Things aren’t looking good for me. I’m a few levels into Selaco, a new FPS out now on Steam, and I’m stuck behind a bar as a group of sci-fi soldiers unload their rifles and shotguns into my hiding spot. I’m also low on health. So yeah, a bad spot to be in. I take a deep breath and try something.
As smoothly as I can I slide out from behind the bar, toss an ice grenade toward the enemies, and then dash behind a wall. A moment later a boom happens and my foes are frozen. I spot a nearby propane tank, pick it up, and chuck it at them. A second later I shoot it and watch them blow up. On my screen, a notification lets me know I’ve killed enough of these bastards to unlock a new milestone and earned some new crafting materials to make my assault rifle even better. Sweet!
I then remember that the game I’m playing—that lets me do all this and more was built using a modified version of the ancient Doom engine and giggle. This kind of thing happens a lot in Selaco, a game that rarely feels like it’s built on old bones and dated tech, but instead feels like a polished and modern shooter with some slick retro visuals. What’s most surprising about Selaco isn’t that it’s developed in GZDoom, but that it might be one of the best shooters I’ve played in years.
Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.
There’s something special about a game like red dead 2 or ghost of tsushima that makes you stop and just enjoy the scenery. Games with good graphics have their place, it’s just that they need to also have all the other elements to be any good.
thing is, games aren’t pretty because they model every cell in every lifeform and have 5 gigabyte textures for each individual leaf, they’re pretty because they have good graphical design.
Just lighting alone is like 50% of making a scene look nice, you can literally just slap together a low-poly flat-colour scene in blender and set up nice lighting and people will call you talented.
A prime example of this is valheim: ps2-style models and textures and yet the lighting and general graphical design makes it look lovely and atmospheric, especially combined with the music.
Hell, minecraft’s vanilla textures look downright gorgeous with lighting mods.
it annoys me to no end that people think minecraft looks terrible and attribute that to the textures, it’s literally just pixel art! Other games are praised for having pixel art! aurgh!
Minecraft might be considered ugly, but in that case it’s probably moreso because its lighting is… rudimentary… or that person specifically just doesn’t like the artstyle.
Also something that almost no one ever talks about is render distance! Games with a gargantuan render distance look SOOOOOO much more appealing and are easier to navigate, but people just don’t think about it!
I recently played Satisfactory and holy shit that render distance, when i called down the space elevator it’s the only time i can recall a game ever making me just sit there in awe, never before have i felt such a visceral sense of scale from something on a display!
Oh, don’t get me wrong, minecraft’s art style is absolutely charming and a perfect fit for the “blocky” nature of the gameplay. See how many of its imitators try to look more realistic and end up looking genuinely ugly. But to speak to the top comment’s point, when fancy shaders are added minecraft’s simple style gets elevated so much and it goes to show how simple and effective design paired with good-looking lighting can make even the lowest-poly games look absolutely gorgeous.
Hyper Light Drifter is absolutely stunning and its a 2D pixel art game with amazing lighting.
Noita has some decent lighting too
Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.
Great point. I saw an interesting video recently that touched on this exact issue:
https://youtu.be/x4_8rIUh7E8?si=-E1VWA8bZ-eVibkL
As graphics increase in quality, the desire for developers to fill spaces with clutter grows – which makes it harder to make meaningful levels with thoughtful design.
There are plenty of big and complex games with great graphics.
Started playing it and I’m liking it so far! The low health regen is very clever. Solves the problem in Half Life 1 where the player is always finishing encounters at 1 HP without the need for excessive health pickups. Now the player is guaranteed to have at least 35 HP.
The immersion is really great as well. Often I forget that all the enemies are just 2D sprites.
Honestly that’s what made me stop playing OG Half-Life until Black Mesa came out. I wanted to do it without cheats or anything, but goddamn do the enemies pack a punch.
And I got all the way to Xen, too.
I feel like it’s a little disingenuous to call it “Doom Tech” when it’s modern GZDoom with proper full 3D and shit.
But it is true that it’s way more systemic than anything AAA in the genre.
Doom wads and hacks in recent years have been doing some absolutely insane things, and it’s only been getting better as more and more people are realising the things they can do with it. I’m not surprised in the slightest.
Total Chaos has got to be the most mind-blowing to me, it’s a total conversion mod built of GZDoom. https://youtu.be/L7IITZDBvqE
I can’t believe I have never heard of Total Chaos. It looks awesome!
I wonder what other good other good GZDoom based games I am missing out on. :)
I know this is a couple weeks old, but I just got Supplice and Incision, along with Hedon based on a recommendation in this thread. They’re all boomer shooters that honestly look absolutely bonkers and I’m excited to jump into them.
Supplice looks to be kind of a mix of classic Doom with OG Half-Life on an alien planet you’re terraforming.
Incision looks like a crazy nightmare.
Hedon is thicc orc women with flamethrower machine guns.
Thank you for reply. I am looking forward to playing the games you mentioned. They look great!
Triple AAA games are usually very polished. But polish doesn’t make games fun. Polish is important with accessibility, and it’s easy to see why accessibility is important for a big studio casting a wide net.
But fun? That comes from creativity and innovation. Big studios are averse to risk taking, and struggle to attract creative individuals, because the corporate culture seeks to stamp out individuality in the name of process and procedure.
So yeah, more evidence of this. My money is going to Indy devs who prioritize fun over polish. (But polish is good to have too).
Triple AAA
I absolutely love AAAAAAAAA games
Oh you mean the Serious Sam series? Tons of fun!
FYI: Cross-platform cloud save sync is currently not working. Developers are working on a solution.
Workaround is to enforce Proton.Edit: The workaround I’ve read somewhere is wrong. Currently the only workaround is to either manually copy the save data or to set up a 3rd party sync solution (which for Steam Deck means to enter desktop mode).
If anyone wants a complete GZDoom game (or 2 or 3 depending on how your counting) right now to try, Hedon is really great. Also, made by a solo dev(music and VA work was outsourced), so absolute flex on AAA game companies.
Those look like they have potential. Hopefully the publishers let the devs cook long enough. I don’t want another Graven.
And some real brain damage on the Supplice comments section.
For some weird reason that specific one doesn’t run on my Linux system. Sad.
If you can get a clue as to what’s going on, message the dev on steam. It’s one guy, so they probably don’t know about the issue. For a for a little while, if you had Heretic loaded in GZDoom, it would load that instead of the Hedon.
Sure it “looks old”, but it’s sooooo smooth. Kinda reminds me of the Quake remaster in this regard, and that one holds up pretty well in this day and age.
Steam Summer sale’s lookin’ pretty good this year on my end.
Been on my wishlist since 2001! I can’t wait to have time to play.
Whattt 2001??
Oops… 2021. Fail me!
The funny thing is that with these doom engine games it might as well be a project from 2001 :)
Good point! They could have even had a period accurate trailer, with that guy with the really deep voice like in movie trailers back then “A game, 20 years in the making…”
(Online features require 56k modem)
I swear when I had dial up I could tell how fast my connection would be by the sound of the static. If it didn’t sound clean I’d get a crap connection and just hanging up and dialing a different connection number would do the trick.
Oh, trust me I know the 56k dance, too bad I never learned how to actually dance…
However! I have since purchased the game, and it is just as spicy as the reviews say :) level design is interesting, it throws in some puzzle mechanics between the gore fest
Anybody that played the Aliens Total Conversion on the original Doom engine (best Aliens themed shooter oriented FPS) knows just how awesome things can turn out.
/yes I’m old
Hey man, those old AvP games were pretty great too!
The Demo was great, Im going to play this today
Let us know what you think of it! It certainly looks like it could be entertaining.
Just following up in case anyone reads this in the future. The game is really good. In FPS games muzzle flash obscures the target and there’s a little of this here, and there’s a rhythm to shooting enemies and then stopping when they are dead so you don’t waste ammo. Once you get used to it, it feels like a challenging part of the game. I didn’t find the map key until like an hour ago and I wandered around a lot looking for the next thing. Navigating is a large part of the game, because exits and tunnels are not always obvious. Sometimes it’s irritating especially if you don’t use the map. Movement and the world are awesome
Thanks for the follow up!
I’m not the same person, but I’ve played a few levels now. I think it’s really good, especially for being early access. Reminds me of original Half Life, so if you like that kind of game it’s a strong recommend!
Most. But there’s a small problem: Us console peasants can’t play it yet. So… Yeah.
What exactly is your pc specs? The game has really low system requirements. It’s high compared to OG Doom, but low compared to what AAA means today.
edit: there’s a free demo, so you can just download that to try it out.
My PC specs are 0. You might’ve missed the part where I said “console peasant.”
I guess I also missed the part about being a phone peasant. Not having a gaming PC and not having ANY PC are different. Personally, I’d rather have a bargain bin PC to play indie titles then a console.
@Duamerthrax I’d love to get me one of those raspberry pie mini consoles one of these times.
The Odroid Go line is nice. Not raspberry pi, but a different ARM SoC.
