Are Retro Sprites Irreplaceable?

[Bofferbrauer2]

caffeinade said:
I think Dead Cells uses 3D models to generate their sprites (though I could be wrong), but imagine using a IK system for player feet and hands in a 2D sprite based game.

I think that procedural animation is the future, that and deep AI systems.
Rain World has a really good looking procedural animation system.

We are currently in a period where 3D graphics still sucks, the current gen games are being developed for weak PCs (and Doom (2016) was designed to run at 60 FPS on them).
Due to a lack in computational power, a very limited pool of RAM and the raw number of artist hours required to create high quality art assets...
Games have a hard time looking quite as nice as the games where they could only have a few hundred highly polished assets, rendered 'most pixel perfectly.

When we get faster consoles and game engines that can leverage machine learning to hep polish and generate high quality assets for less cost than the current pipelines.
3D games will finally catch up to high quality 2D games.

It's the other way around, just like it was last gen. Multiplat games have to be able to run smoothly on an XBO, which is about as strong as the upcoming Raven Ridge APUs in the graphics department (and those are MUCH more powerful than the XBO in the CPU department). Hence why the base specifications for the games isn't moving much for several years now. The recommended configurations on the other hand are often on par with PS4 Pro or XOX in terms of graphics.

Doom 2016 was the first game running entirely on Vulcan (OpenGL's successor). Vulcan widened a lot of bottlenecks in the OGL API (especially the numer of draw calls) which make the game run much faster without needing stronger hardware. The result was that the game runs smoothly even with low-end PCs. But that's not the reason why they used Vulcan, Id Software was always using OGL so when Vulcan came around of course they where using that one instead of DirectX.