- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
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Video game graphics seem to have reached diminishing returns at this point. Games are more expensive to make, but the end consumer barely notice any visual difference.
There was a time when having the best graphics in any video game was a selling point. People argued whether X360 or PS3 could produce best graphics. Now, nobody cares.
Honestly, I think we hit that point about 10 years ago with the XBox 1 and PS4. Yeah, XBox Series and PS5 look better, but PS4 and XBox 1 still look great IMO.
I hit the “Okay we have solved video game graphics” moment when they zoomed in on the hair on Aloy’s face from Horizon: Peasant’s Quest or whatever it was called. Like okay we don’t need to try any harder than this.
Even if you’re talking visuals only (which obviously don’t always matter), good art direction always beats high res and photorealistic.
My prime example for this is always Okami. It’s a PS2 game. It’s basically intemporal.
Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker. Those graphics were slammed at the time for being cartoony, but they hold up even now. Meanwhile, games that were going for realism at the time look like ass in comparison to modern realistic graphics. And today’s will suck compared to next year’s and so on.
I still think Shadow of the Colossus on PS2 is one of the best looking games out there, even though it was going for a more realistic art style which has aged horribly in most other games.
For a contemporary example, Hi-Fi Rush. Here in 20 years, when modern graphics look like ass by comparison, heavy stylization will always look good.
They focused so much on hyper realistic graphics that they forgot about the most important part of a game: being fun.
I’ve sunk way more hours in an “ugly” game such as space haven or balatro this year than in any ultra beautiful (and void of fun) AAA game.
I wonder if it has to do with the age of the player. I grew up playing old games, not first gen games but on commadore and such, ms-dos games. Win 3.1, SNES, etc. Graphics in games have never really meant much, sure pretty is pretty but I’m more than happy to play around with noita for a couple hours, simple art styles, blocky textures. I am also fine jumping in to cyberpunk or mgs or last of us or anything newer. As long as I find the gameplay fun that is first and foremost the most important part. IDGAF about multiplayer, to me multiplayer was a cop-out in the late 90s early 00s to not have to actually make decent games, and I still stand by that. IDGAF about stupid features. You make a game I find interesting and I’ll likely play it, You make a game that looks pretty and has shitty gameplay I won’t even spit in its general direction.
I’m not really sure it’s completely like that. In the early 2000’s we had “beautiful” games (aka the most advanced graphics that technology could afford) but games were fun.
Devs invested in graphics, but they also invested in innovative formulas, in gameplay… You could tell a game was unique and beautiful.
Today, AAA games are just a checklist of things that must be included (almost none pointed at making the player have fun) with an incredible level of detail that makes every single leave of every tree move independently from the rest.
The main problem with pretty graphics is that you actually lose out on the kind of variety a more abstract graphics style would allow, e.g. by distinguishing objects in a textual description you can have millions of distinct objects (e.g. in something like Dwarf Fortress with its item and character descriptions), much more than you could if you had to represent everything graphically.
Indeed. Today’s problem is that graphical fidelity takes so much of the development time and resources that the rest of the aspects of the game are completely left aside.
Yeah, I can count how many freckles this character has in their face, but that’s all these games offer now, and I don’t need to count freckles, I can do that in real life. I want to have a good time with the game.
In the early 2000’s we had “beautiful” games (aka the most advanced graphics that technology could afford) but games were fun.
You only remember the good ones. There has always been a lot of games that look good or even impressive, but play like crap.
Today there are still critically acclaimed games that happen to look good too. They’re a tiny minority, but it’s always been like that.
The problem is they put 300million in the graphics thinking it will make up the the 3 hours of fun content they copy-pasted from the last title. They charge $70 (plus $6000 in skins, skips, the other half of the game, and + a $7 month battle pass) and you still got to wait 3-6 months for the game to be in a playable state.
Same problem as Hollywood, big soulless corpos wearing the freshly harvested face of creativity to get an inverter hard. These clowns keep losing to some dudes making the game they want to play themselves because those guys actually care.
I remember having this argument 20 years ago with a bunch of people talking about the great graphics of some games. My response was always “yeah but the gameplay isn’t good.”
I’ll take a pretty game, sure. But I’ll take 2600-level graphics and good gameplay over a lot of the AAA garbage we’re being fed these days.
I always just point to Dwarf Fortress. Extremely complex mechanics that all work together (sometimes in unexpected ways; see cats dying of alcohol poisoning), all with ASCII graphics or simple 2D tilesets.
Except for the thousand keyboard binds you need to remember
I don’t really know any of the binds and I’m having a good time.
Most things work via menus, the key bindings just speed things up.
Up until the Steam version of the game, the menus were solely controlled by the keyboard.
we’re also getting pretty uncanny valley with a lot of the human models
