Why is it that the textures in pretty much all modern FPS games are so crappy and blurry compared to some older games? For example, play the first UT with the S3TC texture packages and then try out any of the current crop of games; there is simply no comparison. Even the small textures in the original Unreal look better close up than those in most modern games due to the game's excellent usage of the detail texture technique. In those days it seemed that game textures were gradually getting larger and more detailed and that blurry look when you went close to something was being eliminated, but we have taken a few steps backwards since then. The Doom 3 and Half Life 2 textures are all low resolution ones that look blurry even at short to medium distances. Far Cry and SCCT have a mix of blurry ones and a somewhat more decent ones. UT2004's textures are a bit larger and more detailed, but even those aren't nearly on par with what UT had. I haven't seen any recent game that uses detail textures like Unreal did either, or at least not in the same way (last one was Deus Ex, which used the same engine). Modern FPS games have lots of great lighting effects, but texture size/detail seems to have taken a backseat somewhere along the way. So what's going on here? Is this due to console influence (where smaller textures are sometimes needed due to memory restrictions) during cross-platform development or something?
Just something I have wondered about for a while now...
Just something I have wondered about for a while now...
