Why do so many games from the 90's and 2000's look similar graphically?

[Dweller Dark]

Since I generally play older games, I see that a lot of them share graphics, even if they're by different companies. Some of this can be attributed to licensing engines and/or whatever software, or released sourcecode, but I've never quite understood how companies without those can use similar graphics. Do they just buy a copy of their competitor's game and study it's engine? Are the methods the same, but with different software and hardware? What's the legality of all this?

[DooM Bear]

Do you mean like stock assets? I.e. you find the exact same barrel or wall texture etc. across a bunch of different games?

 

If so, this is due to the devs buying access to an asset library so they don’t have to spend a bunch of time and effort creating these assets and can just pop them straight into their game.

 

Decino did a good video about the audio side of this for doom and thus you can hear a bunch of doom sounds in other games and media (I.e. the door sound, the imp sound, etc.). 

[Doomkid]

I think there's merit to the idea of devs looking at how other devs do things and taking inspiration from their methods. Doom/Duke3D is a fine example, they have completely different engines and assets but still look and play superficially similar. I'm sure this is because 3D Realms/Ken Silverman used Doom as the guide for how to make an FPS engine, but of course written differently from-scratch. It would not be surprising to me if the same is true for things like Super Mario/Sonic, or any other cases where the game was clearly heavily inspired by an existing game.

 

As for old consoles, both N64 and Playstaton games each had their definitive looks - Playstation had more detailed textures but really warpy/stretchy walls (even when not intended), whereas N64 had blurrier textures but without any of the weird wall wobble. I'm no programmer or console engineer, but I'm going to guess they look that way due to hardware limitations, and naturally that means all of the games made for each platform are going to succumb to those hardware limits and as a result look similar in various ways.

[Dweller Dark]

58 minutes ago, DooM Bear said:

Do you mean like stock assets? I.e. you find the exact same barrel or wall texture etc. across a bunch of different games?

 

If so, this is due to the devs buying access to an asset library so they don’t have to spend a bunch of time and effort creating these assets and can just pop them straight into their game.

 

Decino did a good video about the audio side of this for doom and thus you can hear a bunch of doom sounds in other games and media (I.e. the door sound, the imp sound, etc.). 

 

Now that I think of it, it probably is stock assets along with the type of object being textured. Quake had fairly polygonal shapes, which is also in Aliens versus Predator 2, both having a somewhat "alien" look to the textures. Half Life had a similar style too, with Xen architecture being polygonal and covered in alien textures. 

 

I did watch Decino's video on that and I've heard the Doomguy grunt in another game before, as well as the door-slide sound in Cyberpunk. It's just weird seeing all the games from that era looking roughly the same across the board.

[lazygecko]

I'd say a lot of it just comes down to artists converging around a common pool of styles that were proven to work well within the technical constraints of the time. This is also when 3D graphics had finally been heavily codified around a rigid set of standards, while in the early 90s a lot of devs were experimenting with in retrospect more unorthodox methods to render 3D or 3D-esque graphics.

[Bauul]

2 hours ago, DavetheDoomguy said:

Quake had fairly polygonal shapes, which is also in Aliens versus Predator 2, both having a somewhat "alien" look to the textures. Half Life had a similar style too, with Xen architecture being polygonal and covered in alien textures. 

 

Well any 3D engine game in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to look "polygonal" because that's what 3D engines used (and still use) to show 3D models.  There just wasn't the rendering power to make the polygons too small to notice individually yet.

 

I wonder if you're also noticing early texture-filtering too.  Many early 3D accelerated games used rudimentary texture filtering combined with low res textures (because it was the best tech available at the time) and it does give them a pretty unique look compared to modern games.  

[Nevander]

It's funny, I actually feel the complete opposite. Older games all manage to look different and unique even if some share base engines or some assets.

 

Rather I've noticed modern games tend to all look the same. Especially years ago when pretty much every single damn game that came out used Unreal Engine 3. You can spot that engine from a mile away and so many games at the time were using it.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

I think it depends on what genre you are talking about. But early games didn't have a lot of things we take for granted in 3D graphics nowadays, and unless they used a unique artstyle they ended up looking similar to the rest.

[seed]

That depends on the game, many shared assets and since they used similar engines they had the tendency to look somewhat same-ish, but not really. Those with distinctive art styles did not.

 

I agree with Nevander, in fact, I think modern games had the tendency to look more same-y than old ones, especially in the glory days of UE3 as the visuals of that engine were striking, you could tell from a mile if a game was using it, and many of those felt similar just because of it.

[ReaperAA]

So it seems that I am not the only one who could easily see a UE3 game :D

[Gez]

5 hours ago, Bauul said:

Well any 3D engine game in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to look "polygonal" because that's what 3D engines used (and still use) to show 3D models.  There just wasn't the rendering power to make the polygons too small to notice individually yet.

This didn't stop some people from trying different approaches; such as Ecstatica which used ellipses for characters, resulting in a kind of balloon animal look.

 

[hybridial]

I like how this is suggestive that most games 2010s don't have this problem. In fact I think they have it worse. 

[seed]

3 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

So it seems that I am not the only one who could easily see a UE3 game :D

 

Whether that's a good or bad thing depends I guess :p.

 

It sure led to an odd sameness among less distinct games at times, but since I actually liked the way UE3 games typically looked, it didn't bother me that much, as some of those are also among my favorite games, visuals included, such as Arkham Knight.

 

For an UE3 game AK looked amazing.

Edited January 7, 2021 by seed : typo.

[Mr. Freeze]

35 minutes ago, seed said:

 

Whether that's a good or bad things depends I guess :p.

 

It sure led to an odd sameness among less distinct games at times, but since I actually liked the way UE3 games typically looked, it didn't bother me that much, as some of those are also among my favorite games, visuals included, such as Arkham Knight.

 

For an UE3 game AK looked amazing.

 

I'd have fonder memories of the UE3 era if the majority of games didn't have this awful color correction overlay. Everything looked so damn ugly. 

 

Also your avatar. I want source on it now.

[cambreaKer]

12 minutes ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Also your avatar. I want source on it now.

 

[seed]

7 minutes ago, cambreaKer said:

 

 

Yeah, heh.

 

I still have the OG link if you're interested on where exactly I found it, Freeze.

[Mr. Freeze]

Yes please, reverse image searching doesn't net me any results. 

[SilverMiner]

They don't lol

[MrFlibble]

Personally, I could not help but notice that the enemy sprites in 2.5D id Software engine games -- Wolf3D, Blake Stone, Doom, Heretic, Hexen and Strife -- do have something in common between them (e.g. if you look at how human/humanoid enemies are drawn) which cannot be explained by the small resolution and limited palette alone. I'm not sure if there was any cross-pollination between the artists working on all these projects. I think it's a good thing, actually, because it creates a sense of continuity and coherence among the games that you're playing.

 

I'm not talking about Capstone stuff

But actually Corridor 7 at least also has kinda-sorta similar style but more cartoonish.

[wallabra]

Wait, you mean graphically, or aesthetically?

[Bucket]

3D acceleration was in its infancy and hardware wasn't powerful enough to accommodate creative diversity in games. The first big stylistic shift in 3D was cel shading which only started to pop up in the Quake 3 era. Until then 3D was kind of considered to be a subgenre.

[wallabra]

Subgenre? I reckon they were pretty popular! Maybe in a kind of underground way in the early days, but nevertheless. I suppose that in retrospect that would make more sense, since having 3D spaces running on your computer was, up until the 90s, more of an academic field than anything else.

 

Or maybe you mean a subgenre of other shooters, like Metroid?

 

Also, I don't remember all that many cel shading games from the late 90s / early 2000s. I think American McGee did one once?

 

[Taw Tu'lki]

Maybe because technologies weren't so high as now and some companies can't some shooters that were surpassed of popular hits.

And I know some companies that were so poor that they can't make a good game with super technologies.