04-03-2018, 10:28 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/26679...arket-dead
Quote:Consider this lack against, say, the early days of 3D acceleration in PC gaming. Then, as now, adding a 3D accelerator to your system was a significant investment. The original 3dfx Voodoo card, which debuted in 1996 for $299, was worth $482 in 2018 dollars. It was by no means certain that gamers would spring for these solutions or that 3D-accelerated graphics would win out, or that one specific type of 3D acceleration would win out (betting on the wrong horse nearly killed Nvidia out of the gate). With that said, here’s a short list of games that launched in 1997 and 1998 — within roughly two years of the appearance of third-party hardware accelerated GPUs:
- Descent II
- GLQuake
- Half-Life
- Hexen II
- Quake II
- Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
- Tomb Raider
- Unreal
- Wing Commander Prophecy
Within a very short period of time, in other words, we saw 3D support being rolled out across the entire industry. Not every game on the short list above is a must-play title, but some of them are still excellent titles that hold up today. Unreal, in particular, was considered a stunning demonstration of how great games could look in its own era.
VR, two years later, has yet to launch a single equivalent hit. This undoubtedly reflects the greater difficulty of building games in which how the player moves and interacts with the wider world is so different, but it says something that not one major franchise holder is apparently willing to risk making even a demonstration title with a franchise logo on it. In 2015, EA included a VR level in Battlefront and Activision had one for Call of Duty: Infinite War. In 2017, as Ackerman notes, both sequels launched without any hint of VR support.