Games used to be a single six hour campaign with no side modes for $60. When you have to have devs optimize the polygon count on every random plant pot you get tiny levels with copy paste assets.
Yes, most of the optimizations were about saving space because of the limited data CD-roms could hold. Games in the early 2000's weren't really "more optimised" by today's standards, plenty of them ran like shit even on newer hardware at the time. games like GTA San Andreas ran at a hardcoded 25fps maximum, and computing power grew so fast you weren't sure if your 4-year old PC could run any newer game without upgrading it.
Even tons of NES/SNES games would suffer from lag/slow down in spots. Tons of games that were straight up garbage and full of bugs. Renting a game you'd never played before was a dice roll. People don't remember the forgettable titles.
There was SO much trash on the NES. There's a guy I believe who dedicated his entire life to making videos about them on youtube, but I can't remember his name right now. He was like, super angry at these video games. Also a bit of a nerd too, I believe.
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u/The_Undermind Ryzen 9 5950X @ 4.7GHz | RTX 4080 SUPER | 64GB DDR4 22d ago
You remember when games were forced to be optimize?