What we gain in “realism,” we lose in experiences we could only ever have in a digital realm. Far from the spatial awareness and absurd player speed required in the late 90s, modern shooters lean on providing regenerating health and cover-based tactics to create an almost entirely different experience. Maneuverability as defense was the only way to survive the onslaught of DOOM ’s horde of imps and zombies. With such a small playfield, nonstop movement is the key to survival, an idea core to the DNA of first-person shooters of yesteryear. The stark refinement of extraneous choices levels the playing field as players compete to save their souls in unending combat against never-ending hellspawn. There are no secrets, no extra lives, and no protection. A far cry from the arsenals of the games it’s inspired by, you’re stuck with a few variations on the same weapon: a rapid-fire flurry of knives, a quick shotgun-like blast, and, after slaying enough demons, homing daggers. Inspired by 90s FPS titles like Quake (1996), player movement is fast and precise, and the cacophony of death requires twitchy precision to survive even for a few seconds. It’s like a Bosch painting with a leaderboard. Salvation will never come, and even beating the best player in the world would only provide a temporary respite, knowing that another sinner is on their way to dethrone you. Never progressing, simply locked in torment against garish demons of all shapes and sizes, with tiny defenses to hold back the tide until you are eventually overcome, only to start the Sisyphean task all over again. It’s arguably the most consistent depiction of hell in videogames ever created. Gurgling groans like the churning stomach of the underworld swirl around your ears as you dance through eldritch horrors and clattering bones, flaming daggers leaping from your fingers.
The ever-increasing wave of satanic creatures cascade on top of the player on a single platform, cloaked in darkness. Simpler models like the daggers are probably modeled in a more traditional manner though.It’s never clear what the player has done to be locked in this eternal struggle Either that or they are decimated then touched up, although I'm fairly confident that it is the former.
Models I believe are sculpted at very very high polycount and then remodeled using retopology techniques. The textures don't have low color depth, the colors are actually posterized as a post processing step but the posterization is done non linearly and with different emphasis on different colors If you look at crash bash for example, the vertex jitter is very hard to notice because all the minigames take place only on the small arenas, so they could have more room for floating point precision. The PSX's gpu had low float precision which meant they could have minigames with tiny arenas and a fixed camera, and reduce the jitter, or bigger and more vast environments at the cost of lower precision and thus, more jitter. This is the true reason that vertex jitter happened back in the days, like on the PSX. Vert = floor(vert * precision) / precision For polygon jitter, it isn't a noise function, they actually downsample the vertex coordinates in object-space (so that vertices won't jitter if the camera moves, only if the object itself moves), like this float4 vert = mul(_Object2World, v.vertex)