What if the 5th generation of consoles had been 2D?
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PauloRoberto
Member
Nothing too different. Sega management and the relationship between JAP and US were soo bad that Saturn failure was bound to happen..
MrCunningham
Member
I hindsight, I think the gaming industry would have regressed badly. It is easy to look back at that generation with rose tinted glasses and just say that 2D would have been better... but back then, after coming off of multiple console generations... consumers were definitely looking for something new.
The idea of: "here's the same thing you had last generation, but with better looking graphics" would have not cut it at all. The Playstation 1 was a huge break out machine, because it was the first time (Saturn came kind of close) when larger consumer bases saw 3D as a viable option.
Even Nintendo jumped 100% on board the 3D wagon with the N64 for better or worse. They completely abandoned 2D gaming for that console generation, and mostly regulated 2D games to their handhelds.
Outside of some exceptions, 2D games were seen as boring to the mass public. Because we just went through the Atari generation, 8-bit generation, and 16-bit generation. By 1996 2D was a hard sell to a mass consumer base.
The idea of: "here's the same thing you had last generation, but with better looking graphics" would have not cut it at all. The Playstation 1 was a huge break out machine, because it was the first time (Saturn came kind of close) when larger consumer bases saw 3D as a viable option.
Even Nintendo jumped 100% on board the 3D wagon with the N64 for better or worse. They completely abandoned 2D gaming for that console generation, and mostly regulated 2D games to their handhelds.
Outside of some exceptions, 2D games were seen as boring to the mass public. Because we just went through the Atari generation, 8-bit generation, and 16-bit generation. By 1996 2D was a hard sell to a mass consumer base.
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
It would've been something like this. So in other words, extremely good.
Parazels
Member
What exactly were you missing in the 2d department?
BlackTron
Member
IDK, just SotN: the Gen? Where every game was made like that? Think getting 3D games "fully matured" from PS1 during PS3, but then never getting PS4/5 because we had the next paradigm shift instead (like brain VR). What'd we miss in the 3D department?
Sticks
Al Pachinko, Konami President
Parazels
Member
But we kept getting matured 2d games like Oddworld or Doom. At the same time the Saturn wasn't able to surpass the Neo Geo, so we could have ended up with tons of nice looking but constrained titles. Forget about Gran Turismo or Pro Evolution Soccer - 2d graphics just don't fit for many genres regardless of hardware.
Crayon
Member
It would have been kind of interesting to see what kinds of games we would get had the result been consoles that could do massive amount of scaling effects and animation. I can imagine some of the 3D classics being made with 2d techniques. But it still would have been a big missed opportunity as 3d was clearly ready for primetime. No Gran Turismo? No thanks.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
It seems like the underlying assumption of your post is that maybe we would have got more and better 2D games, but 5th gen 3D games walked so 6th gen could run.
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Instant_Classic
Member
5th generation would have kept gaming niche, had it remained 2D.
Instant_Classic
Member
Exactly, the experience and lessons learned from 5th Gen allowed the 6th Gen to be GOATed.
Syphon Filter
Member
you was already seeing some fake 3dish around 16bit and pc games so it was definitely inevitable.
Halfkut
Member
I've had this same thought as well.
Same with silent movies. They just started to perfect everything and then through it all away for the next big thing
Not saying it wasn't the right thing to do but I think it would have been interesting to see what kind of creative ideas they continued to come up with to keep working around the limitations while having a bit more power and experience.
We did get a few games (SOTN) that are still classic today so there was still juice in the tank
I personally hated the early days of 3d gaming so I would have loved that we didn't throw the baby out with the bath water on that one but I understand most people wanted something new and flashy
Same with silent movies. They just started to perfect everything and then through it all away for the next big thing
Not saying it wasn't the right thing to do but I think it would have been interesting to see what kind of creative ideas they continued to come up with to keep working around the limitations while having a bit more power and experience.
We did get a few games (SOTN) that are still classic today so there was still juice in the tank
I personally hated the early days of 3d gaming so I would have loved that we didn't throw the baby out with the bath water on that one but I understand most people wanted something new and flashy
existensmaximum
Member
Yeah it could have been glorious. What a waste
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
You'd have way better hockey games!
That era of 3D hockey games during the PS1 and PS2 years were total junk. EA games on Genesis were great. And so were hockey games during the 360/PS3 era (aside from NHL 07 which was kinda shit). But there was a solid decade span of crappy hockey games. I wasnt a fan of smoother playing 2K hockey either.
That era of 3D hockey games during the PS1 and PS2 years were total junk. EA games on Genesis were great. And so were hockey games during the 360/PS3 era (aside from NHL 07 which was kinda shit). But there was a solid decade span of crappy hockey games. I wasnt a fan of smoother playing 2K hockey either.
UltimaKilo
Gold Member
What if the 10th generation of consoles was 2D?
What if TV's were still black and white?
What if you had six eyes?
What if TV's were still black and white?
What if you had six eyes?
SkylineRKR
Member
People act as if 3D was shit that gen, but its not like Tekken 3, Ace Combat 2, R Type 4, Ape Escape, Wipeout, Crash, MGS, Silent Hill, Spyro, Vagrant etc were dumpster fire. Games like Tekken, Wipeout and Ridge Racer were there from day one and were absolute game changers out of the gate. Mario 64 was a game changer as well, maybe the biggest in history.
If you walked into a store in 1995, and you saw RR or Tekken being demo;d and you weren't impressed, I think you lie. I had a Megadrive at home, playing Monaco GP, Virtua Racing etc. RR blew my socks off.
And on 16-bit consoles cinematic experiences like FFVII and RE, which used polys with pre rendered backgrounds weren't possible either.
These systems added many different ways to present and play games. First person, third person or a mix of both (MGS), playing with camera angles (RE) racing on actual tracks, sandbox environments.
I love 2D (Shinobi and Ragebound are my last 2 games), but after Atari 2600, NES, SNES I think it was time for a jump.
If you walked into a store in 1995, and you saw RR or Tekken being demo;d and you weren't impressed, I think you lie. I had a Megadrive at home, playing Monaco GP, Virtua Racing etc. RR blew my socks off.
And on 16-bit consoles cinematic experiences like FFVII and RE, which used polys with pre rendered backgrounds weren't possible either.
These systems added many different ways to present and play games. First person, third person or a mix of both (MGS), playing with camera angles (RE) racing on actual tracks, sandbox environments.
I love 2D (Shinobi and Ragebound are my last 2 games), but after Atari 2600, NES, SNES I think it was time for a jump.
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TerribleAtThisGame
Member
I can't tell what started the "craze" but as a teenage player at the time, after seeing Doom it was hard to not want that. Back then I was like wait if they can do that...why is shit still flat?! I mean I was a teenage boy so that was the logic lol.
Yeah it could have been glorious. What a waste
diffusionx
Gold Member
I don't see any world where that happens.
It was extremely obvious by 1992-1993 that CD and 3D were where gaming was headed and consoles were always about the best technology they could put in an affordable box. They weren't going to skimp out on that.
It was extremely obvious by 1992-1993 that CD and 3D were where gaming was headed and consoles were always about the best technology they could put in an affordable box. They weren't going to skimp out on that.
Danny Dudekisser
I paid good money for this Dynex!
I'm happy with the way things progressed, honestly. 2D games looked crazy good on the 32-bit consoles, and I wish we'd gotten more of them. But: there were a lot of lessons that had to be learned about 3D gameplay, which the industry got out of its system during Gen 5. If that hadn't been the case, then yes, you'd still have impressive 3D games during Gen 6, but a lot of them would be terrible until devs figured out how to make those games fun. I actually think the limitations of Gen 5 were something of a boon in that regard, because it forced them to figure out the basics of 3D gaming instead of going balls to the wall and really bungling the introduction of 3D gaming in the home.
If I wanted killer 2D games during that era, there was still the arcade.
If I wanted killer 2D games during that era, there was still the arcade.
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PlayStaytion
Member
Then I'd be satisfied with 2.5D games on PC.
MrCunningham
Member
The Saturn is a true 2D machine that can render rasterized rectangular or square sprites. The machine uses quadrilateral polygons that are just 2D sprites being manipulated in 3D with vertices applied to all four corners. 2D models are basically just constricted out of bill boarded sprites. The earlier 3DO also uses quads as well, as it too is primarily a 2D machine as well.
The Playstation is the complete opposite of the Saturn and is designed entirely around triangle based rendering. It does apparently have some sort of built-in 2D engine, but the 2D engine is just displaying polygons as flat rectangular 2D sprites using UV mapping. Sprites are made out of two flat one-sided polygons with no hardware shading or lighting applied to them. The 2D engine can be expanded with the Playstation's polygon redering capabilities.
The N64 co-processors were developed by some offshoot company of Silicone Graphics and uses some scaled down features seen in the Reality Engine found in the larger SGI workstations. Like Trilinaer-like filtering, hardware z-buffer, culling, lighting engine, and other effects. It purely is a 3D machine, but can still do 2D sprites through one sided polygons. The N64's 4KB texture cache really limited it when doing anything 2D related. I'm guesting Nintendo had some sort of software solution in their dev kits that allowed for displaying sprites.
tkscz
Member
For the Saturn, this. Sega did SO much wrong during the Saturn that even if everyone stuck with 2D, it wouldn't have helped.
However, 3D would've been happening regardless if the main focus was 2D. The SNES was already getting full 3D games. Hell, Star Fox 2 was damned impressive, kind of wish they did release that game.
But think about it, they got Star Fox 2 to run on the SNES. If they stuck with 2D as the main focus, Nintendo's Ultra Nintendo would've contained a more powerful version of the FX chip built into it. It would've mainly been used for sprite rotation and manipulation, additional background/foreground layers, it would've also been used to make 3D games the like the SNES and it's FX chip wouldn't have been able to do.
PauloRoberto
Member
I hate to sound like a pessimist, but str fox 2 never RUN on a snes. Givne it's performance, I can only say it 'walked' on snes
If we're discussing purely rasterizing polygons - I fail to see the 'opposite'. PS1 renders all polygons as flat-surfaces using UV mapping - there is absolutely no '3d' capabilities in its rasterizer at all.
The UV mapping is a sizeable advantage to have - sure, but it's an evolution rather than 'opposite'. And yes it had support for quads (or sprites as DirectX calls them), not only triangles. Defined by 2 points so no rotation/free deformation possible, really closest to 'classical' sprites.
Ignoring memory capacity, there's real arguments that could be made for what was the 'better' 2d accelerator (PS1 could certainly push more pixels - even after accounting for the background layers on Saturn).
And as for 3d - if we're going to be pedantic - Saturn had more 3d rasterization capabilities than the PS1 - as at least - it could do mode-7 backgrounds that do actual 3d computations. Though, of course - N64 was the only console of the era with with actual 3d capabilities in the rasterizer (from perspective interpolation to z buffers and depth cued fog).
Software was driving that evolution already - even if machines were more limited in 3d, it wouldn't stop developers from trying.
At any rate - 2d survived just fine on later generations and we have more of it now than ever I'd argue, so it's not like anything was lost to history.
And the gen after we've had basically 'unlimited' 2d power in something like PS2, to the point where it hw constraints were no longer a thing if you wanted to make 2d. As I say above - it's not like 2d went anywhere, we still have thousands of 2d games made every year.
deriks
4-Time GIF/Meme God
Generation 4 was the foundation, with games truly establishing themselves and creating standards still used today. An era of experiments and consolidation of technical achievements, franchises known for over a thousand years, new names emerging all the time, and where games were meant to be played and anything beyond that was profit. The best era.
Generation 5 was a mix of try and errors, and probably the biggest transitional generation ever. The successes were more in the ideas than in the execution itself, creating the beginning of new standards. The amount of relevance it has probably also generated the biggest number of bad decisions as well. 3D got here, and for some games is the way to go while some others confirmed for a big no
Generation 5 was a mix of try and errors, and probably the biggest transitional generation ever. The successes were more in the ideas than in the execution itself, creating the beginning of new standards. The amount of relevance it has probably also generated the biggest number of bad decisions as well. 3D got here, and for some games is the way to go while some others confirmed for a big no
wondermega
Member
Interesting thought, but I don't see that this would have happened. But to entertain it - 2D visual novels were getting pretty popular in Japan, so they would have kept blossoming. I cannot imagine that we would have gone for that stuff in the west, though. FMV was the big thing that was being pushed over here, of course - and it is hard to know if that could have been ratcheted up to a "next generation" as well. We saw an attempt with that, sort of, on the NEC PC-FX and it crashed and burned miserably, but that was very different than what we would have had over here. I think that stuff (FMV) would still have been a dead-end for awhile (drives were still too slow, and production costs were probably going to be too high for some big next-coming of a Dragon's Lair or Night Trap, as it were.
If anything, they probably would have leaned into more of what had been happening with 3D pre-rendered sprites (the likes of what had been seeing with Donkey Kong Country) but already the gameplay evolution of those games was feeling a bit stale. 3D had to happen and I think there was no way around it. If there had been more clamoring for 2D games at that point, we'd probably have seen more of it alongside what was going on with 3D.
If anything, they probably would have leaned into more of what had been happening with 3D pre-rendered sprites (the likes of what had been seeing with Donkey Kong Country) but already the gameplay evolution of those games was feeling a bit stale. 3D had to happen and I think there was no way around it. If there had been more clamoring for 2D games at that point, we'd probably have seen more of it alongside what was going on with 3D.
ClanOfNone
Member
I would've loved one more crop of 2d consoles. While I was impressed by the early 3d stuff at the time like everyone else, that gen has aged the worst for me, I rarely revisit titles from that era.
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