PC's Have Come a LONG Way
The original Underworlds were designed to run on 20mhz 386 processor class PC's. The smartphone in your pocket would crush a PC of that era without breaking a sweat. These PC's also lacked any sort of graphics card. You had to do all the rendering in software. That was a huge hurdle to doing real-time 3D texture mapping. Even with some super clever code running in optimized assembly language, we could barely achieve a playable framerate.
In some ways having these performance constraints was helpful, as it compelled us to find creative work-arounds. For instance, there was no way to render fast enough an over-the-shoulder view that would show the player's character in the foreground and world beyond that. Solution was first-person view, which ended up working well for us, and many games to follow.
Today's PC's are ludicrously powerful in comparison. Graphics cards and modern game engines now provide all the building blocks to do sophisticated 3D rendering. The focus has moved from simply trying to get 3D to run, to tweaking the higher end bits of the rendering pipeline to achieve refinements on advanced visual effects. Like getting the fur on that creature to look even more natural than it did in a game from a couple of years ago.
Another notable evolution in the PC hardware is advanced displays and peripherals. The original Underworlds worked with just a keyboard, optionally a mouse if you had one. And the display was a mere 256 colors 640x480 pixels.
Today we have 4K displays. Then there is VR and AR coming into play, which are paradigm shifts in how players get immersed. Not just with their visuals, but with interfaces such as 'wands' that enable a more tactile experience in how you reach out and interact with the game world.
This level of incredible fidelity and immersion compels us to evolve our thinking on how we build games. For example, we can now consider mimicking the sort of physical manipulations a thief would do to pick a lock, instead of abstracting it as a mini-game.
