/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5431558
it's an obvious side of the design approach, the other being that exploration isn't as engaging in a 2D space. It just probably felt the best way to utilize the new technology. Once elaborate 3D worlds became the norm, I guess focusing the gameplay on exploring every corner of the map stopped being a viable approach to create universally appealing gameplay

> Fully 3D worlds must have required significantly more time, budget, & storage (the latter only relevant for N64 carts) than 2D stages
It's all about the assets in the end, really. You can instantiate and reuse "pieces" of the scenery to shape levels inexpensively, and games from that generation used extremely low geometry for the general geography. Crash Bandicoot was a very early example of 3D platformer and was a middle ground between classic platformers and 3D world-based ones (since the devs, though extremely accomplished on the technical side, weren't really creative enough to come up with innovative design philosophies and simply defaulted to what they knew: linear obstacle courses). There's a lot of detailed information about the development of the first Crash online, and apparently they had to manually calculate the density of detail and geometry in each section of each level for the system to be able to handle it.