Very cool! But what's even more interesting to me is the effect of our brain filling in the missing details that are now explicitly rendered in modern games.
I think I felt more immersed in retro games because my brain knew that it's supposed to fill in all these details. With modern games it's close to realistic, but not quite, and my brain doesn't even try to fill in what's missing. It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen.
I'm also constantly surprised how little graphics matter for an enjoyable experience. A game with amazing graphics blows my mind for 15 minutes. But then I'm used it and I stop caring about visuals altogether, unless they get in my way.
And in my mind the quality has always felt essentially the same, through CS, CS:Source, CS:GO and now CS2.
Each was a significant rendering upgrade. And I know I could never go back an iteration, but going forward as it has, the game in my mind's eye is just how CS looks and how it's always looked.
I'm the opposite about "retro" gaming though. Having experienced better fidelity and more readable fonts and better sound, I struggle to play games which don't have that, or worse, deliberately choose bad font rendering as a "retro" effect.
It's why one of my favourite games is Factorio, because it's almost the opposite of retro.
Despite being sprite based, it's the cutting edge of modern sprite rendering. The sprites are generated from 3d renders, and you don't find yourself suddenly in 640x480 or crappy fonts out of some nod to the ages.
> It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen.
I‘ve noticed that as well. I much prefer say Tomb Raider 2 with its clear edges and flat surfaces to the modern ones with all the foliage and clutter and lighting effects. But I put that down to getting old.
this is why I never could get into counterstrike after 1.6
it's not just the visual noise, it's also the inconsistent behavior introduced by those details.
Yes everything being flat boxes was boring looking but I knew exactly what would happen when I tried to shoot through it or bounce a grenade off of it.
Now it's not obvious if that stack of sandbags is actually a single surface and my grenade will bounce off of a gap or if it will go through it. Or if that random bucket I'm shooting at is synced on the server and real or is a local prop.
> It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen
This has made me really appreciate art direction over raw fidelity. The first party PS5 games are all beautiful, but Horizon Forbidden West was almost difficult to look at because there's just so much detail everywhere, much of it irrelevant. In contrast God of War Ragnarok is just as beautiful, but the art direction is much better suited for the gameplay, so I never had problems with losing important details in the sea of fidelity. Horizon is like blowing out your taste buds on pure sugar.
> I think I felt more immersed in retro games because my brain knew that it's supposed to fill in all these details.
I remember having a great time playing Rise of the Triad[1], both single player and against my buddy. I was quite good at the time, and often won against my buddy.
Some years ago I fired it up again, and set it to the 320x200 pixels I used to play with, with pixel doubling to get it to about the size of my then ~13" monitor (can't recall except my later 15" was a decent upgrade).
And I couldn't play at all. Anything beyond about 2 feet was just a mess of random pixels. Felt like I had a severe case of myopia.
Yet I also vividly recalled how teenage me would fire rockets at those two pixels over there, killing my buddy...
And proper roguelikes (Hack/Nethack/Moria) and text adventures.
Also, the CRT blended the pixels, so Max Payne with the CRT color contrast looked almost real life. Nowadays, not so much. LCD screens look dull.
I think I felt more immersed in retro games because my brain knew that it's supposed to fill in all these details. With modern games it's close to realistic, but not quite, and my brain doesn't even try to fill in what's missing. It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen.
I'm also constantly surprised how little graphics matter for an enjoyable experience. A game with amazing graphics blows my mind for 15 minutes. But then I'm used it and I stop caring about visuals altogether, unless they get in my way.