Is basically horseshit, straight out of the horse's arse.

It's basically like being a fan of 1920s ballroom music and then making a lo-fidelity stuttering crackle'n'pop lossless FLAC of ballroom music, claiming that what made that era great was not the passion, melody, groove, and integrity of the music, but all the unavoidable shit quality recording of that music due to limits of that time. And then doing a fucking half-arsed job of sort of recreating the music, but putting a lot more effort into recreating the shit quality recording.

Devs, repeat after me until you get it into your stupid thick skulls:

WHAT MADE SOME RETRO GAMES GREAT WERE THE POSITIVE QUALITIES OF THOSE GAMES (directness, simplicitiy, player controls, imagination, themes, atmosphere, action, violence, creativity), NOT UNAVOIDABLE TECHNICAL LIMITS THAT GOT IN THE WAY OF THOSE QUALITIES. 

Give it time and you'll have algorithms that can far surpass anything any human can do creatively. 

Sure there are lots of small devs attempting modern retro shooters who lack the resources to go far beyond the limits of older tech. Totally fair enough. But it's just as important to focus on those positive qualities of older FPSes and do a really good job within that genre and within those limits, rather than using those limits as an excuse to churn out shit "Hey this is old-fashioned and out-dated, that's our USP". Nope, all the nope. 

An artificially low resolution can work as a deliberate art style, IF and I think only if, the underlying graphics are low fidelity and would gain nothing from being seen in a higher resolution.

Take vanilla quake, and start with a modern screen resolution, then try lowering it, and keep lowering it, until you reach a point where the ability to read the scene really suffers if you go any lower.

Take Doom 3, and do the same exercise. You will find you can't go as low as you can with quake.

It seems the people doing this Probeus thing haven't quite grasped this incredibly advanced concept. 

Dusk was made by one person. 

And it is fun (if occasionally eyeball-hurting). 

I'd rather move at a hedgehog's pace in HeXen II. 

Hexen 2 aged poorly because of its obtuse and tedious level design...

Therefore I fully expect one of these "retro fps" games to come out that perfectly mimics this obtuse and tedious level design, just because the developers think that's the sort of thing retro gamers cherish and is something to be celebrated...

:ponkie: 

i started playing dusk yesterday...

and... i'm afraid to say, but...

right now i love more dusk than quake

(i'm feeling like a traitor... please don't block my account) 

 

I'm glad I don't understand Dusk, but it costs money? Apex Legends and Fortnite are free, so is also CS:GO and a few other games now with a lot higher production quality overall. Why pay for an inferior product just because you fell for the hype? Yes, I hate CS:GO and I don't play Fortnite but I can't hate on them for being free to play because at least they are honest about being worthless.

Come on, I just want to read you defend purchasing Dusk so I can feel smug sbout myself for choosing not to waste time and money on it. 

No thanks. 

Quake1 is the ultimest best game EVER, despite its old graphics, period!

I keep playing this gem years after years, since what, 20 years!? All the rest sucks in comparison. 

Quake nowadays is not Quake in 1996. Playing community content is not the same thing as playing what id Software released.

I usually play the first half of episode 1 sometimes, as well as the first map of the other episodes, but I doubt anyone regularly plays the full game anymore.

Saying "best game EVER", "all the rest sucks" is easy when comparing community content in Quake against the base content of other old games. Without the community content, there are better games out there. 

I fully agree. I was implicitely talking about Quake1 as it is today and about all the great maps that were done for it. Quake1 kept evolving, year after year, and this is why no other game can compares. 

I actually play the original episodes quite often as a quick stress free romp. Whenever I download a new custom map the perfectionist in me demands me to fully evaluate everything the map has to offer, so I can give it a fair and useful review here and/or Quaddicted.

Sometimes I enjoy the reviewing part but often, when I just want to unwind with some Quake without having to think and contribute, I play an episode or two, sometimes even blitz through the whole game. 

"WHAT MADE SOME RETRO GAMES GREAT WERE THE POSITIVE QUALITIES OF THOSE GAMES (directness, simplicitiy, player controls, imagination, themes, atmosphere, action, violence, creativity), NOT UNAVOIDABLE TECHNICAL LIMITS THAT GOT IN THE WAY OF THOSE QUALITIES."

The bit after the "NOT" got us more of the bit before the "NOT"


You could only go so far with the glowy cumgoggle stuff, which due to limited options limited the manpower worth throwing at it, which left more resources to focus on what would differentiate and sell the game: "gamefeel"

And for atmosphere etc the limits are nothing to talented artists, as demonstrated by golden oldies that hold up perfectly well today in that department, even though they lack cumgoggle filters. 

A retro-styled shooter should, on the basis, have similar design elements from 90's shooters before Half Life, even if the graphics are high-end.

On the topic of low-poly graphics, I agree there's a big misunderstanding amongst the makers of those retro-styled FPSes. While it was indeed at the time because of technical limitations, I believe low-poly graphics can still be used to do pretty things, but not the Dusk kind.

What the minimum threshold should be IMO is Quake 2 as far as polycount go. Characters and monsters have curves, and some details (which is then reinforced by texture work). Anything below that looks like papercraft.
As for environment? I believe the best custom Quake maps in the past few years has elevated the standart, and is something that should be followed if a retro-FPS is made.
Unreal 1 and Tournament should also be a good inspiration for what to achieve in that regard. 

No particular game deserves to be held up as the aesthetic "template" for retro-shooters. It's more about aesthetic consistency. I think it's just as fine to aim for a Classic Doom look, as it is a Quake 3 look. The number of goons you can rope into helping you make this thing is also going to dictate the level of detail you can afford to make in a realistic time.

It's about making all the elements fit in with each other. Wolf3D environments mixed in with 10,000 polygon character models is, as the kids say, "retarded". 

I'm a big fan of low poly art, I think its a genuine artistic challenge that often results in a brilliant aesthetic if done well. Polycount's low poly threads were filled with fantastic work (image hosting is shaky and most images are lost now) and you have games like Devil Daggers that pull it off and look fantastic.
However lots of retro throwbacks just don't look good. Part of that is that they don't match any specific era or tech but the biggest problem is that they're just not artistically well done.

Prodeus has a strange aesthetic but the models rendered as sprites is pretty cool as far as tech gimmicks go. However the lighting and shading makes everything hard to see, it kind of turns everything into a speckled mess with all of the specular highlights everywhere. The particles are also excessive and obscure so much.
It kind of kills the biggest strength of sprites, that is visual clarity
Also why on god's earth is it doing the 'bloody screen, so real' garbage? I thought we got over that years ago. 

"It looks like the work of a single amateur indie developer done in his spare time (of which I would respect a lot more), but instead it is made by a team of paid people working full-time?"

I'm pretty sure that it was only a couple of devs, mostly Dave Oshry, that made the game. 

It worked for ROTT and STRAFE 

David Szymanski 

"I keep playing this gem years after years, since what, 20 years!? All the rest sucks in comparison."

"Quake1 kept evolving, year after year, and this is why no other game can compares."

Well the same can be said for several other older games I could name, Doom and Thief among my favorites right up there with Quake. Honestly this is why old PC games that are relatively easy to modify/make new content for is my favorite type of game. There's just a practically endless stream of new stuff that ends up pushing the game aesthetically and technically beyond what it is out of the box, and you can also get people who deeply understand the game mechanics who will keep pushing the skill ceiling higher and higher, or just people doing their own oddball thing. You can probably see more of the latter two facets in Doom (just because it's a bigger scene), but it's still found in Quake and I love it. Even people doing more "average" maps show their own personality. Honestly at this point I almost feel like any action game that can't be modified in this way (or that can, but happens to be prohibitively time-consuming or difficult to do so) is just wasted potential.