Some developers went the extra mile in designing their worlds, using the full potential of these systems to make their worlds as beautiful and detailed as possible. Gamers who grew up on 8-bit and 16-bit games were wowed by the explorable 3D worlds with far more depth than the 2D backgrounds of the past.
With the advent of 3D graphics came new leaps and bounds in game design. Another major feather in Sony's cap in this area became manging to win over the fighting game developer Namco, whose output up until that point had been pretty much synonymous with Sega's consoles. As a result quite a few developers, who up until this point had been synonymous with quality games on Nintendo's consoles, most prominently Capcom, Squaresoft, and Konami, decided to jump ship and make their next big projects or main installments in their running franchises exclusives for the PlayStation. With Sony emerging on the console scene as a serious competitor, many developers found that the company was willing to offer them far more lucrative deals and a greater degree of freedom.
Especially many Japanese developers had for a long time been disgruntled with Nintendo's rather restrictive licensing policies and their insistence on taking a relatively large cut of the sales, which had in many cases made turning a decent profit on their games a difficult task, and this generation would see the blowback from these policies starting to kick in. The kingmakers of the generation would be the third party developers. The Saturn was, in hindsight, ultimately a Creator Killer for Sega as a console manufacturer, but this would not become apparent until the next generation. This led to the game's unceremonious cancellation in 1997, just a year before the Saturn was officially discontinued on the Western market. Work on the game, Sonic X-treme, which would also have been the franchise's leap into 3D, started in 1994, but got caught up in quite a messy bit of Development Hell (and even some in-fighting between Sega's Japanese and American divisions). Things certainly didn't get better for the Saturn when Sega's next planned entry in their flagship franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog, which would unquestionably have helped the console's lacking sales, failed to materialize. Ironic, considering that Virtua Fighter, the game that caused the 3D boom, was Sega's own product. While it certainly was possible to squeeze 3D graphics out of the Saturn, it was an extremely cumbersome task to pull off making them look and run decently, even for experienced code-wizards. Thus, the Sega Saturn became notorious among developers for its difficulty to develop 3D games for, as the console's hardware architecture wasn't really put together to render 3D. Sega, on the other hand, didn't catch on until their own console was too far in development. Both Nintendo and their newly emergent rival Sony Computer Entertainment caught onto the excitement towards polygons, and so they designed their respective consoles, the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation, around polygonal rendering from the very start. Suddenly, the addition of a third dimension seemed to make the sprites of the past look outdated, and polygons were said to be the future of video gaming. The 16-bit era had a few scattered experiments to bring polygons to primarily sprite-based consoles (most notably Star Fox), but when the revolutionary Virtua Fighter hit the arcades, polygons finally took off. The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games (sometimes referred to as the 32/64-bit Era, but referring to consoles by their bits started to fall out of style in this gen) was a time of many of the biggest leaps forward in the industry in terms of design, graphics, and storytelling in video games, as well as the way video games were viewed and played.
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