After a long time considering the infinite many options that are open to me, their practical limitations, and my own aesthetic preferences, I started actually working on my first game this year. And settled on aiming for a look like early 2000s PC games. I think these strike a very nice balance between pretty visuals and a relatively swift process for creating 3D assets. With lower polygon models you can also go with more basic textures, fewer environmental objects, very basic faces simpler animations and sounds, and it will still feel visually consistent.
The games that stand out the most to me as good examples of visual fidelity and technical simplicity are Morrowind, Arx Fatalis, Gothic II, Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, and Knights of the Old Republic.
What I am after is achieving the overall aesthetic of these games, not to be technologically period accurate. So I am more than happy to have much longer draw distances, keeping up the maximum LOD for a larger radius, and not having clearly visible seams between different mipmap levels as you are moving down a hallway.
The most basics steps for this look are pretty obvious: Relatively low polygon counts on models and no smooth shading. No circles, only 12-sided polygons. Medium texture resolutions with linear filtering. No normal maps and maximum roughness. No ragdolls.
But that’s about as far as my technical knowledge of these early 3D graphics and developments that came after them extends. What other things do graphics from this time period have or not have, that produces their look?
As for the lighting, I want to depart from the oldschool look and would like to have real time lighting. With all light coming from objects that can be turned on and off (other than the sky) and no phantom glows lighting up walls with no light source. But I think that’s probably a completely separate topic in itself.
Technically, those games are almost identical to what we have today. So re-creating the look is mostly a matter of art direction and asset production. You can do it in Godot without any problems, although for a first game I’d suggest doing something very simple or at least very small in scope.
I would just use blender and make low-poly artwork, or just hire an artist who specializes that sort of thing. As @normalized stated, the workflow is basically the same now as was then;
it is all dependent on what you decide to use as assets.
really, early 2000s look would be fairly easy to create given the graphics of many a modern game, and the ease of creating such assets.
Most of the stuff where you notice an early 2000s pattern accross different art teams (very wide spectrum from sonic, mario, rayman to hl2, doom 3, unreal tournament) is a consequence of the devs going “oh it runs like shit let’s downscale”.
In terms of art direction, there is no “2000s” style. there’s sonic heroes style (shiny, stages are 70% skybox), doom 3 style (pitch black, horror theme), MGS2 style (lots of alpha-blended particle effects) so on so forth.
Here are some art-looking technical choices i noticed most dev teams take that might tickle that 2000s feeling you’re looking for:
Lots of enclosed spaces, as many as you can get away with on the same scene. More walls around you will give the engine the chance to hide more stuff or at least force the LOD down to poorly folded origami levels.
Transition areas. Doorways, tunnels, scripted sequences that conveniently follow a 2-mile distance from each other, or whatever travel distance hits that 32MB asset count ceiling. This goes hand in hand with the next category:
Conservative placement. if some piece was modeled, it is likely interactable. Because you can’t just sprinkle a bunch of crap on a scene, anything 3D you bother to place there must be a climbable ladder, an explodable fuel barrel, a collectible shiny thingamajig, ammunition for your marshmellow blaster, a ledge you can hang off of, so on so forth.
Third party stock textures. some wave-like, voronoi-ish, grainy noisy stuff often shares the same texture that the studio guys likely pulled from a texture collection CD bought way back in 1996. Players are often not aware of this but that pattern-seeking part of your brain signals to you: “i’ve seen that surface before”
Very stylized baked lighting. Each game series had its own look they’re aiming for that can’t be achieved by placing 800 point lights on an environment (cough coughhaloinfinite cough) , so they either use their own tweaked settings on the 3d modelling tool to bake a cheap approximation of lighting, or they straight up paint manually onto the scene’s textures to hit that spot. It’s much more artistic than technical.
An additional point i’d like to make is that there were already some open-world games like NFS Underground 2 and GTA 3 that had some fancy-shmancy asset streamer letting the player roam around aimlessly in the gameworld without loading screens. So pretty much anything was already doable back then, it was just put out in a constrained form for technical reasons.