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The most technically-advanced game for each year

Morfeo

The Chuck Norris of Peace
Some crappy examples there OP. Killzone 2 took a huge dump on Crysis when it came out, the lighting alone is a generation ahead, Uncharted 2 is no slouch either. Arma is demanding only it was badly coded and poorly optimized. Crysis 2 is another bad example, Killzone 3 raised the bar again and looked significantly better with larger levels and set pieces.

is-this-just-fanta-sea.jpg


Wow, lots of terrible examples like this in this thread. Gotta agree with Synth that Im glad Phediuk started the thread, and not you.

Anyways, I dont have much to add to the OP, but just wanted to say that I greatly enjoyed reading it, and I think most of the picks were really well thought out. Not often I see such a great OP. Also, that Sega domination!
 

Alej

Banned
guys

hey guys

this thread is not called "what playstation game you fapped most furiously to each year"

No it is obviously called " what PC/Sega/MS game you fapped most furiously to each year". Denying any KZ2, U2, GOW3 and most importantly DriveClub's presence in this thread is total fanboyism.

But heck, trying to be objective without having any base to do it, in a world of subjectives like GAF is and should be, is totally absurd.

This isn't science like all these guys are trying to say here, there is no benchmark about this or even hierarchy of the tech used in gaming. You know it's not because a tech is very expensive power-wise that it's the most advanced out there, trying to go this route isn't objective at all or near to it, and it can't be done without any bias.

What "wowed" you the most is a good metric, in fact the most objective one if you really assume you are indeed and fundamentally a subjective mind. That's it.

Guys coming with WiiU games are perfectly fine, even if I don't support their opinions, I can agree some of the stuff seen on WiiU is, indeed, very impressive.

To those saying Killzone and Uncharted. Have you actually played any PC games from 2006 and up till today?

That was a totally viable opinion back in the day. Trying to rewrite history I'm thinking.

Nothing came close to KZ2 when I played the beta back in the day. Fact, no one believed those graphics were possible in real time without a very high end machine.
 
What about ocean covered planet with enormous waves with a city in the middle?

IMG_PAX_0002_Layer-15.jpg

ASqIpLy.png


Have You seen new damage tech? Almost anything You've seen is more early than pre-early.

That's pretty cool. Need to see more than concept Art though. The art is fairly standard sci fi though. It looks reasonably plausible, but there isn't much creativity (which is fine given what they are going for). Really interested to see how the finished game looks. Is there any single player in this game? A fleshed out narrative?

That looks like they took some inspiration from Interstellar in the second concept. Not that the movie was the first (or the hundredth) to posit the idea.
 
Thx for doing that.
Are you saying, that these two hit and death animations...
http://a.pomf.se/vbtspc.webm
http://a.pomf.se/qrofdm.webm
are the same as these?
cray30sz73.gif


i would obviously like to hear secondary opinions from other gaffers, but, I must say, I am not seeing any simularity. And knowing the systems behind the two, I also know that it is impossible... Crysis 1 and Warhead have hit animations where the part of the body just has a physicalized hit added to it. It is not a reaction animation being spontaneously played. Likewise, shooting a korean to death in Crysis 1 does not yield an animation played upon death, but just applies force to the point of impact and the korean soldier ragdolls with that previous force applied. Hence how the koreans in the webms above have their legs spread each time they fall over, they basically are a physics puppet as soon as they die.

Crysis 2 on the other hand has a hit reaction animation system that combines with those physics. So you see the soldier in the gif above get shot, rebound to the screen left, hit the boxes, rebound forward, get shot again and then collapse face forward in an animation. WHILST his arm is physicalized and upper torso are physicalized. The part which betrays its existence as an animation and not being fully physicalized is given away by the fact that he falls knee first, unlike in the Crysis 1 shots above.

Also I am pretty sure the NPC soldier skeleton is different in both games and they basically share little to no animations.

no im saying they are the same as this

ibsGT3zvIZGw1g.gif
 
no im saying they are the same as this

ibsGT3zvIZGw1g.gif

Why not create a video of you running into a korean then? Or shooting out their feet? So that we can compare... Also, we were orgiinally not even talking about THAT animation. But rather the gifs I posted.

edit: also, those webms of the koreans dying look nothing like the .gif from KKRT running in the the cell soldier's feet.
 

KKRT00

Member
That's pretty cool. Need to see more than concept Art though. The art is fairly standard sci fi though. It looks reasonably plausible, but there isn't much creativity (which is fine given what they are going for). Really interested to see how the finished game looks. Is there any single player in this game? A fleshed out narrative?

That looks like they took some inspiration from Interstellar in the second concept. Not that the movie was the first (or the hundredth) to posit the idea.

Squadron 42, which first episode will be released this year is exactly single-player experience [which coop functionality]. This first episode will have 10-15h multi-branched story, intro + 10 missions, full of cutscenes and dialogs.
There will be 5 episodes released, every 3-4 months starting fall of 2015, so in the end 50 missions.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
Maybe in scale, but MGS2 had DoF, shadows, rain and other effects that were cutting edge at the time.

And Halo has bump and normal mapping, and other shader effects that were a generation ahead of anything the PS2 would do in its entire lifetime.
 
Why not create a video of you running into a korean then? Or shooting out their feet? So that we can compare... Also, we were orgiinally not even talking about THAT animation. But rather the gifs I posted.

edit: also, those webms of the koreans dying look nothing like the .gif from KKRT running in the the cell soldier's feet.

i was always referring to this gif when i said i remembered it from crysis 1 and it made me cringe. they look exactly like it
 
And Halo has bump and normal mapping, and other shader effects that were a generation ahead of anything the PS2 would do in its entire lifetime.

To be fair, if the xbox tried to run as much alpha as present in MGS2s rain.. it would choke and die. But I still think Halo should be on top there.
i was always referring to this gif when i said i remembered it from crysis 1 and it made me cringe. they look exactly like it

Are you saying that gif from KKRT resembles the two deaths you told me to look at from the Crysis Warhead vid? Because I do not see it at all. In fact, they are completely different!
 

Synth

Member
Not really. 1998-2002 are the only years in which the most powerful hardware is debatable.

Well, I was mostly thinking about all the cases it's pretty obvious that the contenders aren't on the most powerful hardware. The Dreamcast was definitely not debatably the most powerful hardware for the year it came out. It's the software that keeps it in the discussion. There's a lot of eliminating you'd need to do if the hardware actually is a consideration, because after Model 3, PC is simply the only viable answer for every single year, regardless of what game released on it. This is basically what iapetus is saying. Even if a console had a release that completely embarrasses the PC options for that year, you're obligated to not consider it simply because a more powerful PC existed in the world running games at the time.

Nothing came close to KZ2 when I played the beta back in the day. Fact, no one believed those graphics were possible in real time without a very high end machine.

And that's the problem here. Your suggestions rely on those high end machines not existing... where unfortunately, they did. I like this thread primarily because it's possible to actually argue down to a few real examples (which is rare as hell on GAF tbh). You seem to want a completely different thread, where people simply talk about the games that impressed them personally... one where an OP really couldn't award a game for each year, because you could never really claim that other games even on less capable platforms are accomplishing more when you take the platform's limitations into account. As I said before, under those conditions someone can suggest a recent ZX Spectrum game, as it's quite likely that game would be pushing that machine more than anything on a current gen console in its first full year.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
To be fair, if the xbox tried to run as much alpha as present in MGS2s rain.. it would choke and die. But I still think Halo should be on top there.

Well, the Xbox took a valiant stab at those effects in MGS2: Substance. They're noticeably downgraded, yes, but the Xbox could do alpha effects; it just couldn't throw them around as much as PS2.

Conversely, the PS2 simply could not have run even a rough approximation of the normal mapping, bump mapping, and shader effects of Halo.
 

IHaveIce

Banned
feel like Halo at least needed a shoutot for its release years and then on console.

Halo 2's Matchmaking and Clansystem + Custom games on a console.

And Halo CE in general..
 

Jaagen

Member
Well, the Xbox took a valiant stab at those effects in MGS2: Substance. They're noticeably downgraded, yes, but the Xbox could do alpha effects; it just couldn't throw them around as much as PS2.

Conversely, the PS2 simply could not have run even a rough approximation of the normal mapping, bump mapping, and shader effects of Halo.

I would still say that Rouge Leader takes the cake. Tons of polygons and particles(and at 60fps)
 

Alej

Banned
You seem to want a completely different thread, where people simply talk about the games that impressed them personally... one where an OP really couldn't award a game for each year, because you could never really claim that other games even on less capable platforms are accomplishing more when you take the platform's limitations into account.

This is exactly the thread you are describing. Guys are talking about games that impressed them personnaly, even the OP.

There isn't any science or any established nomenklatura done in order to judge a hierarchy of techs and how they are more advanced than others. (1)

That's why "the most technically advanced game for each year" is pointless if trying to be scientific. But if it's an open discussion about what we called the "omg amazing I've never seen that before" effect, then there is a good discussion to have. Hence why, i feel a little frustrated by those high minds saying others that they don't know what they are talking about (the usual suspects you know, the same platform warriors breaking every threads lately on GAF because of their persistent insecurity) and shouldn't even be allowed to speak about it ("ewww grateful you aren't the OP"). (2)

Denying others the right to discuss a very subjective object (1) because of an authority argument (2) is what I'm seeing in this thread right now. You shouldn't be proud about this IMO.
 
To be fair, if the xbox tried to run as much alpha as present in MGS2s rain.. it would choke and die. But I still think Halo should be on top there.


Are you saying that gif from KKRT resembles the two deaths you told me to look at from the Crysis Warhead vid? Because I do not see it at all. In fact, they are completely different!

im sitting here rewatching all 3 of them over and over trying to understand what you are seeing
 

iapetus

Scary Euro Man
I'm not adding Angband as a contender, but I'll remove Gears if you have any good-faith suggestions for 2006, i.e., possible alternatives to Oblivion. It really is the odd game out in this thread.

But Gears is a technical tour de force. As you say, it's the most advanced engine of that year. The problem isn't that it's being declared the most technically advanced game of the year. The problem is that you've defined the list in terms such that it can't even be an honourable mention.
 
Hence why, i feel a little frustrated by those high minds saying others that they don't know what they are talking about and shouldn't even be allowed to speak about it ("ewww grateful you aren't the OP").

If you are talking about the post I believe you are talking, then you should re read what that poster was replying to. May be something else, though.
 

Phediuk

Member
But Gears is a technical tour de force. As you say, it's the most advanced engine of that year. The problem isn't that it's being declared the most technically advanced game of the year. The problem is that you've defined the list in terms such that it can't even be an honourable mention.

True, Gears is an inconsistency, being a console exclusive among a bunch of PC games. The determinant of the thread is hardware, not software engines, after all, and certainly, the scope of something like Oblivion was at least as impressive as anything Gears did, UE3 be damned. I'm gonna switch to Oblivion unless someone has any suggestions for another game.
 
True, Gears is an inconsistency, being a console exclusive among a bunch of PC games. The determinant of the thread is hardware, not software engines, after all, and certainly, the scope of something like Oblivion was at least as impressive as anything Gears did, UE3 be damned. I'm gonna switch to Oblivion unless someone has any suggestions for another game.

I hesitate to mention in light of the KZ and GoW3 stuff, but Motorstorm came out that year in Japan I think. It looked pretty nice, had some decent physics too. I loved it but I'd honestly just keep Gears in there.

Oblivion looks pretty dated imo, huge though. But then what about the GTA games? Ugly as sin but what about on a technical level?
 

whoszed

Member
Half Life 2 looks so much better than Doom 3 that it should win. The world just feels much more real than Doom 3.
 
This is exactly the thread you are describing. Guys are talking about games that impressed them personnaly, even the OP.

There isn't any science or any established nomenklatura done in order to judge a hierarchy of techs and how they are more advanced than others. (1)

That's why "the most technically advanced game for each year" is pointless if trying to be scientific. But if it's an open discussion about what we called the "omg amazing I've never seen that before" effect, then there is a good discussion to have. Hence why, i feel a little frustrated by those high minds saying others that they don't know what they are talking about (the usual suspects you know, the same platform warriors breaking every threads lately on GAF because of their persistent insecurity) and shouldn't even be allowed to speak about it ("ewww grateful you aren't the OP"). (2)

Denying others the right to discuss a very subjective object (1) because of an authority argument (2) is what I'm seeing in this thread right now. You shouldn't be proud about this IMO.

Ok, post a list and list the technology it wrought.
 

hodgy100

Member
Half Life 2 looks so much better than Doom 3 that it should win. The world just feels much more real than Doom 3.

well thats more of an art thing than the game being technically advanced. Doom 3 pulls off a load of awesome effects that HL2 does not.

also to those shouting killzone, uncharted & GoW. Yes those games are damn impressive for the hardware they are running on, and in the console space they were graphically the best. But technically the crysis games have been above and beyond with the number of and complexity of the effects it pulls off.
 

IHaveIce

Banned
True, Gears is an inconsistency, being a console exclusive among a bunch of PC games. The determinant of the thread is hardware, not software engines, after all, and certainly, the scope of something like Oblivion was at least as impressive as anything Gears did, UE3 be damned. I'm gonna switch to Oblivion unless someone has any suggestions for another game.

Do you even understand what iapetus point is?
 

mclem

Member
True, Gears is an inconsistency, being a console exclusive among a bunch of PC games. The determinant of the thread is hardware, not software engines, after all, and certainly, the scope of something like Oblivion was at least as impressive as anything Gears did, UE3 be damned. I'm gonna switch to Oblivion unless someone has any suggestions for another game.

If you're going to bring up scope, we have to bring up Elite again :)
 

DevilFox

Member
Hate to be a buzzkill, but you are describing two different things. Aliasing (and by extension anti-aliasing) and polygon count. Pretty sure Agent 42s head is rounder... both by polygon and by shear sampling to maintain good edge shading.

I know they're different but we were talking about the techniques used to have a well rounded head. What GoW3 did with the MLAA was impressive considering the performance hit while the tesselation used for 47 is definitely good but it takes a lot more resources.
And I was stating my opinion saying that we should also consider how a game achieves something, if it's a smart method or not, and not only what it achieves.
Random example going by memory, the ubersampling in The Witcher 2. Nice option but damn at that performance hit!

To those saying Killzone and Uncharted. Have you actually played any PC games from 2006 and up till today?

Yes, and back then very few impressed me like Killzone 2 or God of War 3 and its titans did, even more if I consider the hardware.
Can we not bring this down to pc vs console or it's already too late?
 
im sitting here rewatching all 3 of them over and over trying to understand what you are seeing
Recap, you are saying, these deaths..
ospeka.gif

uirmuk.gif


..look like this..
ibsGT3zvIZGw1g.gif


...and further more, that all these animations are "horrible," "poor," or "bad?"

Other than the fact that the legs get splayed (one caused by a ragdoll and the other caused by a predefined animation)... I am seeing NO similarities.

I know they're different but we were talking about the techniques used to have a well rounded head. What GoW3 did with the MLAA was impressive considering the performance hit while the tesselation used for 47 is definitely good but it takes a lot more resources.
And I was stating my opinion saying that we should also consider how a game achieves something, if it's a smart method or not, and not only what it achieves.
Random example going by memory, the ubersampling in The Witcher 2. Nice option but damn at that performance hit!
You are still confusing two different techniques doing two different things. The same level of "roundness" (you are confusing what MLAA did in God of War III) could be done with SMAA (available to everyone on PC) in hitman. What tesselation and MLAA do are completeley different...
 
I wouldn't put Crysis 2 over the Witcher 2 but hey, to each their own.

Those dithered shadows, though. The game looks great (much better textures than C2, for sure), but the lighting is simple among other things. C2 has overall more things going on under the hood: object motion blur, POM, dx11 features such as tessellation, shadows with variable penumbra, real time local reflections, SSDO.
 

Phediuk

Member
What is "top hardware"? This is absurd.

Late 90s and earlier: Whatever the most powerful arcade board was.

Late 90s onward: High-end gaming PCs, with a brief period from 1998-2001 in which consoles were competitive, and some overlap with Sega's Model 3 hardware from 97-99.
 
To those claiming certain titles like Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 shouldn't be mentioned because of PC games from that time frame - this is a thread about technically-advanced games, not just pretty games on high end hardware.

Uncharted 2/3 and God of War 3, and TLOU on their respective platforms and for the entire industry, raised the bar on what was happening on screen in terms of animation, physics, with AI buddies, and so on. In fact, after Uncharted 2's collapsing building, truck sequence, and the train - a LOT of games soon after began to include the dynamic playable sections that everyone was used to just being cut-scenes. A lot of it was pre-canned (you can only do so much with 256-512MB heh) but even stuff like the docks, ship, and desert in U3 were pretty sweet technical achievements.

The final Chateau sequence is one of my favorite technical playable game experiences ever.

That alone is enough for them to qualify as contenders for their respective years of release.
 

iapetus

Scary Euro Man
To those claiming certain titles like Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 shouldn't be mentioned because of PC games from that time frame - this is a thread about technically-advanced games, not just pretty games on high end hardware.

Apparently it isn't. It's exactly that; pretty games on high end hardware.
 

FLAguy954

Junior Member
You get the point! This thread isn't about being fair to the games pushing weaker hardware really hard. It's about games pushing the most powerful hardware. This is not a "games that were ahead of their time" thread in a game-design sense, hence why many of these games are fairly unimaginative with their design. Winning Run, for instance, a routine driving game, but the tech utterly smashed everything else that year, and it uses that tech well, so it wins. That's all that matters for this thread.

Exactly. I don't get why many posters here are trying to push for their favorite console game when the title simply says "most technically-advanced game" with literally no other criteria than "technically advanced."
 

Synth

Member
This is exactly the thread you are describing. Guys are talking about games that impressed them personnaly, even the OP.

There isn't any science or any established nomenklatura done in order to judge a hierarchy of techs and how they are more advanced than others. (1)

That's why "the most technically advanced game for each year" is pointless if trying to be scientific. But if it's an open discussion about what we called the "omg amazing I've never seen that before" effect, then there is a good discussion to have. Hence why, i feel a little frustrated by those high minds saying others that they don't know what they are talking about (the usual suspects you know, the same platform warriors breaking every threads lately on GAF because of their persistent insecurity) and shouldn't even be allowed to speak about it ("ewww grateful you aren't the OP"). (2)

Denying others the right to discuss a very subjective object (1) because of an authority argument (2) is what I'm seeing in this thread right now. You shouldn't be proud about this IMO.

I'm not denying anyone the right to discuss anything. I'm just suggesting that if what they wish to discuss is at odds with the OP's topic, then maybe they should become the OP of a different thread. There aren't any concrete measures of one game's technology being more advanced than another's, but when the game your comparing against does pretty much everything technologically that your suggestion does, but more, then it's hard to make a case for it, regardless of how nice you think it looks.

One way I look at it is, if you imagine swapping the games over onto each other's platform, is one of them suddenly completely infeasible in its current form? If so then it's probably more deserving of the spot in this thread.

With that said though, there has been some confusion in regards to what the OP was looking for with this thread. I initially assumed that it was the merits of each game regardless of the hardware it ran on... but it seems like he considers the power of the hardware itself to be a prerequisite. That's fine and all, but then I think some of his suggestions don't fit his own criteria (pretty much anything on any console).
 

wazoo

Member
What is "top hardware"? This is absurd.

Elite was running on Amstrad CPC, on BBC micro, on Spectrum, pretty much everything crappy or not.

Elite is a software masterpiece, but it has nothing related to technology.
 
Uncharted 2/3 and God of War 3, and TLOU on their respective platforms and for the entire industry, raised the bar on what was happening on screen in terms of animation, physics, with AI buddies, and so on. In fact, after Uncharted 2's collapsing building, truck sequence, and the train - a LOT of games soon after began to include the dynamic playable sections that everyone was used to just being cut-scenes. A lot of it was pre-canned (you can only do so much with 256-512MB heh) but even stuff like the docks, ship, and desert in U3 were pretty sweet technical achievements.
In Crysis Warhead, which came out a year earlier... there is an entire train sequence but you can actually get off the train at any time... and it is not just repeating level sections.. .but rather driving through a real multiple kiometer long space. Similarly, the facial and body animation in something like Crysis is more than comparable. As well as almost every "set piece" moment in the game being driven by an actual physics engine, and not a play backed canned cut scene. Hence why something like Arma is technically advanced, it is doing everything via simulation.

I mean... I think all those games look great on their hardware, but they are just not doing things which are necessarily new and groundbreaking, but working their technical limitations well into their art.

On the other hand, rendering wise I think something like KZSF is doing quite a god damn lot, and deserves a great contender mention for 2014. More so than infamous for example.
 

rashbeep

Banned
To those claiming certain titles like Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 shouldn't be mentioned because of PC games from that time frame - this is a thread about technically-advanced games, not just pretty games on high end hardware.

Uncharted 2/3 and God of War 3, and TLOU on their respective platforms and for the entire industry, raised the bar on what was happening on screen in terms of animation, physics, with AI buddies, and so on. In fact, after Uncharted 2's collapsing building, truck sequence, and the train - a LOT of games soon after began to include the dynamic playable sections that everyone was used to just being cut-scenes. A lot of it was pre-canned (you can only do so much with 256-512MB heh) but even stuff like the docks, ship, and desert in U3 were pretty sweet technical achievements.

That alone is enough for them to qualify as contenders for their respective years of release.

I agree, although I think contenders is all they really are. Metro 2033 for example, completely outclasses God of War 3 graphically.
 

rashbeep

Banned
2015? GTA V for PC.

Add The Order, Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Star Citizen, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Battlefront and the Division (if they actually come out).

No one really knows what Battlefront actually looks like, but that footage that was released was the most impressive out of any of the above imo.
 

JP

Member
Going through that list has just made me want a new Outrun, surely every generation should have a new Outrun. Anybody know when the 3DS version out in the west?
 

Rafterman

Banned
Some crappy examples there OP. Killzone 2 took a huge dump on Crysis when it came out, the lighting alone is a generation ahead, Uncharted 2 is no slouch either. Arma is demanding only it was badly coded and poorly optimized. Crysis 2 is another bad example, Killzone 3 raised the bar again and looked significantly better with larger levels and set pieces.

This has to be a joke. Out of all the games on that list, Crysis is probably the only game on there that is objectively the best looking game for the year it was released. You can argue other years all you like, but Crysis not only took a huge dump on Killzone 2 but every other game to come out in 2007. The only game that even came close for the next couple of years was also named Crysis, namely Warhead. It's not even about opinions, anyone claiming Crysis wasn't the best looking and most technically advanced title in 2007 is just wrong.
 

mclem

Member
Elite was running on Amstrad CPC, on BBC micro, on Spectrum, pretty much everything crappy or not.

Elite is a software masterpiece, but it has nothing related to technology.

Technology (from Greek τέχνη, techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand"; and -λογία, -logia[1]) is the collection of tools, including machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures used by humans.

Is the problem thinking that 'Technology' only pertains to 'Hardware'? It's very much not.
 
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