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Examples of parts of games we only have because of the limitations developers had at the time of development

Multievolution

Multievolution

Member
Jun 5, 2018
3,217
Hypothetical, let's say the first video game was invented with current available technology, I doubt we'd have retro style games, 2D and some genres like platformers might never of existed, I also imagine artstyles are another example of something that has been used to hide technical limitations for visuals and in doing so been met with great appeal surely those too wouldn't be as varied, lastly I'm sure there's cases of games that had to be really creative because of storage limitations.

the limitations of hardware are part of the reason games are the way they are today, thought it might be interesting to show examples of types of games and features that only came about because of such restrictions.
 
DazzlerIE

DazzlerIE

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,756
Those sections in gears of war where you'd slow walk through cutscenes while the next area loaded
 
srylain

srylain

Member
Jun 15, 2018
396
Murlin said:
Those might have still been in there even if loading were not necessary, stemming from the game's origin as a remake of Sweet Home which had those doorway animations on Famicom:
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The Remake still had them too even though you could tell that some areas were all part of one scene since you could have zombies breaking through doors from one hallway to another and then you could walk freely between those areas.
 
KamenSenshi

KamenSenshi

Member
Nov 27, 2017
1,861
Lots of space saving tricks, the pallet swap ninjas in Mortal Kombat or the clouds being bushes in other games. Think there was an interview with Travellers Tales in GameFan where they explained how they got transparencies to work so well on Saturn when everyone said it couldnt be done well. Sprites, I believe.
 
Teeth

Teeth

Member
Nov 4, 2017
3,933
I might be misremembering, but I think Kojima talked about how the limited number of enemies they could display on the MSX caused him to come up with the idea of making the original Metal Gear a stealth game (which necessitated less enemies per screen) rather than a straight action game.
 
styl_oh

styl_oh

Fallen One-Winged Chicken Chaser
Member
Nov 24, 2019
2,205
Alberta, Canada
LoZ Second Quest

famicom carts were very limited in memory and so miyamoto, having efficiently and sinfully only used half, felt the need to put a second game in the game
 
electricmastro

electricmastro

Banned
Jul 17, 2021
748
There's a game called Days of Thunder, which appears to feature terraforming roads because the game couldn't visually load everything in all at once:

4AzrKRb.mp4
 
Paroni

Paroni

Member
Dec 17, 2020
3,397
In the plot of Spider-Man for PS1, the bad guys cover the city in fog to better conduct their evil scheme. They actually do it so that not modeling and rendering city streets was justified.

maxresdefault.jpg
 
Tokyo_Funk

Tokyo_Funk

Banned
Dec 10, 2018
10,053
STALKER Oblivion Lost : The games AI (A-Life) was causing massive issues and how it handled open areas because of CPUs/hardware of the time was unable to keep up with all the individual characters and density. So the game was broken up into smaller sections and load zones so as to not tax memory and make the AI navigate/respond/pathfind better in both the loaded zone and the exterior zones.

The SNES and Mega Drive weren't the best at 3D and limited to how many polygons they could draw, so extra hardware was added into the carts - FX chip and Sega SVP chip to make up for this. So it was technically an addon to resolve the issue.

The Sega Master System had limited sprite capabilities, like most 8-Bit game consoles of the time, but there was a solution to get some games working with larger sprites and more of them. Basically the Master System could make sprites/characters be drawn as background tiles, rather than with the sprite layer. Games such as Golden Axe and Mortal Kombat relied on this and it allowed many large sprites to be drawn on screen. Not only did this allow larger sprites, but it also meant that there was no sprite flicker when sprites were on the same scanline (The limit being 8 per scanline) reducing visual problems commonly found in the NES. However there is an issue with this method, the sprites were locked to grids, so animation and movement became choppy and less smooth as they would when dealing with regular sprites.
 
EatChildren

EatChildren

Wonder from Down Under
Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,029
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but in Half-Life 2, Chapter 9: Nova Prospekt / Entanglement, Alyx and Gordon infiltrate a Combine base to rescue Eli. This culminates in an escape through the use of the Combine's own teleportation technology. The revelation here is semi crucial to the narrative and lore pertaining to the Combine Empire's limitations: their teleportation technology is technically archaic in comparison to the advances made by both Black Mesa and Aperture Labs. Black Mesa's teleportation technology slingshots through and around Xen, while Aperture's is limited to mostly local wormholes. Both are relatively instataneous. The Combine's engineers and scientists, however, have been unable to resolve space/time/dimensional complications in the way their teleportation technology works, resulting in a "delayed" teleportation method appears instantaneous from the observer using the teleporter, but in actuality has external time pass for other observers. In this case Gordon and Alyx escape Nova Prospekt, but arrive back at Kleiner's lab a week after leaving and right in the middle of a civilian uprising. The implication here is that the Combine Empire's reliance on teleportation and dimensional transport, of which they've used to conquer multiple dimensions, has the limitation of time. If the Combine are put under pressure from an opposing force, they cannot readily call in external back up. They are, in a sense, "cut off" from reinforcements. It is partially why (or assumed why) they're pursing Black Mesa technology, and is an integral plot point of Episode 1 and 2, and likely why the cliffhanger of Episode 2 was the Combine seeking advanced teleportation tech hidden in the Borealis build by Aperture.

In reality, the time skip was because Valve ran out of time and couldn't get the interim levels up to scratch, and so bolted together a plot device that would explain Alyx and Gordon jumping forward a week into the middle of a war.
 
dskzero

dskzero

Member
Oct 30, 2019
3,355
Murlin said:
Those might have still been in there even if loading were not necessary, stemming from the game's origin as a remake of Sweet Home which had those doorway animations on Famicom:
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Click to shrink...


Is this really confirmed? Beyond the setting they aren't remotely similar and Sweet Home is based on a movie.
 
ClivePwned

ClivePwned

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,616
Australia
Save passwords for games in the 8 and 16 bit era. No battery back up in the cartridge or the publisher was too cheap to spring for it.
 
Noctis Winters

Noctis Winters

Member
Sep 23, 2018
1,084
dskzero said:
Is this really confirmed? Beyond the setting they aren't remotely similar and Sweet Home is based on a movie.
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I'm reading "Itch Tasty", the unofficial history of RE at the moment, and the first few chapters seem to confirm that yes, it started life as a remake of Sweet Home.
I'm forgetting the specifics but it is talked about.
 
Soap

Soap

Member
Oct 27, 2017
15,167
I actually think low poly games can be scarier than modern horror games, at least for monsters.
 
radiogra

radiogra

Member
Jun 27, 2020
238
EatChildren said:
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but in Half-Life 2, Chapter 9: Nova Prospekt / Entanglement, Alyx and Gordon infiltrate a Combine base to rescue Eli. This culminates in an escape through the use of the Combine's own teleportation technology. The revelation here is semi crucial to the narrative and lore pertaining to the Combine Empire's limitations: their teleportation technology is technically archaic in comparison to the advances made by both Black Mesa and Aperture Labs. Black Mesa's teleportation technology slingshots through and around Xen, while Aperture's is limited to mostly local wormholes. Both are relatively instataneous. The Combine's engineers and scientists, however, have been unable to resolve space/time/dimensional complications in the way their teleportation technology works, resulting in a "delayed" teleportation method appears instantaneous from the observer using the teleporter, but in actuality has external time pass for other observers. In this case Gordon and Alyx escape Nova Prospekt, but arrive back at Kleiner's lab a week after leaving and right in the middle of a civilian uprising. The implication here is that the Combine Empire's reliance on teleportation and dimensional transport, of which they've used to conquer multiple dimensions, has the limitation of time. If the Combine are put under pressure from an opposing force, they cannot readily call in external back up. They are, in a sense, "cut off" from reinforcements. It is partially why (or assumed why) they're pursing Black Mesa technology, and is an integral plot point of Episode 1 and 2, and likely why the cliffhanger of Episode 2 was the Combine seeking advanced teleportation tech hidden in the Borealis build by Aperture.

In reality, the time skip was because Valve ran out of time and couldn't get the interim levels up to scratch, and so bolted together a plot device that would explain Alyx and Gordon jumping forward a week into the middle of a war.
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damn, i remember the timeskip but it felt totally natural in context with the story. great example.
 
kurahador

kurahador

Member
Oct 28, 2017
17,532
Anyone know the reason why Arkham games always make it slow and have you press buttons when opening grates?
 
Adum

Adum

Member
May 30, 2019
924
Fixed camera angles is one thing that was prominent in earlier console generations but you almost never see now outside of indies. I had no idea about static background images vs 3D rendering back then - all I knew was that Resident Evil 3 was one of the best looking PS1 games I had played.
 
Ewaan

Ewaan

Member
May 29, 2020
3,568
Motherwell, Scotland
Shin Kojima said:
Really? I thought they were just emulating tabletop RPGs on purpose.
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Yeah you could be right. Given the direction of RPGs from then though, I had always thought that turn based combat was a substitute for more realistic open action orientated combat due to the limitations of the time, and the fact we have moved away from turn based battle systems since then was an indication of that limitation being removed. I hadn't considered table top RPGs though, never having played any myself.
 
Paroni

Paroni

Member
Dec 17, 2020
3,397
Ewaan said:
Yeah you could be right. Given the direction of RPGs from then though, I had always thought that turn based combat was a substitute for more realistic open action orientated combat due to the limitations of the time, and the fact we have moved away from turn based battle systems since then was an indication of that limitation being removed. I hadn't considered table top RPGs though, never having played any myself.
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I would say that turn based combat just used to be the easiest way of controlling a party of characters. Real-time ARPGs with a single controllable character were a thing already in 80s, as were the 1st person dungeon crawlers with real-time combat.
 
pksu

pksu

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,238
Finland
Flashlight in Doom 3 caused additional render pass reducing the frame rate so they chose to not include always on flashlight.
 
Khasim

Khasim

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,260
kurahador said:
Anyone know the reason why Arkham games always make it slow and have you press buttons when opening grates?
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That's not related to loading, you can run and slide through all of the ones which are on floor level to open them immediately. Then there's also the slower/quieter animation that plays to let you know you're entering a stealth section.
 
beat

beat

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,516
In God of War for the PS4, the Realm Between Realms (fast travel) is a big loop you can run around in while the system is busy trying to load the next level. Or you can just stand still. Either way, the portal to the next world will pop up right in front of you when things are done loading. But they took the effort to put a lot of conversations in to break up the monotony.

(See also the Mass Effect elevators.)

Much older, the LucasArts SCUMM adventure games went to a point and click system because (I think) they didn't like making a text parser that could/had to deal with users typing in natural language. I suppose even modern computers still can't fully parse human language as fluently as real humans, but it was much worse thirty years ago.
 
Farlander

Farlander

Game Designer
Verified
Sep 29, 2021
329
Stan's jacket in Monkey Island had an unmoveable grid pattern because it was easier to animate that way using pixel art, and then later on developers had to actually do a lot of work to recreate that same effect in 3D games.

453786-tales-of-monkey-island-chapter-4-the-trial-and-execution-of.jpg
 
PedroRVD

PedroRVD

Member
Oct 25, 2017
545
Ecuador
The Wii era.

The "galaxy" aspect of Super Mario Galaxy obviously was their excuse for not rendering big areas.

The same for Skyward Sword and its "sky" theme. Small islands and areas with a big boring background / wallpaper.

Dumb gimmicks to cover a (technically) terrible console.
 
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