For me it was encapsulated by doom 3 for the most part. Games with strong dynamic shadows like splinter cell chaos theory and stalker with a mix of shiny specular effects is timeless for me. When I go back to these games the shadows still feel as good as they did when they came out and the lighting perfectly crafting the mood. A lot of modern games now even though their fidelity on paper is much better just always feel extremely flat to me and don’t pop out of the screen like they used to. It seems like they’re missing contrast and UE5 seems to make this even worse where all the games using it just look like mush

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netMEnglish
      15·
      24 days ago

      Can’t leave out Wind Waker especially. When Nint*ndo began promoting the game, a lot of capital G Gamers were malding about their decision to pursue a cartoonish art style rather than the more “realistic” style of other titles in the series (Majoras Mask before it, and Twilight Princess after). This was in stark contrast to titles like SSBM which were able to capitalize on low-complexity scenes, putting all the detail into character meshes and high resolution textures - to the point where you could see the golden seams on Mario’s denim overalls for the first time in the history of the franchise, and overall trends in the contemporary gaming industry (same year as the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, for instance).

      To this day, the game’s artstyle is truly iconic, and though it wasn’t intended, the cel shading technique used in the game scales up very well, making it delightful to play in emulators to this day, while the reliance on texture resolution makes a lot of other “highly realistic” games from the era look disappointing on modern high-resolution displays.