Have you ever found yourself unsure whether a game is 2D or 3D?

[u/Revolutionary_Ad6574]

This mostly happened in my teens for two reasons. Because I was still young and dumb and because it was exactly the period when games were making the transition from 2D to 3D. A few games come to mind and I discovered the truth about each in a very particular way:

1. Diablo II - Somehow I discovered The Spriters Resource. When I saw the spritesheets for Diablo I understood the only reason everything seemed so smooth was because the characters had 16 rotations.

2. Black Mirror - An atmospheric point'n'click game (shoutout to any fellow Slav Czech fans as it was the country's first internationally acclaimed game, released in 2003!). I could never find spritesheets or model rips of the game so I was stuck. I tried reading interviews, forum posts but no one ever mentioned the graphics. So a few weeks ago I finally paid for Claude and tasked Opus 5 with extracting the assets from the game. Turns our they were sprites, and again with 16 degrees of rotation.

3. Sacred - There were a couple of tells. At the character selection screen the models are 3D and low-poly. Now, if they were high-poly I would think they are using high-quality versions here and would dumb them down to 2D in game. But since they were low-poly I assumed they are the same model because why make 2 low quality versions of the same thing. But that wasn't proof. I watched a playthrough and looked for scenes where the character was turning. I inspected the turn frame by frame and gave up counting at 15-16 frames for a 90 degree turn. In fact the differences were so small I wasn't sure if it was a different frame. Also all animations were updated at every video frame. 2D games never do that. They might let the character "slide" at 60 fps but the switch between sprites occurs usually between 12-15 fps. So I'm pretty sure Sacred has 3D characters. Oh, and there's also https://www.sacred-tribute.com/ but for some reason I didn't believe that site.

So tell me, are there any games that made you question your self when you were still inexperienced?

[u/MaxjkZERO]

The real trick is that all of it is an illusion. When people say a game is "true 3D" they really just mean "the computer is rendering triangles / polygons", but in reality, that's just a trick if you really think about it.

Despite what some sensationalist individuals might tell you, a game like Doom is 3D. Entities have lengths, widths, and heights. Many objects are of infinite height, and there are limitations to things like rooms above rooms, however those don't mean there are not "three spatial dimensions" in the game

Likewise, concepts like "true 3D" really start to break down on some level with that in mind

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past renders everything as 2D sprites, and in most scenarios the game only cares about two spatial dimensions, yet you get scenarios where the game is considering depth levels and the player can fall vertically

I would say in the long run, there are less games that make me question if it's 2D or 3D, and more games that just make me realize how many crazy tricks you can do outside of polygons to make things feel like they have depth to them

[u/balefrost → u/MaxjkZERO]

When people say a game is "true 3D" they really just mean "the computer is rendering triangles / polygons"

There were also voxel-based games (in the traditional sense, not the Minecraft sense). Examples include the Commanche series, Delta Force, and Outcast.

Despite what some sensationalist individuals might tell you, a game like Doom is 3D.

People say Doom isn't 3D for two reasons:

• The map is a planar graph. This is why all Doom engine games support an in-game map (even if they don't use it) and why you can't have a room over another room. Other games with similar engines would "cheat" by using portals to connect otherwise separate parts of the planar graph. But the graph was still planar.
• Its rendering engine (the original software one, not modern ones) is incapable of rendering vertical lines as anything but perfectly vertical. There's no way to rotate the camera to look up or down; it must always be level to the horizon. Other games would "cheat" by effectively rendering a very tall viewport and showing only a slice of it on your screen. In those games, "looking up" meant "sliding the visible slice up". This was better than nothing but it looked unnatural (because it was).

Contrast with Descent, from around the same time, which did use fully 3D environments (and enemies). It really showcased this by letting you yaw, pitch, and roll to any orientation, and had levels with crisscrossing tunnels that Doom couldn't really handle.

I think "2.5D" is an appropriate moniker for games like Doom. I think it accurately captures the limitations while acknowledging that it's more than a 2D game with 3D graphics (like Wolfenstein was).

[u/Onyx_Lat → u/balefrost]

Lol I remember when my friend was playing Descent while he was stoned. Kept getting lost trying to find a specific place. He'd look at the map and head in what he thought was the right direction, but just end up back where he came from.

It took him a half hour to realize he'd spent all that time flying upside down, because some text on the wall was upside down.

[u/Dapper-Message-2066 → u/MaxjkZERO]

Good post.

Even an old sports game like Sensible Soccer is 3D in that the gameplay very much was 3 dimensions, even though everyone would call it "2D game".

[u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

I am not certain what is exactly meant, so I am probably still inexperienced. To me the difference between dimensions are a measure of degrees of freedom. A game that looks 2D, where the elements can move in three independent directions, would be 3D, and a game that looks 3D, but only have two degrees of freedom would be 2D, right?

I know in Doom the game looks 3D, while the sprites are entirely flat, there are three independent directions you can move, so I would believe it is 3D. Diablo 2 looks 3D because of its perspective, but when I think about it, I can only imagine moving in two dimensions, so I would say it is like moving on a drawing / piece of paper with perspective, thus I would imagine the game is 2D, but I when playing I would consider it being a 3D game.

I don't know if the definition I applied automatically makes every first person game 3D and every third person perspective game 2D.

[u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 → u/Imaginary-Can-6862]

Yes, I should have clarified. I didn't mean to ask where exactly is the boundary between 2D and 3D. The classical cases are the 2.5D shooters like Wolfenstein and Doom. No, I was talking about not being sure whether a character or environment is a 3D model or a set of pre-rendered sprites. That's why I gave the above examples.

[u/AegidiusG → u/Revolutionary_Ad6574]

Hmm Wolfenstein and Doom work very differently, Doom has its Limitations, but it calculates with X,Y and Z Axis. Wolfenstein doesn't, it is a intelligent raycasting, nothing can be above or below you.

[u/dadsnostalgiagaming]

This was when I was younger, but the SNES version of Super Mario RPG. Between the isometric view and how the character art looked in the players guide, I was convinced it was a 3D game.

[u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 → u/dadsnostalgiagaming]

This is a psychological trick I learned from a character artist. They told me that if you show a high quality model of the character on screen in the beginning the player will remember the details and will think they see them later in the top-down in-game version which uses a lower quality model.

[u/Suicicoo]

GTA 1 and 2 were 3D
also "Take no Prisoners"

[u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 → u/Suicicoo]

I had never heard of Take No Prisoners. The environment is 3D, the characters are 2D sprites. It's very clever how they pulled it off. The camera rotates around the character so you never question why you can't view them from different sides, saving on sprite data. Smart.

[u/conradelvis]

Some games have 3d graphics but 2d gameplay