I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
On the one hand, we’re more accustomed to better hardware latency. On the other hand… we played first-person shooters on 56K modems. The lag was legendary
Wasn’t prediction baked into the netcode very early in the FPS genre? I wasn’t playing multiplayer in the Doom days, but by the late 90s, you wouldn’t have latency so much as you’d have rubberbanding. Games also use very little bandwidth, so 56K was no different than broadband, from my recollection.
First multiplayer FPS I played was Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (released in '97). In that game, you had to lead your shots to a silly degree to actually hit anyone. But I think you’re right; by then most games weren’t suffering from that problem as much.
Its ironic. Network latency has drastically decreased while game optimization tanked. Leading us back to where we were originally!