Pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D assets should've remained until at least the 2010s for certain genres. I'm pretty sure much of the love for the golden age of Final Fantasy (VII- IX) and the early Resident Evil games is due to the highly detailed nature of pre-rendered graphics. The worlds depicted felt more alive and lived in, meaning kids could imagine themselves in it more easily.
It's just a factor that nobody really picks up on when discussing these games. I remember my Grandma watching me play through the Winhill sequence in Final Fantasy VIII and going on about how beautiful the village looked. I don't think you could've had anything comparable in detail in full 3D for at least fifteen years, and not anything as consistently pretty over the course of a full game until around today.
Final Fantasy X was sort of a graphical step down in a sense of so much being plain, flat and ugly. So much so that when you step into a pre-rendered background house, you're taken back by how detailed that is compared to the ugly flatness of the outside.
I think the reason they died out was sort of sloppy mapping, and that developers wanted to the flex the capabilities of the console's hardware and their own skills. They really are better than anything in-engine, when people talk of graphics they care about how good it looks when you're playing the game but in terms of fidelity and detail they peaked in the 6th generation with how the game looked in cutscenes, lighting, texturing, and final touches. The FMVs in Stalker were a good example of a linear progression of technology that still had playback issues but was getting better and more natural-looking by the year. I hope this is understandable.
Then in the 7th generation everything started to look like sticky claymation and physics while actually physics-based now instead of being individually scripted weren't at the level of technology necessary, everyone was rightfully excited for new tech and rendering methods but it felt premature compared to the prior progression of 3D graphics even if the lighting and particles were more sophisticated. I'm not a programmer so maybe it was something to do with consoles' components resembling PCs more now than the proprietary designs of the 5th and 6th generations with new technologies made for them that didn't require the sophistication of the prior gen to make models and maps, or middleware that was prioritizing realism over detail. Graphics have gotten worse now due to video game developers being mediocre college grads whose games are as primitive as tech demos so it's just been an exponential decay since then, a shitty game ten years ago was trite and derivative with DLC and optimization issues, I don't know the range of how bad it is now.
>>61385 because modern players would complain about not being able to move the camera around, I've seen many people saying old resident evil games are "unplayable" because of fixed camera angles >And why did the point & click genre die out? they just fell out of fashion, the point and click public moved on to other stuff like walking simulators
>>61385 >And why did the point & click genre die out? Most were really really bad and even the good ones didn't sell that well. With very few exceptions they have always had relatively poor sells compared to most other kinds of games.
As for why modern games don't use prerendered backgrounds as much, while you still see them in indie titles on occasion the main reason is the technology has moved on and now you don't have the same hardware limitations that prevent you from actually rendering stuff in the distance instead of faking it with a painting. You can have as many complex polygons within a scene as you want provided your programing is decent. Prerendering has always been a cope for technical limitations.
>>61387 Resident evil on the harder settings where you're expected to dodge zombies is miserable because of the camera angles. Point and click doesn't really resemble modern games in the way we think of them and often had quite bizarre object interactions that were rarely intuitive. They'd often lock you into encounters where you couldn't even get the necessary items through backtracking without an earlier save state.