The Beauty Of Pre-Rendered Graphics From GameTalesHQ - Luke Reacts

let's see this this is something from game tales HQ and this is just a a little video on the Timeless beauty of pre-rendered graphics and it's just a really really solid little thing uh making you appreciate this style of uh graphical representation that used to be very very common and now is almost unheard of it's extremely rare nowadays but look at this especially this this little open Montage it it's going to make you feel really really old um this is the original like balers gate box and everything and do you guys remember like did you grow up around this time when they had these monitors that were like this thick and they would hum and then the keyboards were also massive and when you would just like touch them they would Creak and squeak like rough gross plastic those were the days man those were the days back at the PC games of the late '90s and early 2000s there's a distinct VIs ual style that I believe truly stands the test of time it's when the game employs pre-rendered Graphics paired with an isometric perspective curious about what that looks like here let me show you Desperados basically what it is is that they render out assets fully and then they have NPCs in like Sprites oh dude that's this was my stuff I played the ever living crap out of stronghold like oh my God I played these games so hard but they'd basically render the asset and then they'd have it all in these little bitty Sprites and then those Sprites could be placed on screen now like factorio would be another example he'll probably Show and The Perks of this is that it's extremely easy to run and so you get these games that are massive but run on by today's standards potatoes I mean like they can run on a Cassio wrist watch or like an Apple Watch easily easily um just extremely extremely efficient downsides are like because they're pre-rendered you can't go above a certain frame rate so like like factorio for example you can't play that above 60 frames because the Sprites are all rendered at 60 frames so you can't go above it because it it won't do anything you could double the frame rate but it's still just going to be the same as as the Sprite count or Sprite frame rate um so there's like that downside of course it's not full 3d you can't freely move the camera but a lot of these games have rendered multiple angles of building so you can rotate or they'll rotate the building with you there's all sorts of stuff that you can do but uh yeah it's extremely common in the early 2000s yeah Sim City plcape torment 99 oh yeah Roller Coaster Tycoon used it yeah Roller Coaster Tycoon if you also have never seen like the the videos breaking down how they coded that it is madness it is absolute Madness the fact that it works at all is crazy yeah the original Fallout games oh man is it just me or do these games look just as beautiful as they did over 20 years ago the rich details the handcrafted feel and level of cohesion all culminate into one of my favorite Aesthetics of that era where did the style come from you might ask well allow me to explain back in the late '90s realtime 3D Gra ICS were still in its infancy these early games were usually pixelated lacked details and suffered low frame rates rendering complex scenes in real time requires a lot of processing oh dude yeah when shooters were all on the keyboard you didn't even use a mouse on it so like he's using uh the the directional buttons with WD and everything oh man power and memory which many computers at a time simply didn't have to achieve a higher level of fidelity developers thought of a solution they'd create high detailed environments characters and objects then render them on powerful PCS athetic images or sequences of images all assets were created with a fixed isometric perspective this means they are viewed diagonally from above despite their static nature isometric pre-rendered Graphics can create the illusion of depth and three-dimensionality through clever use of shading lighting and perspective techniques since these games didn't require rendering most or any of their assets in real time developers could pack them with far more detail than the true 3D counter parts this particular art style was most prominently seen in role playing strategy and management games I'd say the Golden Age started with the first Diablo in 1997 and ended around the start of 2003 with Sim City 4 occasionally you'd still stumble upon a game using this art style but by the end of 2004 it had largely become obsolete which leads me to the question why was this technique mostly abandoned by the mid 20000s my guess is just because 3D stuff was easier to sell like especially in like 2003 2004 that like if a game was not 3D it's it's almost like if an animated movie nowadays is not 3D animation and it's like 2D people get weirdly like almost not not quite turned off by it but they're like okay you know the exception of course being clouse klouse I will die for that movie is phenomenal if you've never watched klouse do it it's a Christmas movie that will tug at your heartstrings and I yeah technically well they use they use like a really if you should watch the documentary they did on it um because they use like an AI tool to shade it so it appears 3D even though it's like 2D it's really really cool it's fascinating it's so good pepp Farms remembers yeah yeah it's so good it's such a good movie oh my God the whole reason this technique was used in the first place was due to Hardware limitations look at that however as we entered the mid step aside the 4090 look at that thing wow w we w we wa look at that then you compare it to like the modern gpus that have like three fans and are this thick and oh my God it's ridiculous but look at that thing wow thousands rapit ADV no okay who said balding I'm talking about the graphics card chill out the guy's living his life look at that thing oh yeah look at that oh and the heat spreaders this thing ain't overheating try to overheat it it's not doing anything oh yeah and then the V uh what is it VGA or is it vag the vag uh whatever that the port that had screws that one sucked but yeah that was that was a thing I remember those those are so stupid back in the day when computer plugs had screws in them I think we should retroactively call it the vag Port I think that's what we should say new graphics hardware and rendering emerged these advancements made it possible to render 3D Graphics in real time that didn't look like a slideshow pretty clean smooth looking animation consider I mean compared to the Doom type stuff oh how the times have changed another reason for the switch to 3D is the limitation of pre-rendered Graphics in terms of interactivity and adaptability as games evolved to become more complex the use of pre-rendered Graphics became increasingly impractical the same applied to the development of pre-rendered this also I'm just going to say like this is an Nvidia e304 demo so like every time we see Tech demos people always say yeah but we're never going to see this actually employed and you might not see that particular instance employed by a game development company or something but every time we've gotten like Tech demos graphically speaking we've overcome it and surpassed it we'll see Tech demos of stuff where they're like look at our AI systems isn't this amazing and sometimes those don't see the light of day just because it's not actually like they were just lying it's like no this wasn't running in real time this was all scripted made up but when they're showing like this is real time running you know Graphics it's super specialized but yeah it's running in real time we always eventually catch up to it and surpass it so when you see like those those Tech demos of Unreal Engine yes they're extremely specialized and very carefully arranged to look amazing but that will be a thing like that level of quality will eventually happen it's crazy F became increasingly impractical the same applied to the development of pre-rendered Graphics if you wanted to change an asset you couldn't simply tweak it you had to fully re render it being able to tweak a model within a couple of clicks meant developers could work a lot faster you're inclined to think that was it for the aesthetic right well I'm happy to report it's made a bit of a comeback especially in the Indie Scene It seems I'm not the only one who still adors that pre- rended look Obsidian Entertainment released a game called pillars of Eternity in 2015 developed by crpg veterans like Josh Sawyer Tim Kane and Chris Avalon obsidian would drop two more games in this graphical Style with tyranny and pillars of Eternity dead fight another relatively recent game with an amazing pre-rendered art style is Disco elesium in this game they went for a more painting like aesthetic next up are the it's also kind of hybrid cuz it's like this stuff is all pre-rendered but the character models and NPCs that sit on top of it you know it's not Sprite based or anything they're actual models being rendered in real time but yeah disco Elum is beautiful brotherhoods games they are in any Studio that made four adventure games in this style called cane stasis beautiful desolation and stasis bone totem then there are also games that keep the isometric perspective but don't use pre-rendered graphics and go for handdrawn Sprites instead like all of super Giants as games alongside all of these new releases a lot of classic games have received remaster treatment this allows people to enjoy these Timeless games on Modern machines and man do they look beautiful on there it's a testament of why hardware and budget limitations can produce some incredible art in a world where AAA Studios relentlessly pursue photo realism nothing inherently wrong with that of course I'm happy to see the preservation of these older games and the passing of the torch to create new ones I've compiled a list of my favorite games in this style that I think deserve your attention feel free to pause the video if you need to yeah absolutely Roller Coaster Tycoon Age of Empires Diablo 2 stronghold I don't know how the original Sims holds up Robinhood games oh yeah there's just so many all of these play all of them of course there are plenty more games that use this art Stronghold Crusader this is one in particular I've spent a stupid amount of time playing Stronghold Crusader we specifically had on like our family computer that could run it somehow and uh yeah we played so much Stronghold Crusader so much I'm also just going to say that stockpile way too small way too small if your stockpile doesn't spill out the back and then basically create a basketball court behind the the stronghold what are what are you playing what are you even doing style but this is a nice place to start I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to me ramble on about video game art if you want to see more retrospective content like this I'd really appreciate it if you like the video leave a comment and subscribe to the channel hell yeah go give him a sub I'll share the the link in chat real quick um and uh just a really solid retrospective video and how refreshing to have a video uh and I'm saying this as a YouTuber that is part of the problem um how refreshing I have a video that's that's 5 minutes long covers the topic nice and cleanly answers it abruptly and and precisely instead of being like 35 minutes filled with random sound effects of VHS tapes and stuff like this is this is very nice I understand why the art style is no longer common place but still he took my thing wag red flag 16 times the detail [Music]

Channel: Luke Stephens LIVE

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Id: UmeaBSp3LCs

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024