CRAP Poll: Does The Tech Still Impress?

So this CRAP* poll is ever-so-slightly less random and pointless this
time. I mean, not /much/ less; it's just enough less CRAP that I'm not
going to be giving you the usual silly options. Yup, this time you
can't just pick from A, B or C; you gotta WRITE out your response. You
might even have to think about it first!


(Obviously, I expect many fewer responses this time** ;-)


Anyway, here's the question for this month's poll. It's about tech in
video games. Specifically:

Does the technology in games impress you anymore?

And by 'tech', I mean anything from graphics, physics, world-size, AI;
stuff like that. The underlying software and hardware that powers our
games. When you load up a new game, is any of that still making you
go, 'Wow! I didn't know PCs could do that" or "Hey, that's really
neat"? If so, which games? If not, can you remember the last time that
happened?




As for me...

Many of you probably know that I've been gaming almost since the
inception of the hobby and for the longest time, I was almost
continually in a state of amazement at all the new things video game
developers were coming up with. As hard as it may be to imagine, even
"PONG" felt like something out of an impossible future; I just wiggle
these paddles and the bar on the TV screen moves in response to my
commands? It was fucking incredible! Games like "PacMan" brought color
into this world***. "Zork" had a text parser that could understand the
English language. "Might & Magic" had huge open worlds. "Wolfenstein
3D" had smooth-scrolling 3D. Not every game brought innovation to the
hobby --and some of those 'innovations' were little more than
improvements to existing ideas; GTA3's open world was incredible, but
was it really more novel than "Might & Magic"?-- but they still
impressed me.

But it occurred to me that aspect of gaming has largely been missing
from modern gaming. There's very little modern games do these days
that make wow me, at least from a technical front. Sure, developers
--especially the Indies-- still impress me with their artistic chops
or new game-play mechanics, but the underlying tech? It's all so
ordinary. Maybe the graphics are a little bit sharper, the framerate a
little bit smoother; perhaps the gameworlds are slightly larger and
the AI a little bit less brain-dead. But nothing that sets me aback
the way it used to.

VR didn't really impress me except as a gimmick; I struggle to see the
difference that raycasting adds to the visuals, and developers keep
playing the same tricks with physics engines. Maybe new large-language
model "AI" will change things up with games, but so far I've yet to
see anything progress past gimmick stage.

The last game I can recall that made me go, "Shit, that's awesome" was
"Star Wars Battlefront II" for its lush photogrammetric forests... and
that came out in 2017, almost seven years ago!

Again, that's not to say I get no enjoyment from games, or even that I
don't see things that impress me, but these are often despite the
underlying tech, not because of it. Unity --which many games use-- is
never going to be considered cutting-edge, but a good artist can make
use of its limited capabilities to render gorgeous scenes, and a good
game designer can come up with new mechanics that will keep me
enthralled for weeks even if it doesn't require a 24-core CPU. 

So does the tech impress me anymore? Sadly not. Maybe this is a good
thing; maybe it means game designers will have to depend on quality
design to sell their games now. But I sort of miss the thrill of
firing up a new game and seeing some new wonder I hadn't even imagined
possible a few years before. Like a game with completely destructible
terrain, or a world-map millions of kilometers across, or being able
to kick out the legs of a bad guy and having him tumble realistically
to the floor. For the longest time, this thrill was an integral part
of the hobby, and now that it's gone, I miss it.


What about you? Does the tech still impress? Did it ever? And do you
care?





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* Completely Random And Pointless, true believers. Nuff said!
** But if you ARE one of the respondents, that obviously means you are
more thoughtful and less lazy than your peers who sat this one out.
You know, if that's the sort of thing that motivates you to press the
REPLY button. ;-)
*** Yes, I know PacMan wasn't the first color video game. But it was
early enough to benefit from the switchover.