Games that changed graphics forever - These games made significant contributions to pushing video game graphics to the next level.
Games that changed graphics forever Feature StoryGames That Changed Graphics ForeverGames that changed graphics forever - These games made significant contributions to pushing video game graphics to the next level.
Here we go again with the “video game graphics have come a long way”. Well, they have, leave us alone. They’ve come a long way really fast though, if you think about it, in the last 20 years video game graphics have improved exponentially. If you asked anyone 20 years ago what games would look like today, we’re pretty sure nobody would have thought they would look this good. Of course, in order to get there innovation was needed. Graphics didn’t improve overnight, it was the effort of various different teams of developers working on different games that slowly pushed the boundaries of gaming graphics, the culmination of which we can see today. So here we have some games that introduced or perfected the graphics and mechanics that we take for granted, for the first time.
Looking up and down doesn't seem like a big deal, does it? Well, in 1995 it was a huge deal. This was the first FPS game where you could do just that. Compared to every major FPS that was out at the time, we're talking Wolf, and Doom, and... um let us know if you think of others, but yeah, this was the only game at the time where you could look up and down. Something as simple as that was a huge leap for FPS games.
Doom was the first game to truly emulate a 3D environment for you to explore. It wasn't true 3D, the devs achieved it by using some very neat tricks, but what they accomplished definitely left you feeling like you'd just played a proper 3D game. Even if you were to return to the original Doom now, you'd still think you were playing a 3D game. The game was actually just extrusion maps, flat 2D maps that had been stretched out to look 3D. This meant that you couldn't even have a room on top of another in Doom, but that didn't really stop them from delivering.
1995's Descent was the first truly 3D game. Don't confuse that with the first 3D game, that's different. What we're getting at here is that in Descent, instead of using 2D sprites, all the models in the game were 3D models made with polygons. You might ask, wait, even Doom was 3D. Well yes, but not true 3D. Doom was made using heightmaps, not polygons. Being the first polygon-oriented 3D game is a pretty big deal, but that wasn't all. Descent also offered six degrees of freedom, meaning you could point and shoot in any direction, in a time where the norm was simply up, down, left, or right.
Crusaders of Might and Magic had quite a bit of hype surrounding it. On release it turned out to be a pretty mediocre game. It received a pretty meh reception. However, it is the first game to have dynamic or volumetric shadows. This means it was the first game to be affected by light sources. Meaning, if your character was near a light source, it affected how you saw shadows. You might be thinking, "pfft, big deal". Well yes, for 1999, a very big deal. At the time, there were no games around that had dynamic shadows, or proper shadows at all. They were either static images, or blurry patches. This was one of the features about the game (in addition to being true 3D, also a big deal at the time), that created a lot of hype surrounding it. Unfortunately, the game itself was pretty bleh.
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