Going back to your beginnings in PC gaming: the first game you played and loved, but the frame rate and resolution weren’t ideal. Your first “I need/want to upgrade my specs” basically.
Warcraft III. Voodoo2 wasn’t cutting it, upgraded to a GeForce4 MX420.
… which still wasn’t really cutting it, so I spent every penny to my name and upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro like 6 months later.
Man, I loved that card. Used it for years. To this day I think it was the card I held onto the longest.
That’s when I went from no dedicated graphics to Voodoo3. I think it was already old by then, but worked well.
Officially- Bioshock Infinite.
I was still rocking my windows XP old faithful, and Infinite required the upgrade to windows 7. My motherboard didn’t support 7 though, so Old Faithful finally met its match
Probably Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80 Color Computer.
Edit- It was a Tandy Color Computer 2 circa 1986ish, went from 16K to 64K ram.
It was a Tandy Color Computer 2 circa 1986ish, pwent from 16K to 64K ram.
What a beast!
I think that would’ve been the first Crysis.
Same for me. That was the first game I explicitly remember that “pushed the limits” in terms of graphics, as it was a big jump in terms of PC requirements compared to other games that were available at the time.
I don’t think it was the first time, but I vividly remember Arkham Asylum, I played for several hours thinking that fights occurred in bullet time, slowing way down as more enemies appeared on screen. I later saw a gameplay trailer where the brawls were frantic and quick action. Felt pretty stupid after that.
Morrowind, specifically the Tribunal expansion, and then I played it anyways at like 10fps and fucking loved it lol
Duke Nukem 3D. I had a 486 SX 25 Mhz processor, but upgraded to the DX 100 Mhz processor. Can’t remember if that helped and I just needed a Pentium to run it properly, but I think it worked.
World of Warcraft. I was on Windows XP with 512mb of RAM and who knows what graphics card but I was lagging so bad when WotLK came out.
With all the people standing at the entrance to Naxx I had to basically aim myself for the portal and lag my way in without being able to see where my character was walking due to the lag.
The golden age of WoW man…
My parents needed a new family PC right before it first launched, and I convinced them to get a slightly better version just so I could spend the next decade of my life raiding with the homies
Exactly the same game and situation. 😂
Heretic.
I bought a used hard drive at a yard sale in like 1996 or 1997, that contained Doom II and Heretic. The 386/40 that was my personal box wouldn’t tun the latter, and I wasn’t going to set it up on the family’s rapidly disintegrating Packard Bell Pentium-100.
SWTOR. I did a whole new build so I could play it.
Witcher 3. I played the first two on my old laptop but waited to upgrade for that one.
Kena: Bridge of spirits.
It’s such a gorgeous game and I loved playing it. But the fight scenes would drop frames so badly that I couldn’t finish the game because of one boss battle that requires solid timing to win.
Holy shit how have I never heard of this game? It looks amazing. It’s giving me massive Fable vibes.
It’s pretty good. It feels like a kids friendly dark souls. Not nearly as hard, but some portions are pretty difficult. But it’s got a good story and beautiful graphics. Highly recommend
Blade and Sorcery, because my PC with a Ryzen 3 1200 and GTX 970 at the time could hardly run this and a lot of other VR games. And also Cyberpunk 2077, to a smaller degree.
Half-Life 2. I remember being completely blown away by early source engine, even on low graphics to keep the frame rate above the 20s. I watched the weird little graphics benchmark animation probably a hundred times to dial in the settings. If you told me that in the future I’d be capping the framerate on highest settings to keep it from hitting the default limit of 300 I’da called you a liar.
I have no idea how Source went from being so taxing to so insubstantial in the course of a few years. By the time I really got into gaming around 2010, Source games were the ones we’d throw on our shit box laptops and play together in class.
Metro 2033. I used to play it on my Dad’s slightly more powerful machine until I could upgrade my machine. One of the best examples of art direction and great graphics being utilized together. Last Light looks like a PS4 game no matter what platform you play it on. Easily one of the best looking games ever.
