Style and aesthetic only go so far. The low poly counts and blurry textures will still drag it down for anyone not already enamoured with legacy 3D graphics.
Pixel art games seem to have much more longevity than early 3D
this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
25 points (82.1% liked)
Games
38588 readers
1544 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here and here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I don't entirely agree.
Say what you will about what it did with the characters, but Sly 4 took the level design and art to new heights, and that was thanks to modern advancements in graphics.
Rift Apart does the same for Ratchet and Clank.
Jak hit differently though. It had a good mix of great platforming and creative use of graphics. If anything without Jak I wouldn't have played rift apart or sly.
Ok?
I'm saying is that modern game engines and rendering tech allow a lot of the things that are good about these games to be turned up to eleven, both in terms of gameplay and art.
I think a modern port for other systems would do very well, Sony just isn't interested in reviving the series which does suck. They did HD versions for PS3 which regained some interest in the franchise, but then they just ported the PS2 versions for PS4/PS5...
If we can have those HD versions on Steam, it'd be a huge deal. Right now most people can't play the game without jumping through hoops. As an aside, you can play the decompiled versions on PC using OpenGOAL.
Wow. This opengoal project is so cool!
You made me dig through old boxes to find my Jak games. I know what I'm doing this weekend :)
OpenGOAL runs flawlessly ime. For TPL and Jak 2, there are some extra qol settings and some added secrets to mess around with (in Jak 2, you can unlock cheats for invulnerable vehicles throughout the city, real time of day, turbo jetboard, etc). They're still working on Jak 3, but you could always get PCSX2 for that one. PCSX2 is a fantastic emulator for PS2 games that also works pretty much flawlessly. It's how I replayed the old Sly games and a bunch of others.
I played the HD version on a PS3 emulator and honestly didn't notice that much of a difference from the PS2 game with upscaled resolution.
I think the point of this post, which I agree with, is that the PS2 version that is available via emulators or on the PS store currently is good enough as it is and the series doesn't need revived at all.
Sort of in the same vein is that I tried playing MGS1 twin snakes which is the gamecube remake of the PS1 game. Maybe it's nostalgia of the original being my favorite game of all time, but it just didn't hit the same for me as the original. It's just about the closest thing to what a modern "remake" would look like, except I guess with the graphics of how the new remastered snake eater game looks instead of the GC graphics.
It sucks that people might skip timeless classics like these because they're not remastered with updated graphics.
There's actually somewhat of a resurgence for retro-ish games even among new gamers.
General consumers are mostly keeping up with the latest releases or updates because that's what their friends or streamers are talking about. High fidelity adds to that but I don't know if that's the big draw. Especially since things like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite seem to be the juggernauts right now.
Its just harder to create new conversations around something like Ps2 games because all the talk around them has passed.
These graphics trends are basically the opposite for indie games. Look at Schedule 1 and STRAFTAT.
Abiotic Factor, which is a new open world survival game based on a mix of og Half-Life and SCP, so the graphics and models look like they come from the 90s or early 2000s.
Hands of Necromancy (and pretty much all other GZDoom games for that matter) all look like they came right out of 1996 - with the exception of Selaco. That game is actually beautiful.
Going Medieval has a slight pixel/voxel look to it.
There's also Ultracop, which I think is made by one person and also looks straight out of the 90s. It's also only like $2 and it's a decent time waster.
Pseudoregalia, Fly Knight, Lunacid, Verho, Dread Delusion, Nightmare Kart...
These are just from my own games list. I'm not sure why I even made this comment. Sort of a recommendations list I guess?