Matija Mandic wote: "Today, we look at video games as just an another form of an entertainment medium – along with television and books – as they are made to entertain the consumer for a time set by him/her, for an efficient price. The presentation varies in the terms of storytelling, imagery, and characters, but ultimately, it’s entertainment that matters the most. And that’s what video games once did best, above all other media: give the player a feeling of being in shoes of a fictional hero, control his actions and, if we are really to push it, live in the game’s created universe. Now that’s what most of modern games can’t seem to understand – with all the scripted nonsense, forced linearity, taking the control out of the player’s hands, having them feel like he’s watching a movie, a game is breaking its main point: being played."
Despite launching back in 2011, Serious Sam 3: BFE is playable on all modern formats. But is it still worth your time?
Serious Sam II debuted back in 2005, and is still a hallmark of the 'boomer shooter' genre, as it's known today.
Yeah, I'll have my "boomer shooter" any day over "fee to pay" garbage churned out by game companies nowadays.
Digital Foundry : Serious Sam is a classic PC shooter that's celebrating its 20th birthday this year - and software engineer 'sultim-t' has delivered a fully path-traced mod, similar to Quake 2 RTX. So how does it look and how well does it run? Alex checks it out.
Again, sure there are scenes where path racing looks realistic, but I just don’t know if it really looks better. And most of all, is it worth it everything considered (performance hit, heat and power consumption increase, hyper realistic lighting in a cartoon game.)
"is it worth it everything considered ... hyper realistic lighting in a cartoon game."
Because path tracing for a game with more polygons, details, and effects will result a nearly unplayable state of that game using even an RTX 3090, tanking the performance greatly.
Path tracing is freaking expensive calculation. Nvidia's own Marbles demo ran at 1440p@30 with DLSS 2.0 enabled.
Hence the path tracing experimentation is carried out in less detailed games like Quake II and Serious Sam, to analyze the final result, appreciate the said technology and still able to play it at a reasonable framerate.
Thanks for the comment. I completely understand why path tracing is so expensive and used in these low end games to show it off. To me, it simply shows how far we still are from any reasonable implementation of RT in games. I think realistically we can talk about ray tracing for consoles when PS6 and XSX2 releases in 2026-2027, or for PC when RTX 5000 - RX 8000 series are out in 2025-2026. That's when it becomes somewhat realistic, because we have to remember the rasterization requirements go up, and the reflections required also go up in parallel.
Meanwhile, I think the best bang for buck for highend is 6800xt OC'd 10% with MPT. I've got a 6900xt, and I run it raster 4K60 all maxed out, and when it doesn't run a stable 60fps, I can scale resolution down 10-20% or use FSR ultra quality or quality and it looks very good still. Ray tracing..? Not a chance, it's just a gimmick, and am not interested in it. Sure, it looks more realistic, but my question is, does it really look better? I mean better in most gamers eyes, not better in technically savvy analysts eyes who know what a scene should look like. Because there's a massive difference between those subjective and objective views. I actually like often baked lighting and reflections better, because they seem to be what the original artists were going for.
I really like this new lighting and metalish looks. Hopefully it just gets better and better. Btw, 20 years of Serious Sam development, damn. That's huge for not that big developer team.
I think the serious sam series is one of the most stale and overrated games this gen and last gen.
It's like the God of War series, they try to make gore "cool". this isn't the 90's buddy. God of war games were fun back in the 90's but the times have changed.