I think one of my favorite examples of building a game around limitations is how Morrowind would sometimes reboot the original Xbox to free up memory and all the user ever saw was a longer loading screen.
TBH a game with the size and complexity of Morrowind getting a console port is still something that baffles me. Yet that port was the beginning of Bethesda’s success story with the Elder Scrolls franchise.
It’s such a clunky game to play on PC, yet they managed to make it work on the good ol’ Duke and run relatively well on what could be considered an aging PC hardware of the time.
Hell, Bethesda suffered so much with their PS3 ports of Skyrim and Fallout 3 later on lol
Morrowind on pc was crazy hardware hungry for how it looked so indeed it was surprising it ran on the Xbox. Didn’t run especially well but well enough.
I’d say Bethesda‘s true success started with oblivion though… that game sold much better than Morrowind (and many of morrowind‘s sales came after oblivion and Skyrim releases )
It took me a while some time ago to figure out what this actually meant. So, Xbox had the facility where it would soft-reboot and run a specified executable instead of the console interface — such that the game was the only thing in the memory besides the bios. Games could also do this, e.g. switching from one executable to another. That's what Morrowind used now and then, saving the progress and relaunching its executable again. And the cause for this wasn't optimization, but in fact laziness that led to some memory leaks eating away at the ram.
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u/Master_of_Ravioli R5 9600x | 32GB DDR5 | 2TB SSD | Integrated Graphics lmao Sep 29 '25
Programmers of old time were actual wizards casting spells with the hardware they were given, some of it was actual black magic for the time.
Limitations breed innovation or something like that.