thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
It didn't though, not at all, DOA2 DC characters beat them all in polycounts and every Tekken after TTT had lower polygon models too (and also less painstacking detailing to stuff like the different specular settings to account for different materials etc.), as did the impressive VF4 ports.
And even so in DOA2 you can get 3 characters on screen in the tag mode, in TTT one first disappears. It did top Sc as it's a really modest Dreamcast game tech wise, it was their first (and last) big DC/next gen game after all and paved the way for TTT in terms of character modeling etc.
Well when I was saying "more detailed" I didn't just mean in terms of poly counts. But also things like the textures, the color depth, outfit designs and artistic choices. The DOA2 characters might have more polygons (just going off what you said), but Tekken 5's characters look noticeably better in spite of that. It's a combination of things.
Modelers simply got better at utilizing less polygons for better form (and not wasting polygons for unseen things like 3D teeth in TTT). VF3tb DC character polycounts are similar to the PS2's VF4 ports (and eclipse Sc's) yet the game looks far more crude, since it's an older 1996 pioneer.
That's not the only reason; the art style is also less sophisticated and realized than VF4's, and I think that accounts for more on the overall impact than some initially realize.
The western release just traded it for extra blur. People always love major widespread flaws in Sony systems but trash every imperfection elsewhere, from the polygon and texture warping and gaping geometry seams on PS1 to the blurry, aliased, low res & low quality video output of 2.
TBF, I don't excuse or pretend those flaws exist. PS1's texture warping is very infamous because they cut corners going with fixed integer math for the GTE instead of floats. But it's also really funny in hindsight to see how some of the biggest games that gen (any platform) did similar things for calculating polygons, geometry, collision etc.
For example, Super Mario 64.
Soulcalibur was impressive at the time but not an example for the age, it was a rushed port (only a few months dev, check the release dates of the arcade original...and the DC release.)
DOA 2 is a better example (1999 Naomi game):
Tekken 4 has lower character polycount than DOA2:
According to Beyond3D, DOA2 characters are almost 3X Soulcalibur...
Tekken 5 is pretty cool as i said but nothing breathtaking. Of course, backgrounds are more detailed than DOA2 since there are multiple layers in DOA2:
Reduce DOA's level size and you'll get more details as well...
Produce a new Dreamcast DOA with 2004 tools and you'll again have graphic improvements. The guy on youtube is already enhancing DOA2 with better textures, higher polycount, new lights, effects, normal mapping and he has a lot of new ideas
I'm not downplaying T5's graphics, i was just seeing great graphics since 1996 Scud Race... So, i found the T5 art pretty cool (waterfalls, Treasure stage and the following T6 on ps3 was pretty lackluster) but nothing mindblowing. It's good but it was...2005.
FWIW I'm sure you could squeeze more out of Tekken 5 on PS2 as well, there just seem to be less hobbyists interested in doing that type of stuff because the common POV is PS2 was a "well-realized" system in terms of games making strong use of its potential, whereas the Dreamcast isn't, since it died so early commercially.
So that motivates hobbyists to push one over the other well after the fact and I think sometimes people mistake that as meaning the underdog (DC in this case) not only had so much gas left in the tank, but other systems (like PS2) were just completely maxed out. I don't think that's necessarily true even for systems like PS2, they just probably have less headroom for improvements on games by hobbyists than a Dreamcast does.
I think there’s some revisionist history going on…I also always had a top end PC my whole life but when the Dreamcast launched, it was a leap. I was excited to show it off because people were slack jawed when they saw it. My friend’s mom thought NFL2K was a live football game at first glance. I loved me some PC gaming, but nothing in 99 touched what Dreamcast was putting out.
Yeah, I don't think anything on PC was touching Dreamcast in '98 or even '99. There was nothing on the market in terms of combined visuals, tech, and scope that was as much a total package as Sonic Adventure was, for example. Especially considering that game was only two years after Super Mario 64, and released the same year as OoT and Banjo-Kazooie.
Also people gotta keep in mind Shenmue dropped in (very late) '99, and that was also in a league of its own vs. basically every other game in the market at the time. Including on PC.
The first screenshots from the DC blew me away when I saw them in a magazine back in the day. Virtua Fighter 3 seemed like HD for me. Played Crazy Taxi to death later when I got the DC.
To answer the question about power: Could Resident Evil 4 be ported?
Probably. But with less geometry and worst lighting than the PS2 version, and lower particle effects. Cleaner output image and potentially sharper textures for certain background objects, though.
Both it and the PS2 version would still be noticeably worst than the GameCube one though, visually. At times the GameCube version seemed a generation ahead of PS2's, but a lot of that may've also been due to the PS2 version being a bit rushed. For example Silent Hill 3 has much better textures than PS2 version of RE4, so better textures were possible.