levels worth of assets in short time.Those backgrounds still took a while to render, even on expensive workstations.
>>12494785Pic not related. RE2 had a long development cycle and was given a way bigger budget after the success of the original.
You are the CEO of a public gaming company.You can release the game quickly and make a million or two per year.You can waste years and hire thousands of pajeets to get cheap bank credit and use buzzword technologies to maximize shareholder value and easily earn 20+million a year.Gee i wonder why?
>>12495425>everyone expects "muh cinematic quality"This is literally a aaa marketing lie repeated ad nauseam.Most played games have shit graphics and most gamers can't tell a ps3 game from a ps5 game apart.
>>12495887I was talking about pre 3D games
>>12496212And the industry crashed in the 80s over less. We really need another collapse.
>>12494821So why can't indie devs do it.
>>12494956>Sequels didn't come out every year.saying this when the OP used RE2 as an example when RE3 came out a year after it lol
>>12496248I think people also forget that Core cranked out Tomb Raider sequels on an annual basis.
Dragon Quest 4 and SMB3 were two year projects.
>>12496245Because to indie devs, game dev is a side gig and not their primary job. Obviously professional devs who do it as their main job in actual offices can get that shit done quicker, where as indie devs who do it on the side from some other primary job, who's office is literally their room can't get it done that quick.
>>12494785Talented developers
Do you think an Independent game developer, using the techniques for memory saving, fast loading, and color/lightning techniques of the time could put out a game within a year or two?
>>12496458Considering most indie devs do game dev on the side instead of as their primary job, no.
4k textures and 4x the polygons became the standard. Why? Just because. I don't understand how theoretical benchmarks can dictate console generations. When games struggled to run at the promised 1080p60 on PS4/Xbone at launch, why didn't devs and publishers scale back on the fidelity? Instead, we wound up with two consoles that limped at 900p30 instead of running at 720p60.
>>12496493Because graficsfags expecting more out of games as hardware got better, even if it meant games taking a decade to develop and the end product being a movie.
>>12496506We were saying for years that gameplay was more important than graphics, but companies kept telling themselves that higher fidelity prints more money and each technological upgrade led to more bloat. Gotta keep expanding departments with more redundant staff and then getting surprised when what used to be a massive success in revenue turns into a shrinking profit margin requiring even more sales. The ouroboros has achieved complete global saturation.in the industry.
>>12496506Series X/PS5 are now gimped by games that look AND run like shit. Games used to have one problem or the other, but now you get both for the price of one.
>>12494785There was no bureaucracy or women involved in gaming back then, and studios weren't bloated with 500 fake jobs and billion dollar budgets. It was just 5-20 male programmers working on every game back then, so shit got done.
>>12494821Probably so after they get the engine going and a good work flow, but you have to consider that in 1995 or whatever they didn't have shit to work with so they almost always had to make engines in house. And like another anon said, rendering anything took a long time so it could be days or a week. Imagine if you remember that you did a small mistake in the middle of it.
>>12494785Basically, games were being made at a far smaller scale compared to today because the demands were still such that one centralized team with maybe one or two support studios could do the lion's share of the work. The biggest bit of outsourcing was typically for voice acting (in the case of RE, it went all the way to Canada after RE1).Another thing though is that generally, more games would be worked on at the same time because of this smaller scale. Capcom had a lot of employees and a lot of connections, and so here's what was in development pre-2000 for RE. It's a lot.>Resident Evil - In-House, Released>Resident Evil DASH - In-House, Cancelled>Resident Evil 2 - In-House>Resident Evil GBC - Outsourced, Cancelled>Resident Evil 3 - In-House, Cancelled>Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - In-House, Released>Resident Evil: Code Veronica - Outsourced, Released>Resident Evil Survivor - In-House, Released>Resident Evil Zero - In-House, Delayed and Reworked>Resident Evil 4 - In-House, RebrandedMight be missing a couple, but these games specifically all started dev basically from 1996 to 1999 (excluding RE1 itself obviously), and all of them after RE2 started 1998-99.
Modest budgets, devs working themselves to the bone, reuse of code and assets, less bureaucracy inside the companies and more, you name it. And still games had issues mid development, RE2 had to be delayed because it wasn't coming together.
>>12495693Funny how still 20 years ago the whole work would just be putting a believable 2d jpg texture which signals to player what's going on. Maybe some level-of-detail texture if they wanted to be cool like if you go take a closer look you see a bit more shit.
>>12495425>>12496218Yeah I was thinking this too. Who exactly demands every game to fully detailed ultra hd or whatever they call it these days? Most people would be fine with lesser graphics and in turn an ordinary sunday game would not take 100-200gb too.
>>12497380>Resident Evil 3 - In-House, Cancelled>Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - In-House, ReleasedThere was a cancelled version of RE3?
>>12497434It was supposedly a game about Hunk on a cruise liner fighting plant people. Never got much farther than some rough concepts. Kamiya took over and it was started over from scratch. The PS2 is announced, development shifts over to that console, and Capcom realizes it won't be ready until 2001 or 2002.In the meantime a side game called 1.9/2.1 was retitled as 3 and given some extra resources to flesh it out so they didn't have a 4 or 5 year gap without a numbered RE game.The former 3 becomes 4, morphs into DMC, and the rest is history.
>>12497320>There was no bureaucracy or women involved in gaming back thenRoberta Williams says hi?
>>12494785big companies bought up the smaller studios and all the quality games now have to make giant open world designs, MMO friendly game loops, and season pass DLC built in. the single player experience has been modified and commodified.
>>12497434On the cancelled RE titles that we know of>Resident Evil DASHThis was a sequel to RE1 that would be based on cut concepts from RE1 and set in the Arklay Mansion after the explosion. Not much is actually known about the game beyond it getting tossed around and canned several times in several different forms. By cut concepts I mean things like there'd be more to the ruins of the mansion areas than what we saw in the game, as well as deeper exploration of the lab (which was initially a larger environment). It's more a pitch than anything though.>Resident Evil 1.5Didn't include this one in the list because it is part of RE2's development- however, it was basically done, so whatever. You should know all about it though.>Resident Evil 3What the other anon described. Typically called Ship BIO.>Resident Evil GBCRather famous/infamous.>Resident Evil 2 (Saturn)Just a port but worth mentioning, it's why CV exists really.>Resident Evil Zero (N64)This is somewhat different from GCN in concept. Like, I don't believe the Queen Leech was even the antagonist in this version of the game and Wesker was more directly a form of antagonist in it, and it was gonna have multiple endings. >Resident Evil 4Everyone knows this.It became DMC and Haunting Ground and RE Lost in Nightmares to some extent. There's other things to go over as well I guess.>RE1There's a whole page on Project Umbrella going over what got cut and changed in dev. It's a lot.>RE1.9Mercs Mad Jackal is an approximation of what that was going to be, but not really even close. The setting of Mercs in that game is what's key though.>CVOriginally a Jill and Chris game, as is known. Really, Survivor had the smoothest development of any game here, but also, most people don't care to research Survivor.
