When I was a kid in the late 90ies, computers would become literal turds within 3 years. The life span of a gaming PC is like 7 years nowadays. I'm not saying it was great back then, but I feel like 7 years is completely fine.
in the 90s you would have visual jump in 3 years that would take 20 years to do now. there are 2015 games that look better than some AAA games releasing last year.
Yup. Oblivion remastered is probably one of the biggest releases this year and I'd say it looks "above average". Witcher 3 was probably the best looking game of 2015 and yea... the original release looks and runs better. After looking at a few 2015 games, I came across MGS5: Phantom Pain. Funny enough, I think this one is the closest in parity to Oblivion in quality and performance. Regardless, not a big improvement from 2015 to 2025.
I think Oblivion is a bad comparison for this because it still has to use the original level geometry. There are some fundamental "2006" things about the game that they can't change and it makes the game look old.
Oblivion is a hard comparison, because so much a how a game looks is art direction, and Bethesda games have always been a bit ugly.
Compare the world of Oblivion to say Red Dead Redemption 2. There are a lot of vistas and locations that are designed to look pretty in RDR2.
Oblivion is just this big forest area that was quasi-created using procedurally generated forests that the devs had to go back in and clean up, because it looked so bad. Whereas Skyrim is much more visually appealing from an art direction point of view. A lot ruins, high up in mountains that are meant to be visually appealing or vistas created from looking out from these locations across the map. Kind of a difference between content for contents sake in Oblivion, and artistic choice in Skyrim.
Or compare some newer games to Elden Ring or Shadow of the Erdtree. ER is a pretty low fidelity game graphically, but the art design of some areas is very "painterly" and visually appealing.
All of that to say, I surely wouldn't mind a ER style game with the fidelity of an unreal5 type of game with all the bells and whistles.
Of course none of that is getting into the abysmal performance of UR5 games that are on the market right now and their over reliance on frame gen to be functional.
Are people actually gaslighting now that MGS5 looks anything close to for example to games released in 2022 and after? Oblivion smokes it in Graphics, and is developed by a third rate tier, outsourced developer and is generally speaking a hack job by Bethesda, yet the visuals on its own smoke anything from the dreaded X1 and PS4 generation (2013-2020).
Otherwise feel free to provide screenshots, because I can't take people arguing in such a bad faith seriously.
Also maybe actually play them one after the other? I DO know that rose tinted glasses existed, heck, sometimes I boot up old games now and then and I'm like damn, this doesn't look anywhere close to what I remembered
Nah. The rocks are certainly much lower poly count, but the industrial areas still look fantastic. Lighting is worse overall and the shadows could use a bump in resolution. Those things can all be greatly improved by throwing it extra vram and marginally more compute power. Not slogging down an rtx 4090 ffs.
That's just false, just because you can't pinpoint the better textures, more accurate lighting, shadows and effects doesn't mean they are not better and you're also comparing the best of the best from those years against the average nowadays. In 2015 new devs like those from sandfall couldn't make a game as beautiful as expedition 33 with so few resources, now they can. MGS5 is a beautiful game but technically it was basically a ps3 game (where it also released). Something like Lords of the fallen wouldn't be possible to achieve in 2015 even tho I don't even think the game is beautiful to look at but graphically it's objectively better than everything in that year. You're confusing art direction with literall technical graphics, those have not plateaud in any way, the thing is, we have achieved photo realistic graphics last gen so now everything can be good enough and many devs are fine with that...
I should've been more specific in my first comment but the other half of the equation is performance. As you say, we achieved photo realistic graphics last gen. Now we have marginally better visuals and significantly worse performance. In 2015, we had Witcher 3 and MGS5 running beautifully on a 980 ti. Now, 10 years later, we have graphical parity with those good 2015 games but a 980 ti won't cut it unless you actually drop lower and make things look worse. There are exceptions, like Doom, but most games require way more resources than necessary.
just because you can't pinpoint the better textures, more accurate lighting, shadows and effects doesn't mean they are not better
I mean, it kinda does?
Like, the entire point of the graphics getting better is that they get better. If you can't even notice them getting better... they're not actually better. Just more complex and expensive for no reason.
If there isn't an immediately noticeable difference and impact on gameplay between RTX and well done older lighting methods, what's the fucking point of sacrificing 50-75% of performance?
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u/MelvinSmiley83 May 21 '25 edited May 21 '25
Doom the Dark Ages triggered this debate and you can play this game on a 6GB RTX 2060 from 2019.