"The Best Looking Game Ever"

Summary by Krater

An exploration of historical games renowned for their visual fidelity, examining how technological advancements, hardware limitations, and artistic styles defined different eras of gaming graphics.

From the video

Answers: What are the best-looking games of all time and how have game graphics evolved across eras?

• Gaming graphics history
• Visual fidelity in video games
• Hardware limitations and capabilities
• Artistic style vs technical power
• Evolution of video game lighting and rendering

What it concludes

• Hellblade 2 is the best-looking game the creator has ever played, praising its environment and character realism despite narrative limitations.
• Defender of the Crown was revolutionary for Amiga with pixel art, cinematic storytelling, and resource-rich presentation, despite being a simplified game of Risk.
• Dragon's Lair sacrificed interactive mechanics entirely for pre-animated cinematic visuals, operating as a binary reaction test on arcade laserdiscs.
• Doom 3 revolutionised game lighting by introducing per-pixel lighting and shadow mapping, standardising realistic illumination across the industry.
• Crysis pushed PC hardware limits at launch with advanced physics and rendering, predicting multi-core CPU trends and defining graphical benchmarks for over a decade.
• The Order: 1886 achieved photorealistic material rendering and lighting years ahead of its time, though its cinematic focus and short runtime limited its gameplay impact.