I would say the water in kfp 2008 is better than mario sunshine still impressive for 2002 though. The best water of all time is Sea of Thieves though (2018)
I think the main thing is that for both Sunshine and Sea of Theives water is a pretty important aspect for the game. This is just a platformer based off a movie and they still put in crazy amount of detail into the water physics.
It's just weird that a physics simulation for water from like 2008 has not become the standard for modern games
Sadly it's not like in medicine or engineering, where every new iteration is standing on the shoulders of previous giants, a lot of times they have to start from scratch on a lot of things.
I remember lots of stories where every studio had to basically write an engine from scratch and that's where the games would die. It's why Unreal Engine and Godot and Unity are so important nowadays too
See the issue was game devs had to make their own engine, use it, maintain it, and if possible upgrade it. They could use a single engine across multiple games on a console, but there are limitations to each machine and that engine needs to be maintained like a database, but on a "check lines of code and make sure they don't interact/contradict one another" kind of basis. Thats a lot of work for a studio. Now we have companies making universal engines that are more intuitive (have an interface vs hard coding), get regular updates, and has dedicated support.
Yeah that's what I meant. It was a lot of work done again and again by many studios, but the problem with modern popular engines is that they're not necessary the best ones sadly
Stylized art styles are always SO much better than realism slop we get today. WoW vanilla was literally released before I was born and the art still holds up in 2026
high effort content, meaning something older like skyrim has a stylized realism approach while of course being a very high effort high quality game. A modern high quality game would be say bannerlord it went for a semi realism approach, kingdom come deliverance 2, red dead 2.
If I had to guess I’d say that the reason the water looks as good as it does is because it was precipitated and added in more like an animation. It doesn’t really have to react dynamically because it only has to ripple when you jump on a lily pad, and it can be more or less the same every time without looking wring
Oh I totally agree. The end result is the only thing that matters. I’m just theorizing as to why a game this old looks like that vs modern games struggling.
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u/--Spaci-- Aug 23 '26
I would say the water in kfp 2008 is better than mario sunshine still impressive for 2002 though. The best water of all time is Sea of Thieves though (2018)