- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
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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.
Minecraft is one of the biggest games on the planet. Very popular with the young. Not what many would consider beautiful.
Some bits of Minecraft can actually be quite beautiful (e.g. the caves where the axolotls occur) but the graphics are certainly not photorealistic.
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.
There have always been pretty tech demos without much gameplay. There was Incoming it was basically a super simple turret section showing off the awesome (at the time) capabilities of the first Voodoo card. It was impressive and fun for about 15 minutes. Still doesn’t look too bad considering it came out in 1998.
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.
Well, I am not even talking about the resources used but literally about the fact that you can’t make that many graphics because of the number of combinations of different properties you would have to model somehow.
Plus there are some things you can describe in text that you can never portray graphically, e.g. concepts like “the most beautiful woman he had ever seen”
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.
I’m guessing the prettiness attracts more than a great gameplay. But I’m basically there with you.
I suspect the prettiness sells better in the investment meetings to people who have no clue about gameplay anyway.
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 agree, what made WW really work to me was the animation. Also the expressiveness of characters, because in comparison N64 Link basically knew a total of two expressions, and they were dull grumpiness and angry grumpiness.
I don’t like what they’ve done to the Wii U remake though. I don’t understand why every colour needed to be balanced toward radioactive hell.
Also unrelated to visuals but the loss of the Tingle Tuner was a shame, that thing was genius. Had so much fun with my siblings with it. I’m sure they could have emulated it with 3DS if they cared, after all 3DS/Wii U connection was a thing for smash for example.
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.
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.
Anyone have the archive.org (or any other paywall side-stepping software) link for this article? I don’t want to sign up for NYT,
uBlock Origin (not on Chrome) + https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/master/antipaywall.txt
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.
we’re also getting pretty uncanny valley with a lot of the human models
This is why Astro bot is such a resounding success.
Astro Bot looks pretty darn good though (in both art style and graphical fidelity), so not sure if it’s a good example.
And Balatro. A game by one dev, making many folks GOTY.
I like how the first line of this article below the images states how epic’s flagship unreal 5 game has outdated graphics… Doesn’t make me feel like they did any sort of research.
The flagship Unreal 5 game released on Unreal 4 in 2017 has outdated graphics, yes.
People aren’t playing the original version anymore though?
But it doesn’t have cutting edge graphics now that it’s 7 years older just because it technically runs on the newer version of the engine under the hood. It runs on phones, after all.
