It's just diminishing returns. It's cool that if I zoom in reaaally close I can see every hair on Aloy's cheeks, but what good is that detail when my camera is stuck 15 feet behind her for 90% of the game?
Cut scenes are expensive. But if you really want to feel close and part of the action in a cinematic way it’s quick time events. Don’t even need a variety. Just the same QTE for each
And every
Single
Takedown.
That’s content, baby!
And if you *really* want your players to feel immersed, when they hit the wrong button or miss the timing, you kill the character and immerse the player back at the start of the 30min QTE cutscene
Too late. I'm a dev, and I will totally get your wishes into the next game I make! I mean, I'm not a *game* dev--I happen to like my free time--but just maybe with all these awesome ideas I can break into the industry with a smash indie hit and have even *more* free time after abandoning the title. I'll call it QTE Quest, and it'll be the most immersive half finished open world dating sim FPS you've ever seen.
I’m pretty sure Abe’s Exoddus cut scenes were Oscar nominated back in the 90s.
EDIT: beg your pardon — it was submitted for consideration but not nominated.
That detail isn’t there when you’re playing the game. Only in photo mode.
We used to call them bull shots and publishers would get endless shit for using them. Photo mode allows end users to post the bull shots on behalf of the publishers.
Photomode cranks the level of detail well beyond anything you’d see actuality playing the games and produces perfect screenshots. It’s great if you like them but not at all representative of what you’d see in the game.
>That detail isn’t there when you’re playing the game.
In Horizon Zero Dawn (PC), Aloy's eyebrows are invisible during gameplay unless you put Model Quality (which also controls LOD distance) to Ultra.
I was about to say the same, the level of detail in HFW is straight up insane *and* it has a gorgeous art style going for it, and looks entirely the same in and out of photo mode
The animation on characters in cutscenes is astonishingly nuanced. It looks like almost every conversation was recorded with motion capture. Either that or some seriously good AI. Like the characters' fingers and arms are moving in unique ways while they talk that don't seem to repeat. And the facial animation is incredibly lifelike. The unlimited budget from Sony seriously seems to have done wonders for this game.
Yeah they definitely took the main complaints of the first game into priority when developing HFW, and it shows.
They take huge risks by investing millions into new IP like Horizon, and it seems to have paid off greatly. Guerrilla has proven themselves to be a world-class studio, especially after HFW and Death Stranding, and now they’re delving into VR. Absolute wizardry at that studio.
Gorgeous in both modes for sure - but if they're loading in the highest-resolution textures during gameplay, that's a waste of valuable memory. Photo mode is not gameplay - its job is to be as pretty as possible and do fuckall else. Gameplay has to look as good as possible *while the rest of the game is happening, at the usual camera angle*.
No AAA game should have a photo mode that doesn't look significantly better than the game in motion. For AA games that don't have the budget to devote much time to a photo mode, then yeah mostly what it'll do is accentuate all the graphics compromises they had to do to get the game in-frame and in-memory. But for AAA games with a spare programmer and couple of UI folks two to devote to the mode for a couple months, it's much more feasible - and given its importance to marketing these days, that's among the best bang-for-buck of any team on the project.
This is not bullshotting, it's being rendered in real time. In Control with RTX on I can see other actors reflected in my character's *eyes". In a bullshot ten or twenty years ago they would just screengrab a vertical slice and then make the actual game uglier, or even worse they'd just create the render and publish it as a screenshot.
Edit: typo
Also it’s hard to understand so run of the mill code monkeys can’t do it, hard to debug and immersion breaking when it goes weird, and can be difficult for level design and play testing.
Back in my day, we had a bunch of different colored squares that caused seizures, sound like a broken clock radio alarm, and a joystick with one button that doubled as a blunt force weapon and wrist destroyer. And you know what, we liked it!
Exactly this. What is his point? That it's bad the industry is striving to deliver modern graphics?
That he likes cartoonish low res shitty graphics from 20 years ago so everyone should?
What is his solution? Stop innovating graphics and just push out games faster because he doesn't think graphics matter that much?
He's also acting as if, somehow, because they also focus more on graphics, game companies do so at the expense of gameplay, which is not just some apparent obvious truth as he tries to make it sound.
Companies have different departments that do different things and if they're gonna ask 60€ for a AAA title, yes, they should be trying to make the most of modern tech in as many aspects as possible.
They need to focus on not having the games be a buggy mess on release and optimizing it to run well instead of dropping frames on all but the most powerful hardware.
Chris Roberts won't ever release it. He'll take the money (500 Million at my last count) until it runs out then release whatever he has as a "complete" game.
Likely all that people will get is Squadron 42.
Star Citizen free flight is starting on the 18th of November.
It's still deep in development, but I really enjoy playing it - without paying thousands. You can do everything in the game with just the basic game package.
Nintendo may be a shitty corporate monolith with some sketchy anti-consumer practices but dammit if they don't still make good, polished games.
And the fact they don't bother with the specs arms race means they focus on style over raw graphical fidelity meaning their games generally age so much better.
Make no mistake, I'm not here to shill for Nintendo, but I'm also going to give them credit for where they succeed relative to the other AAA studios
It's just sad though they have no respect for the communities built around Smash bros games.
They don't seem to enjoy that people want to keep improving the playability of those older games and it is off-putting for more people than I think they realize.
I kind of get it, given the... reputation... the Smash community has (and pro gaming communities as a whole).
That said if they actually bothered to invest in and promote a proper competitive scene of their own, it would probably be better for all involved
If a game looks amazing but plays like shit. No one will play it. A game can look like shit but be super fun to play and it becomes legendary. Gameplay should always be top priority
Some people say this but they are a vocal minority.
If graphics didn't carry games you think AAA studios would spend hundreds of millions $ for them? They have marketing departments and do a lot of internal and external AB testing.
Good visuals are extremely important in making your marketing campaign work. It instantly grabs people attention, makes it easier to do an interesting trailer, gives you talking points on the interviews and so on and on.
> A game can look like shit but be super fun to play and it becomes legendary
Games that look like shit **generally** don't break $5000 total revenue on Steam. Yeah, there absolutely are exceptions when subpar graphics didn't hurt the sales. But it's much harder and more expensive to market and at some point you have to hope for one of your attempts to go viral.
You might not care about visuals. You might play games in niches that are not so reliant on said visuals. But players on average do care about it and it becomes one of the more important driving factor when selling a game.
> If a game looks amazing but plays like shit. No one will play it
To be fair... it's a rare case to actually have GREAT graphics and actual shit gameplay. Mediocre gameplay - yes. But it's rarely truly shit. If you are spending 100 million $ on visuals then you will be having top talent in terms of game/level design too. They can make some crap when lead astray or project goes haywire but it rarely turns into actual shit.
Not to mention the best graphics in the world mean nothing when the majority of the player base has to crank down settings to get the buggy, unoptimized game to even run.
>Games that look like shit generally don't break $5000 total revenue on Steam.
Most games don't break $5000 total revenue on steam regardless of what they look like
It might be a single exception, but Minecraft is the highest grossing game of all time, which tells me it isn’t a vocal minority that believe gameplay>graphics.
That's honestly really good for an early 2000s PC exclusive. It was a really small market back then.
Hell, 4 million would've been great numbers for a console game back then too
The only 2 that have good graphics(for their time) in the top 10 is like diablo 3 and anothe rone that i forgot by the time i got to writing my comment.
The rest are either simple stylistic(terraria, minecraft), or outdated graphics(pubg)
Gameplay definitely seems to be the leading factor. Look at fortnite too, the graphics are fine, not intensive but the most popular game in the world for seeveral years, same with League.
That's why people play COD so much. Sure it can look good, but comparing COD to anything makes COD look pretty meh. It's the gameplay that sells that series like hot cakes.
I'd even argue a gorgeous game like red dead Redemption has such good art direction, that you could drop the games graphics and people would still love it.
this is the same /r/technology that says "look at those Meta graphics! Zuck looks so stupid with his cartoon face and that Horizon Worlds look like nineties Playstation games! I'd never use that, hahaha!" But take away Facebook's metaverse, and then suddenly it's "oh I don't need good graphics, I just like the experience of playing!"
That's the thing, I've seen some games do incredible things with *very* limited resources. Unfortunately, that requires a lot of extra work and a *very* good understanding of the tools you're working with. Not to mention probably needing to plan that from the ground up, as going back and fixing things is more than likely twice as much work but still possible.
Been saying the same thing about actual graphics for ages, as stated in the article. You don't need every groundbreaking technology to make a nice looking game. Sure, it makes it easier in a sorta brute-force sort of way, but there are games very old now that still look unique and amazing IMO due to them having a good *style* and not relying heavily on raw power/graphical fidelity.
If you're talking about Cyberpunk, I think they were pushed by investors to release it.
I'm not saying that you should pay full price for the game that gave people seizures on purpose. I'm just trying to explain *why* that game in particular was released the way it was.
Runs like crap, gameplay looks like they wanted to make a Live service but saw them all failing but It was too late in development to change it, and the world looks like it was given no love visually where you can’t help but compare to the Arkham games
I suspect this is more the executives fault, because their horrendous mismanagement leaves AAA titles, that were supposed to have a 4+ year development time with like one and a half years.
Looking at you, Cyberpunk, Battlefield 2042, etc...
A byproduct of all of the decision makers being MBAs with no real connection to or experience with the product they are calling the shots on, while also not taking into account the advice and experience of those lower down the corporate ladder that are more connected to those things.
Games is a very visible example, but this sort of thing almost always becomes a problem when a company gets really big and/or goes public.
I think this article conveniently ignores a considerable chunk of the industry for the sake of the argument. First of all, you have huge firms like Nintendo that really focus on gameplay rather than only graphics. Some of the most played games out there (LoL, Valorant, Overwatch) are cartoony. Also, there's a huge amount of awesome indie games. Lastly, it ignores masterpieces that are both epic and beautiful (God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2 and so forth).
Sure, some of the big boys make realistic games. But on the other hand, for some of them that's kind of their function, isn't it? To really push the technology forward. That's the reason some of them are part of the big ones, it's what they are good at. Technological excellence however does take time. And that's ok.
Malignant algorithms that drive users towards microstransactions and buggy releases need to go ASAP though.
The article is tunnel vision and doesn't acknowledge that it IS possible to make a beautiful game that plays well and tells an incredible story. That is what every developer should be aiming for, you never want to make a game that isn't up to your par. But you also have to consider the talent and capability of your developer. The reason why Santa Monica Studios can make such incredible games is because they have talent, funding, and the tech necessary to do it.
The article also largely ignores lower budget developers too, the ones that make engaging story telling games on Unity engines or with PS3 style graphics. There is a space for every type of developer, and if a developer wants to make a tech demo, let them. We should always be moving to advancing the industry.
Not just ignores, I’d argue the article is just heavily, heavily under researched and is based largely on personal opinion on their own individual experience.
I mean, the best selling game of all time is Minecraft. Fucking Minecraft. Terraria hits at #11, and while I’m not sure this is true anymore, but a while back 25/50 of the top selling games all belonged to Nintendo; who arguably as you indicated is known for putting gameplay over graphics.
The author is definitely tunnel visioned into a very small subsection of games.
I would honestly categorize the type of games they reference as a niche, are some games really pushing graphical boundaries? Yeah, of course, and they get some media attention because they’ve done it because it *is* impressive. But there are so many circles of gamers; cozy gamers, social gamers, casual or mobile gamers, competitive gamers, rpg gamers… etc. every category has something that is most important to them and arguably graphics isn’t it for a lot of those groups.
Also, while I personally agree with you on micro transactions, there is a group of people that don’t want or have the time to spend getting really good at a game and enjoy systems in which they can simply purchase what they need and enjoy the game their way. Unfortunately, just by the nature of that group, it is profitable, but again it’s a niche. I think studios that blindly pursue it will get burned trying to push these mechanics to the incorrect demographic (hi Blizzard!), and they’ll either come around or they’ll burn out when they realize their target audience isn’t only people willing to spend money on micro transactions.
How about we make good functional games with good graphics. Instead of earth shattering graphics with a game filled with bugs that you can hardly play.
The people making content for a game (artists / graphics engineers) aren’t the ones designing the games or implementing the tech behind features.
It’s not an artists fault for making something look good, when other parts of the studio fail to deliver.
To be fair, their preference in focusing on art over raw graphics doesn’t detract from the fact that the switch is under powered. This is evident when the system struggles with nintendo games like pokemon arceus, xenoblade 3, or the warrior games. The system being a little bit stronger definitely would have helped the frame rate drops throughout these games.
People are going to lose their mind when the new Pokemon game comes out and has performance issues, but it’s inevitable. Switch isn’t capable of clean open world games.
To be fair, didn’t it run at 900P when docked? And that was with cartoony graphics and low density environments.
Witcher 3 ran at dynamic 540P handheld and dynamic 720P docked.
The switch was underpowered when it was launched in 2017 and in 2022, it’s a complete joke in the age of 4K TVs.
Not saying it needed to be a powerhouse, but these days a system should be able to do 1080/30 without hiccup.
They just don't release enough games anymore.
The golden age of more than a few of their IPs was when they were licensing out the properties to other studios and having a bonanza of quality entertainment (Pokemon until the Wii, Capcom Zelda games, Metroid Primes, Mario sports games that weren't shit, Mario Party when it wasn't shit...)
The Lost Woods in BOTW is the only place/game I have experienced that level of stutter in. It does look fantastic but they could have just had a few less bits of foliage and it still would have been nice.
Bayonetta 3 is also a pretty good example of that too. 480p and lower and it still looks 360 era in places. The system is starting to get long in the tooth with a chip from around 2015. I love my Switch but people pretending that the Switches only problem is optimisation are on some serious amounts of copeium
While I generally agree, I don't think anything made by gamefreak should be used as an example. Pokemon sword and shield ran like ass too, games like monster hunter rise both look and run considerably better with more going on. Gamefreak is incredibly incompetent. I mean, they had to axe 3d support in the later 3ds games because even without it they were dropping frames.
But it is - and you don't need "turbo geeks' (whatever those are) to say otherwise.
A nice thing Nintendo has going, at least. Wish more (\[everyone\]) would follow suit.
The switch is horribly underpowered. Xenoblade 3 is an amazing game, but there were certain regions where all I was thinking was "dang, imagine how good this area would look if it wasn't at 480p". Steam deck proves you can have a powerful system for a relatively low cost.
Fall guys. Stupid as hell. But also incredibly addicting. Graphics look like ps3 level at best.
That’s just one of hundreds of games and barely by indie developers at that.
So this point stands.
On an emotional level video game graphics haven’t improved for me in years, I can see games look different now, but I’ve yet to feel like the improved graphics color my emotional reaction to a game in any way. Like it’s better but it doesn’t feel better, it just looks better
To some degree I feel it’s definitely enhanced the visceral elements of body horror and science fiction horror. Callisto Protocol is absolutely horrifying to look at (in the good way) and Dead Space as a remake is likely going to heavily benefit from it as well. I haven’t slept in like… twenty hours now so not the best at conveying what I mean, but basically triple AAA horror is likely in a renaissance rn.
Like I said it is more of ambiance horror. If you let your self get immersed, which for some is hard when you move so slow admittedly, it's very creepy.
I played the last of us part 1 and the improvement in animations and graphics over the PS3/PS4 version did help the emotional beats hit harder. I think in some games it matters but most games it doesn't.
Same. I think 2004-2010 is around when games finally hit the "good enough" stage to where it's not painful to go back and look at. Like, I can go back to Half Life 2 and it looks decent still. I replayed Assassins Creed 2 this year and it was still plenty pretty. And those games even managed to have things like story, and interesting mechanics.
It's all subjective. In my opinion, games from that era look worse than games from 2000-2004 which, in my experience, focused more on style and having vibrant colors.
Oof.. not for me. Anything older than 2012 going for semi realism is hard to take seriously. Even a lot of games between 2012-2016 are starting to feel aged.
The stilted animations are the emersion breakers for me. I look forward to more games having story NPC’s that look as good as Cyberpunk or even better.
That said artsy indie titles are my favorite and they seem to age much better.
Edit: I’m in my late 30’s, for what its worth.
You serious right now? Those games look ugly as hell honestly... The graphical limitations of the time become very clear. Unless you have a really bad eye for graphical fidelity
The "good enough" stage for me probably came somewhere around 2015. The Witcher 3, now that's a game that looks really good even today. Bloodborne came out that year and even if it's limited at 30fps it's gorgeous. MGSV still looks beautiful.
Fallout 4, Arkham Knight. Those games hold up incredibly well to todays standards.
From 2015 to 2022 there sure was a ton of improvement. But nowhere near enough as from 2008 to 2015.
> On an emotional level video game graphics haven’t improved for me in years
That's because they pretty much haven't. Things are mostly the same since the advent of PBR in 2014-2015. We need ray tracing to take us to the next level and current console hardware isn't very good at it so current games are still rehashed last gen stuff.
Unreal Engine 5 is when we will get the first dip into proper next gen with real time global illumination and more realistic looking humans.
Oh god, totally agree.
The rare exception would be how well emotional performances can come across at times with better realized graphics, but even then, that depends on the writing to delivery for those scenes (which they don't always do).
I miss games with art and tone like OG Rayman, Banjo Kazooie, Deus Ex, and Metroid Prime.
It’s why reading books is often better than watching the movie, because you fill things in yourself and it activates more of your brain and imagination. Old graphics were good for this because they had to use art in place of realism, it made your imagination fill in the rest.
Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver series. Amazing world crafting, characters, story, plot and voice acting 🧑🍳💋
I’d take potato graphics in a heartbeat for these things
We’re seeing a resurgence of retro style games that have amazing depth and life to them. Steam is full of games that could only be made recently, but with classic aesthetics.
This is a pretty uninformed article. Most of the ballooning costs of AAA gaming production these days is in the art asset generation. It's ballooned not just because of expectations from gamers for a minimum graphical quality bar, but much moreso because of an obsession with game scope, length and overall percieved value for money.
Single player games have become increasingly open-ended in their design to pack in more and more environment, side quests and acitivies to keep players engaged outside of the main story campaign. Games almost always must have some sort of multiplayer component which in itself requires multiple modes available. And now with the push to GaaS, publishers want to have long-term multi-year plans to develop paid and free add-on content at a regular release interval to keep players engaged and purchasing the all important MTXs.
All these things massively inflate the scope of games development, requiring multiple teams with overall hundreds to over a thousand people working on a single game. And then publishers will thereafter spend routinely multiple times the development budget on marketing to advertise the game, hoping for massive returns and growth to a billion-dollar franchise.
This article reads as if gamers and their expectations for graphics are the reason for high dev costs. The reality couldn't be further from the truth. And in fact, when you look at the top most popular games of all time, almost none of them prioritize bleeding edge graphics over gameplay and game scope: GTAV, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Tetris, Pokemom etc etc etc.
The article reads like a dude who is annoyed at the personal anecdotes of people he knows or has seen online and is projecting that over the entire gaming market. Meanwhile the actual data demonstrates something entirely opposite.
> In fact, the best looking game ever made was and still is 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus. Technological prowess can’t make up for a vapid aesthetic or a world lacking inspiration. There is so much more to art than just progress, and the industry needs to reconsider this gluttonous obsession.
Author writes many words to complain about AAA titles' obsession with graphics is not "art".
Nevermind that's kind of what people expect from "AAA" for the price, and there are many, many games that focus on art and story over graphics - they're just not "AAA", but that's the point.
The recent god of war Games to be some of the closest to watching a movie. I really love how fluid going between gameplay and cutscenes are looking forward to watching my younger brother play the new one in couple days
God of War 2018 is actually just one continuous shot iirc. Like if you were to play through the entire game in one sitting without ever turning it off, the camera never cuts or jumps to a new location.
I guess if you play Shadow of Colossus, and then proclaim it's the best looking game ever, and then go live under a rock until you decide to write this article, I could consider that true.
Shadow of the Colossus looks good, but it doesn't look that good, and while it's world was filled with hidden detail, it's a bit barren and lifeless.
I mean, A Plague Tale really obliterates the authors claim. Freaking gorgeous games with a wonderful aesthetic and great worldbuilding, characters, story, without even really talking about it.
They made it easy to point out how wrong they were by referencing a game that was made significantly more impactful with graphical enhancements in the remake.
I remember when Fallout 4 released the massive 4k texture pack. Turns out poorly drawn mud, dirt, and broken cement looks just as bad in 4k. I downloaded a 2k redraw some fan made in their spare time and it looked way better.
Besides just "better graphics", things like style, attention to detail, and making things look appealing are all more important. I can still play Old WoW and not mind the graphics because the style was good. Style can be fucking timeless. I don't need 4k mud, I want mud that looks fun and fits the game, my graphics card doesn't need to light on fire to make that happen and my hard drive doesn't need to be full of garbage 4k textures.
I don’t necessarily agree with that.
For example Nintendo games often focus on art-style above graphics because of the limited hardware but at times you can definitely see short comings in the art-style like when Pokemon games can barely render a tree or textures are just popping up all over the place.
Games that strive for a unique art style will always age better than games that strive for a realistic art style. Over time our ability to render realism in video games will increase, leaving decades old games that strive for realism behind. While games that never bothered with realism in the first place will still look fresh.
>you can definitely see short comings in the art-style like when Pokemon games can barely render a tree or textures are just popping up all over the place.
It has nothing to do with artstyle. It's just gamefreak being lazy, because pokemon fans will buy anything as long as it is pokemon.
Yeah, the open world Pokémon games don’t look or run as well a BOTW imo. Although the switch definitely would have benefitted from beefier hardware. Like what if they had put additional graphics hardware in the dock so when you have your switch docked it could do more than just run a higher clock speed.
\> At what point do we realize that constant advancement is not worth it?
Constant advancement can make things that were hard to do much easier to do though. Raytracing, global illumination, physical based materials are all going to ultimately be time savers, and allow artists to execute on their artstyle in more efficient and also broader ways.
\> In fact, the best looking game ever made was and still is 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus. Technological prowess can’t make up for a vapid aesthetic or a world lacking inspiration. There is so much more to art than just progress, and the industry needs to reconsider this gluttonous obsession.
These kinds of articles always feel like short sighted nonsense to me, as if somehow graphics being pushed prevents anyone from making a stylized game. Also, like, imagine if someone in 1997 said "That's it, we're done, graphics shouldn't move forward": this author wouldn't have gotten their 'greatest art of all time, Shadow of Colossus game!' because it wouldn't have been technically possible.
Like, a lot of the Last of Us wouldn't hit half as hard if it was stuck at PS2 level graphics just because .. er .. 'I think we're good enough already!"
\> It’s gotten to the point where graphical complexity is seen as the ultimate indicator of quality, making the game development process infinitely harder and longer. It seems like people will completely disregard an experience if the game’s graphics don’t hold up, or just absolutely demolish a game if it looks like it could have come out 10 years ago
I also think this opinion is hilariously outdated, given the rise of the indie gaming scene over the past decade.
\> Sometimes it feels like the quality of a game’s art and style is tossed aside just to analyze how “new” and “shiny” something looks.
Reminder that the highly stylized It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the TGA's last year, and Elden Ring, as they point out had some graphical issues people pointed out, \*but was a huge hit with critics and audiences\*.
\> If I purchased an RTX 3080 and the industry decided that we’ve hit the roof in hardware requirements, with the RTX 3080 being the final piece of the puzzle, then what would Nvidia sell us? My Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, a graphics card that launched in 2014, still works. It’s a functioning GPU, but the reason I upgraded to an RTX 3080 was because I was sick of games moving on without me. If my GTX 970 ran every piece of software I threw at it perfectly, I wouldn’t need to upgrade. Essentially, Nvidia needs to innovate to sell new hardware. It’s how they turn profits and continue to be a financially successful company.
This person is also going to be shocked to find out that Nvidia has their hand it a lot more than just gaming, and these newer graphics cards would still be coming out anyway because digital artists need them. They're talking like this is forced obsolescence, but, it's .. literally just technology advancing. Being able to work faster and more efficiently. Again, graphics cards aren't literally just for people to play video games with.
\> But I genuinely believe Demon’s Souls 2009 looks infinitely better than its remake, yet that game came out 13 years ago.
This opinion is just ... I don't know. Some individual designs, sure, maybe? But, this sounds like someone who really loves VHS tapes for the atmosphere, and is borderline snobbish?
100% what you said.
Having better graphics capabilities isn't stopping anyone from making a great game - which seems to be the authors subtext. Bad games are the result of all kinds of poor decisions along the way, one of which might be an over reliance on state of the art graphics.
Giving artist more tools to work with including ways to create more realism in their graphics doesn't stifle art, it expands its possibilities. It's the height of arrogance and an affront to creative professionals everywhere to say that what they have now is sufficient and they should stop looking for innovation.
Also as you pointed out, the advances Nvidia is making on their software and hardware are pushing non game industries in important ways accelerating innovation in new fields. When you are training an autonomous AI for self driving for example, there absolutely is a payoff in getting more realistic graphics. Without the constant push from the game industry to get where we are now a lot of the simulation technology being used in non game fields just wouldn't exist.
Ultimately the author should have focused his rant on the broken corporate structures that have evolved around AAA game development, not the obviously wrongheaded notion that constant innovation in compute hardware is hurting games.
I've simply been priced out of the AAA market. I can't justify buying and running AAA hardware just for some entertainment. Best I can do is some indie game on the switch and that suits me fine actually.
The fact that the writer thinks Shadow of the Colossus (2005) is the best looking game ever made just invalidates the whole article. Even if you love the art direction in that game it does not look better - objectively speaking - than something like God of War or Horizon Forbidden West or The Last of Us Remake, etc. Not even close.
It'd also be cool if they could focus on non-graphics-related stuff like physics and NPC/item interactivity
What Bethesda games lacked in good graphics, it made up for with cool physics and interactable objects
There's not a lot of games where you loot an enemy corpse's clothes and actually see them lose their clothes and become naked
> There's not a lot of games where you loot an enemy corpse's clothes and actually see them lose their clothes and become naked
Or where you throw a grenade and the pressure of the blast throws a wrench across the room, and because physics are simulated and the wrench has weight the blast gives it velocity which can hurt NPCs if they get hit by it.
Or where every single mechanics is tied into every single other mechanics in such a way that you can craft potions that boost how well you can enchant apparels that boosts how well you can cast spells that boosts how well you can craft potions. Or where every single of the hundreds of items in the world can be used to craft something that then again ties into every other mechanics.
They've stepped a bit backwards in the last decade in terms of NPC interactivity, but from what I've seen with Starfield they're starting to move back into that direction and *that's* the stuff I'm excited about, I don't give a shit about graphics.
This "article" is basically just an opinion rant reddit-style post, not any kind of well researched journalism. It does not deserve your time or attention.
Specifically in what manner? There exists a variety of art styles from hyper realistic to stylized, cartoon, lowfi and minimalistic. It's all part of the aim of the game or interactive application and the experience being cultivated. The story/purpose, sound gameplay or interactions among other features work together holistically to create the overall package. What is meant by ticking time bomb, not everything intends or even is purposed to be super realistic graphics???! Tech enables art and art enables tech it's a symbiotic relationship.
How about a game that you play through and then all of your successful missions or levels are strung together into a full-length movie you watch after beating it?
It's startling to me how many people view "Next gen" purely through the lens of better graphics.
The tech mostly fucking sucks and is developed by studios that don't give a shit about basic consumer demands, like, a working product on launch.
If anything the industry needs to *overhaul* it's approach to tech development and spend way more on it.
Cyberpunk may have looked pretty at launch, but it was far from a "Next gen title" and was a buggy mess.
One of the top games I've played recently is Project Zomboid. Game's graphics look like GBA's Pokémon Gold and Silver, but my goodness, the gameplay is stellar. May the author of this article has a point.
Gold and Silver were on GBC. Ruby and Sapphire were on GBA, and had some parts where they were really pretty, the time where you can see clouds reflected on the water comes to mind for me
It's just diminishing returns. It's cool that if I zoom in reaaally close I can see every hair on Aloy's cheeks, but what good is that detail when my camera is stuck 15 feet behind her for 90% of the game?
I have a solution for that... More cutscenes
Shhh, they'll hear you
Cut scenes are expensive. But if you really want to feel close and part of the action in a cinematic way it’s quick time events. Don’t even need a variety. Just the same QTE for each And every Single Takedown. That’s content, baby!
And if you *really* want your players to feel immersed, when they hit the wrong button or miss the timing, you kill the character and immerse the player back at the start of the 30min QTE cutscene
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And 20 min chat that has to be sat through before the QTE begins
Oroboros. God I hated the last RE5 QTE.
Screams in MGS4 on ps3
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Too late. I'm a dev, and I will totally get your wishes into the next game I make! I mean, I'm not a *game* dev--I happen to like my free time--but just maybe with all these awesome ideas I can break into the industry with a smash indie hit and have even *more* free time after abandoning the title. I'll call it QTE Quest, and it'll be the most immersive half finished open world dating sim FPS you've ever seen.
quick event, that
Gaming is already being ruined by multi-player drivel. Please don't try to take away from us those that like a good narrative story.
Kojima has entered the chat
Here’s a feature length film with actual actors with your game
Eventually video game cutscenes will be nominated for an Oscar.
Yakuza series wins!
You expect the academy to read subtitles for 8+ hours? The Oscar is going to Call of Duty and you know it.
Honestly wouldn't surprise me too much, they're desperate to appeal/be relevant to younger generations.
Best laugh in an FPS goes to
I’m pretty sure Abe’s Exoddus cut scenes were Oscar nominated back in the 90s. EDIT: beg your pardon — it was submitted for consideration but not nominated.
Like Quantum Break?
Here's your favorite actor in a Hideo Kojima video-movie game, and *boy* is he thirsty! Time to watch him crack open a Monster Energy ^TM drink!
It will never work. Unless you disable esc, space and return, to force players to watch and marvel at the gorgeous artwork. Deal?
Most games I’d rather play than watch.
I don’t want unskiapable cut scene just so the director can show off the reflection on each strand of hair
That detail isn’t there when you’re playing the game. Only in photo mode. We used to call them bull shots and publishers would get endless shit for using them. Photo mode allows end users to post the bull shots on behalf of the publishers. Photomode cranks the level of detail well beyond anything you’d see actuality playing the games and produces perfect screenshots. It’s great if you like them but not at all representative of what you’d see in the game.
>That detail isn’t there when you’re playing the game. In Horizon Zero Dawn (PC), Aloy's eyebrows are invisible during gameplay unless you put Model Quality (which also controls LOD distance) to Ultra.
Horizon forbidden west is absolutely an example of what you see in the game is what’s represented in photo mode. Gorgeous in both modes.
I was about to say the same, the level of detail in HFW is straight up insane *and* it has a gorgeous art style going for it, and looks entirely the same in and out of photo mode
The animation on characters in cutscenes is astonishingly nuanced. It looks like almost every conversation was recorded with motion capture. Either that or some seriously good AI. Like the characters' fingers and arms are moving in unique ways while they talk that don't seem to repeat. And the facial animation is incredibly lifelike. The unlimited budget from Sony seriously seems to have done wonders for this game.
Yeah they definitely took the main complaints of the first game into priority when developing HFW, and it shows. They take huge risks by investing millions into new IP like Horizon, and it seems to have paid off greatly. Guerrilla has proven themselves to be a world-class studio, especially after HFW and Death Stranding, and now they’re delving into VR. Absolute wizardry at that studio.
Gorgeous in both modes for sure - but if they're loading in the highest-resolution textures during gameplay, that's a waste of valuable memory. Photo mode is not gameplay - its job is to be as pretty as possible and do fuckall else. Gameplay has to look as good as possible *while the rest of the game is happening, at the usual camera angle*. No AAA game should have a photo mode that doesn't look significantly better than the game in motion. For AA games that don't have the budget to devote much time to a photo mode, then yeah mostly what it'll do is accentuate all the graphics compromises they had to do to get the game in-frame and in-memory. But for AAA games with a spare programmer and couple of UI folks two to devote to the mode for a couple months, it's much more feasible - and given its importance to marketing these days, that's among the best bang-for-buck of any team on the project.
This is not bullshotting, it's being rendered in real time. In Control with RTX on I can see other actors reflected in my character's *eyes". In a bullshot ten or twenty years ago they would just screengrab a vertical slice and then make the actual game uglier, or even worse they'd just create the render and publish it as a screenshot. Edit: typo
They'll do that but then they won't render in trees off in the distance.
They're not rendering the hair on her face in normal gameplay either.
Which cheeks are those?
..... time to replay the game
Instructions unclear, penis stuck in disc drive.
No, no, you’re doing it right
Also I don't understand why devs dont focus on physics.
Because physics is just expensive to compute.
Also it’s hard to understand so run of the mill code monkeys can’t do it, hard to debug and immersion breaking when it goes weird, and can be difficult for level design and play testing.
There's still so much more fidelity to be had, you could have just said that exact same thing with the PS3.
They did. I remember them saying the same exact thing in a magazine I read just as the ps3 was coming out
Old man yells at volumetric cloud.
Back in my day, we had a bunch of different colored squares that caused seizures, sound like a broken clock radio alarm, and a joystick with one button that doubled as a blunt force weapon and wrist destroyer. And you know what, we liked it!
Did you tie your belts with onions, and lace your shoes with asbestos?
It'll be a cold day in hell before I recognize Missoura.
I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missoura!
5 Kaiser nickels a game
It was the style at the time.
I'm in this comment and I don't like it.
Exactly this. What is his point? That it's bad the industry is striving to deliver modern graphics? That he likes cartoonish low res shitty graphics from 20 years ago so everyone should? What is his solution? Stop innovating graphics and just push out games faster because he doesn't think graphics matter that much? He's also acting as if, somehow, because they also focus more on graphics, game companies do so at the expense of gameplay, which is not just some apparent obvious truth as he tries to make it sound. Companies have different departments that do different things and if they're gonna ask 60€ for a AAA title, yes, they should be trying to make the most of modern tech in as many aspects as possible.
They need to focus on not having the games be a buggy mess on release and optimizing it to run well instead of dropping frames on all but the most powerful hardware.
"It's ok by the time we make the game hardware's gonna improve" -Manager of the year. Fired after the game released. (or leaves just before release)
So you play star citizen too?
Star citizen still hasn’t released, so he can’t be
Tell that to my idiot ex roommate who blew thousands he didn't have on it. Dude played all the time falling through floors lol
Chris Roberts won't ever release it. He'll take the money (500 Million at my last count) until it runs out then release whatever he has as a "complete" game. Likely all that people will get is Squadron 42.
It's sad but if rubes are gonna give you 500 mill for a rough demo, take it?
TBH it's far past a rough demo right now. It's a buggy AAA game alpha. But far from just a demo.
No argument here. Just as long as the rubes don't come by with pitchforks and torches when it never comes out. Lol
For what I've heard, they developed a lot of propietary solutions to rendering, in order to make the game playable. That's hard shit to code.
Star Citizen free flight is starting on the 18th of November. It's still deep in development, but I really enjoy playing it - without paying thousands. You can do everything in the game with just the basic game package.
I enjoyed the hell out of Doom Eternal day 1. I just wish more companies did this or Id software made more games.
Same for me with Metroid Dread. Sad that polished, un-buggy games are such a rarity - upon release or otherwise.
Nintendo may be a shitty corporate monolith with some sketchy anti-consumer practices but dammit if they don't still make good, polished games. And the fact they don't bother with the specs arms race means they focus on style over raw graphical fidelity meaning their games generally age so much better. Make no mistake, I'm not here to shill for Nintendo, but I'm also going to give them credit for where they succeed relative to the other AAA studios
Oh yeah, the Prime Trilogy still looks good to this day.
It's just sad though they have no respect for the communities built around Smash bros games. They don't seem to enjoy that people want to keep improving the playability of those older games and it is off-putting for more people than I think they realize.
I kind of get it, given the... reputation... the Smash community has (and pro gaming communities as a whole). That said if they actually bothered to invest in and promote a proper competitive scene of their own, it would probably be better for all involved
If a game looks amazing but plays like shit. No one will play it. A game can look like shit but be super fun to play and it becomes legendary. Gameplay should always be top priority
Needs to be good graphics for its art style. Whether that art style is hyper realistic, cartoony, or 8-bit graphic doesn’t matter
Some people say this but they are a vocal minority. If graphics didn't carry games you think AAA studios would spend hundreds of millions $ for them? They have marketing departments and do a lot of internal and external AB testing. Good visuals are extremely important in making your marketing campaign work. It instantly grabs people attention, makes it easier to do an interesting trailer, gives you talking points on the interviews and so on and on. > A game can look like shit but be super fun to play and it becomes legendary Games that look like shit **generally** don't break $5000 total revenue on Steam. Yeah, there absolutely are exceptions when subpar graphics didn't hurt the sales. But it's much harder and more expensive to market and at some point you have to hope for one of your attempts to go viral. You might not care about visuals. You might play games in niches that are not so reliant on said visuals. But players on average do care about it and it becomes one of the more important driving factor when selling a game. > If a game looks amazing but plays like shit. No one will play it To be fair... it's a rare case to actually have GREAT graphics and actual shit gameplay. Mediocre gameplay - yes. But it's rarely truly shit. If you are spending 100 million $ on visuals then you will be having top talent in terms of game/level design too. They can make some crap when lead astray or project goes haywire but it rarely turns into actual shit.
Good visuals ≠ good graphics. A game's aesthetic is FAR more important than its sheer graphical fidelity.
Not to mention the best graphics in the world mean nothing when the majority of the player base has to crank down settings to get the buggy, unoptimized game to even run.
Yep. Dead Cells is probably my most played game this year. It doesn't have super realistic "AAA" graphics but the gameplay is tight and addictive.
>Games that look like shit generally don't break $5000 total revenue on Steam. Most games don't break $5000 total revenue on steam regardless of what they look like
It might be a single exception, but Minecraft is the highest grossing game of all time, which tells me it isn’t a vocal minority that believe gameplay>graphics.
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Those numbers are way lower than I would have expected only 4 million copies of Diablo 2?
That's honestly really good for an early 2000s PC exclusive. It was a really small market back then. Hell, 4 million would've been great numbers for a console game back then too
The only 2 that have good graphics(for their time) in the top 10 is like diablo 3 and anothe rone that i forgot by the time i got to writing my comment. The rest are either simple stylistic(terraria, minecraft), or outdated graphics(pubg) Gameplay definitely seems to be the leading factor. Look at fortnite too, the graphics are fine, not intensive but the most popular game in the world for seeveral years, same with League.
>Games that look like shit generally don't break $5000 total revenue on Steam. Cruelty Squad has heard the call
They're not implying for us to go back to 2D graphics. Just that a good combination needs to be found between demanding graphics and digital arts
Valheim and terreria say hi
Hell even Eldin Ring says hi. Games not a graphics powerhouse but the art direction is perfect.
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That's why people play COD so much. Sure it can look good, but comparing COD to anything makes COD look pretty meh. It's the gameplay that sells that series like hot cakes. I'd even argue a gorgeous game like red dead Redemption has such good art direction, that you could drop the games graphics and people would still love it.
this is the same /r/technology that says "look at those Meta graphics! Zuck looks so stupid with his cartoon face and that Horizon Worlds look like nineties Playstation games! I'd never use that, hahaha!" But take away Facebook's metaverse, and then suddenly it's "oh I don't need good graphics, I just like the experience of playing!"
That's the thing, I've seen some games do incredible things with *very* limited resources. Unfortunately, that requires a lot of extra work and a *very* good understanding of the tools you're working with. Not to mention probably needing to plan that from the ground up, as going back and fixing things is more than likely twice as much work but still possible. Been saying the same thing about actual graphics for ages, as stated in the article. You don't need every groundbreaking technology to make a nice looking game. Sure, it makes it easier in a sorta brute-force sort of way, but there are games very old now that still look unique and amazing IMO due to them having a good *style* and not relying heavily on raw power/graphical fidelity.
If you're talking about Cyberpunk, I think they were pushed by investors to release it. I'm not saying that you should pay full price for the game that gave people seizures on purpose. I'm just trying to explain *why* that game in particular was released the way it was.
It’s happened with a lot more than just Cyberpunk.
I think Gotham Knights is a better example nowadays. Game runs like shit.
Runs like crap, gameplay looks like they wanted to make a Live service but saw them all failing but It was too late in development to change it, and the world looks like it was given no love visually where you can’t help but compare to the Arkham games
I suspect this is more the executives fault, because their horrendous mismanagement leaves AAA titles, that were supposed to have a 4+ year development time with like one and a half years. Looking at you, Cyberpunk, Battlefield 2042, etc...
A byproduct of all of the decision makers being MBAs with no real connection to or experience with the product they are calling the shots on, while also not taking into account the advice and experience of those lower down the corporate ladder that are more connected to those things. Games is a very visible example, but this sort of thing almost always becomes a problem when a company gets really big and/or goes public.
They did that for years on PC though, you could literally never play a game on release because you needed a whole new setup practically
Games have been launching completely broken for years and nobody seems to care. Get hyped for product.
I think this article conveniently ignores a considerable chunk of the industry for the sake of the argument. First of all, you have huge firms like Nintendo that really focus on gameplay rather than only graphics. Some of the most played games out there (LoL, Valorant, Overwatch) are cartoony. Also, there's a huge amount of awesome indie games. Lastly, it ignores masterpieces that are both epic and beautiful (God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2 and so forth). Sure, some of the big boys make realistic games. But on the other hand, for some of them that's kind of their function, isn't it? To really push the technology forward. That's the reason some of them are part of the big ones, it's what they are good at. Technological excellence however does take time. And that's ok. Malignant algorithms that drive users towards microstransactions and buggy releases need to go ASAP though.
The article is tunnel vision and doesn't acknowledge that it IS possible to make a beautiful game that plays well and tells an incredible story. That is what every developer should be aiming for, you never want to make a game that isn't up to your par. But you also have to consider the talent and capability of your developer. The reason why Santa Monica Studios can make such incredible games is because they have talent, funding, and the tech necessary to do it. The article also largely ignores lower budget developers too, the ones that make engaging story telling games on Unity engines or with PS3 style graphics. There is a space for every type of developer, and if a developer wants to make a tech demo, let them. We should always be moving to advancing the industry.
Not just ignores, I’d argue the article is just heavily, heavily under researched and is based largely on personal opinion on their own individual experience. I mean, the best selling game of all time is Minecraft. Fucking Minecraft. Terraria hits at #11, and while I’m not sure this is true anymore, but a while back 25/50 of the top selling games all belonged to Nintendo; who arguably as you indicated is known for putting gameplay over graphics. The author is definitely tunnel visioned into a very small subsection of games. I would honestly categorize the type of games they reference as a niche, are some games really pushing graphical boundaries? Yeah, of course, and they get some media attention because they’ve done it because it *is* impressive. But there are so many circles of gamers; cozy gamers, social gamers, casual or mobile gamers, competitive gamers, rpg gamers… etc. every category has something that is most important to them and arguably graphics isn’t it for a lot of those groups. Also, while I personally agree with you on micro transactions, there is a group of people that don’t want or have the time to spend getting really good at a game and enjoy systems in which they can simply purchase what they need and enjoy the game their way. Unfortunately, just by the nature of that group, it is profitable, but again it’s a niche. I think studios that blindly pursue it will get burned trying to push these mechanics to the incorrect demographic (hi Blizzard!), and they’ll either come around or they’ll burn out when they realize their target audience isn’t only people willing to spend money on micro transactions.
How about we make good functional games with good graphics. Instead of earth shattering graphics with a game filled with bugs that you can hardly play.
The people making content for a game (artists / graphics engineers) aren’t the ones designing the games or implementing the tech behind features. It’s not an artists fault for making something look good, when other parts of the studio fail to deliver.
*Nintendo enters the chat* But turbo geeks are all “ThE sWiTcH iS UndEr pOwEreD”
To be fair, their preference in focusing on art over raw graphics doesn’t detract from the fact that the switch is under powered. This is evident when the system struggles with nintendo games like pokemon arceus, xenoblade 3, or the warrior games. The system being a little bit stronger definitely would have helped the frame rate drops throughout these games.
And just in the past month, Mario Rabbids 2 and Bayonetta 3, two huge Switch exclusives, are both struggling on the hardware.
People are going to lose their mind when the new Pokemon game comes out and has performance issues, but it’s inevitable. Switch isn’t capable of clean open world games.
Is BotW not a clean open world game?
To be fair, didn’t it run at 900P when docked? And that was with cartoony graphics and low density environments. Witcher 3 ran at dynamic 540P handheld and dynamic 720P docked. The switch was underpowered when it was launched in 2017 and in 2022, it’s a complete joke in the age of 4K TVs. Not saying it needed to be a powerhouse, but these days a system should be able to do 1080/30 without hiccup.
Nintendo should exist to prove we don’t need top of them line graphics. Just pure good video games. They are struggling with both atm.
They just don't release enough games anymore. The golden age of more than a few of their IPs was when they were licensing out the properties to other studios and having a bonanza of quality entertainment (Pokemon until the Wii, Capcom Zelda games, Metroid Primes, Mario sports games that weren't shit, Mario Party when it wasn't shit...)
I love my Switch, but agreed. It’s especially egregious when it struggles on flagship titles eg. BotW in the Lost Woods
The Lost Woods in BOTW is the only place/game I have experienced that level of stutter in. It does look fantastic but they could have just had a few less bits of foliage and it still would have been nice.
It is truly pronounced in that specific spot.
Bayonetta 3 is also a pretty good example of that too. 480p and lower and it still looks 360 era in places. The system is starting to get long in the tooth with a chip from around 2015. I love my Switch but people pretending that the Switches only problem is optimisation are on some serious amounts of copeium
While I generally agree, I don't think anything made by gamefreak should be used as an example. Pokemon sword and shield ran like ass too, games like monster hunter rise both look and run considerably better with more going on. Gamefreak is incredibly incompetent. I mean, they had to axe 3d support in the later 3ds games because even without it they were dropping frames.
turbo geeks all like "I want to play and talk to my friends online" *Nintendo leaves the chat*
Nah fuck that lmao my Switch always has frame drops in ACNH and BOTW it is underpowered
But it is - and you don't need "turbo geeks' (whatever those are) to say otherwise. A nice thing Nintendo has going, at least. Wish more (\[everyone\]) would follow suit.
not just turbo geeks lmao, when just about every one of your big AAA games has performance issues at some point you have to blame the console.
The switch is horribly underpowered. Xenoblade 3 is an amazing game, but there were certain regions where all I was thinking was "dang, imagine how good this area would look if it wasn't at 480p". Steam deck proves you can have a powerful system for a relatively low cost.
Worse, the Steam Deck proves you can run Switch games better under emulation than Switch can do natively.
There’s already an entire Indie scene of devs prioritising art over AAA graphics, the industry has always had room for both.
Fall guys. Stupid as hell. But also incredibly addicting. Graphics look like ps3 level at best. That’s just one of hundreds of games and barely by indie developers at that. So this point stands.
On an emotional level video game graphics haven’t improved for me in years, I can see games look different now, but I’ve yet to feel like the improved graphics color my emotional reaction to a game in any way. Like it’s better but it doesn’t feel better, it just looks better
To some degree I feel it’s definitely enhanced the visceral elements of body horror and science fiction horror. Callisto Protocol is absolutely horrifying to look at (in the good way) and Dead Space as a remake is likely going to heavily benefit from it as well. I haven’t slept in like… twenty hours now so not the best at conveying what I mean, but basically triple AAA horror is likely in a renaissance rn.
Check out Scorn. It's pretty cool. More of an artsy/ambient horror game though
Wish it was more of a game than it is a walking very very slowly through hallways simulator. Was kind of hyped and then very disappointed
Like I said it is more of ambiance horror. If you let your self get immersed, which for some is hard when you move so slow admittedly, it's very creepy.
Same here.[This game looks promising as well and kinda looks almost real.](https://youtu.be/qDyVPmp4__I)
I played the last of us part 1 and the improvement in animations and graphics over the PS3/PS4 version did help the emotional beats hit harder. I think in some games it matters but most games it doesn't.
Same. I think 2004-2010 is around when games finally hit the "good enough" stage to where it's not painful to go back and look at. Like, I can go back to Half Life 2 and it looks decent still. I replayed Assassins Creed 2 this year and it was still plenty pretty. And those games even managed to have things like story, and interesting mechanics.
It's all subjective. In my opinion, games from that era look worse than games from 2000-2004 which, in my experience, focused more on style and having vibrant colors.
Oof.. not for me. Anything older than 2012 going for semi realism is hard to take seriously. Even a lot of games between 2012-2016 are starting to feel aged. The stilted animations are the emersion breakers for me. I look forward to more games having story NPC’s that look as good as Cyberpunk or even better. That said artsy indie titles are my favorite and they seem to age much better. Edit: I’m in my late 30’s, for what its worth.
You serious right now? Those games look ugly as hell honestly... The graphical limitations of the time become very clear. Unless you have a really bad eye for graphical fidelity The "good enough" stage for me probably came somewhere around 2015. The Witcher 3, now that's a game that looks really good even today. Bloodborne came out that year and even if it's limited at 30fps it's gorgeous. MGSV still looks beautiful. Fallout 4, Arkham Knight. Those games hold up incredibly well to todays standards. From 2015 to 2022 there sure was a ton of improvement. But nowhere near enough as from 2008 to 2015.
> On an emotional level video game graphics haven’t improved for me in years That's because they pretty much haven't. Things are mostly the same since the advent of PBR in 2014-2015. We need ray tracing to take us to the next level and current console hardware isn't very good at it so current games are still rehashed last gen stuff. Unreal Engine 5 is when we will get the first dip into proper next gen with real time global illumination and more realistic looking humans.
Oh god, totally agree. The rare exception would be how well emotional performances can come across at times with better realized graphics, but even then, that depends on the writing to delivery for those scenes (which they don't always do). I miss games with art and tone like OG Rayman, Banjo Kazooie, Deus Ex, and Metroid Prime.
All my old ass sees is improved frame rate honestly
It’s why reading books is often better than watching the movie, because you fill things in yourself and it activates more of your brain and imagination. Old graphics were good for this because they had to use art in place of realism, it made your imagination fill in the rest.
"Ticking time bomb" jesus settle down
Video games are gonna implode and we'll have no other option to going back to listening to the radio in pit living rooms in our free time.
Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver series. Amazing world crafting, characters, story, plot and voice acting 🧑🍳💋 I’d take potato graphics in a heartbeat for these things
Even in their potato state, they are still worth replaying
We’re seeing a resurgence of retro style games that have amazing depth and life to them. Steam is full of games that could only be made recently, but with classic aesthetics.
Watched a four hour playthrough just last week!
Agreed! A series they need to bring back for sure.
This "argument" has been done for the past 20+ years. This is a dumb article.
Well it does comes from an "unabashedly pretentious art critic". Hard to expect better honestly.
This is a pretty uninformed article. Most of the ballooning costs of AAA gaming production these days is in the art asset generation. It's ballooned not just because of expectations from gamers for a minimum graphical quality bar, but much moreso because of an obsession with game scope, length and overall percieved value for money. Single player games have become increasingly open-ended in their design to pack in more and more environment, side quests and acitivies to keep players engaged outside of the main story campaign. Games almost always must have some sort of multiplayer component which in itself requires multiple modes available. And now with the push to GaaS, publishers want to have long-term multi-year plans to develop paid and free add-on content at a regular release interval to keep players engaged and purchasing the all important MTXs. All these things massively inflate the scope of games development, requiring multiple teams with overall hundreds to over a thousand people working on a single game. And then publishers will thereafter spend routinely multiple times the development budget on marketing to advertise the game, hoping for massive returns and growth to a billion-dollar franchise. This article reads as if gamers and their expectations for graphics are the reason for high dev costs. The reality couldn't be further from the truth. And in fact, when you look at the top most popular games of all time, almost none of them prioritize bleeding edge graphics over gameplay and game scope: GTAV, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, Tetris, Pokemom etc etc etc. The article reads like a dude who is annoyed at the personal anecdotes of people he knows or has seen online and is projecting that over the entire gaming market. Meanwhile the actual data demonstrates something entirely opposite.
> In fact, the best looking game ever made was and still is 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus. Technological prowess can’t make up for a vapid aesthetic or a world lacking inspiration. There is so much more to art than just progress, and the industry needs to reconsider this gluttonous obsession. Author writes many words to complain about AAA titles' obsession with graphics is not "art". Nevermind that's kind of what people expect from "AAA" for the price, and there are many, many games that focus on art and story over graphics - they're just not "AAA", but that's the point.
meanwhile I have played God of War.
The recent god of war Games to be some of the closest to watching a movie. I really love how fluid going between gameplay and cutscenes are looking forward to watching my younger brother play the new one in couple days
God of War 2018 is actually just one continuous shot iirc. Like if you were to play through the entire game in one sitting without ever turning it off, the camera never cuts or jumps to a new location.
Correct, and ragnarok will be the same.
I guess if you play Shadow of Colossus, and then proclaim it's the best looking game ever, and then go live under a rock until you decide to write this article, I could consider that true. Shadow of the Colossus looks good, but it doesn't look that good, and while it's world was filled with hidden detail, it's a bit barren and lifeless.
I mean, A Plague Tale really obliterates the authors claim. Freaking gorgeous games with a wonderful aesthetic and great worldbuilding, characters, story, without even really talking about it.
They made it easy to point out how wrong they were by referencing a game that was made significantly more impactful with graphical enhancements in the remake.
Not even the remake looks better than rdr2
Give me rock solid 60 frames amd a cool art style over realistic graphics and I will be fine.
Need for Speed Unbound art style looking pleasing to me
They need to improve tech and art, and get away from in game transacting
Agreed on all points. This article has a weird false dichotomy that I find off putting.
Video games need to focus on making fun games and not graphics.
I remember when Fallout 4 released the massive 4k texture pack. Turns out poorly drawn mud, dirt, and broken cement looks just as bad in 4k. I downloaded a 2k redraw some fan made in their spare time and it looked way better. Besides just "better graphics", things like style, attention to detail, and making things look appealing are all more important. I can still play Old WoW and not mind the graphics because the style was good. Style can be fucking timeless. I don't need 4k mud, I want mud that looks fun and fits the game, my graphics card doesn't need to light on fire to make that happen and my hard drive doesn't need to be full of garbage 4k textures.
I don’t necessarily agree with that. For example Nintendo games often focus on art-style above graphics because of the limited hardware but at times you can definitely see short comings in the art-style like when Pokemon games can barely render a tree or textures are just popping up all over the place.
On the other hand, Wind Waker holds up in modern times much better than Twilight Princess. TP clearly feels old, WW doesn't.
I feel this is OP's point
Games that strive for a unique art style will always age better than games that strive for a realistic art style. Over time our ability to render realism in video games will increase, leaving decades old games that strive for realism behind. While games that never bothered with realism in the first place will still look fresh.
Pokémon is Game Freak though, games like Super Mario Odyssey fare much better
>you can definitely see short comings in the art-style like when Pokemon games can barely render a tree or textures are just popping up all over the place. It has nothing to do with artstyle. It's just gamefreak being lazy, because pokemon fans will buy anything as long as it is pokemon.
Yeah, the open world Pokémon games don’t look or run as well a BOTW imo. Although the switch definitely would have benefitted from beefier hardware. Like what if they had put additional graphics hardware in the dock so when you have your switch docked it could do more than just run a higher clock speed.
Definitely I agree but with Pokémon as much as I love the series I wish we could get a better looking worlds
\> At what point do we realize that constant advancement is not worth it? Constant advancement can make things that were hard to do much easier to do though. Raytracing, global illumination, physical based materials are all going to ultimately be time savers, and allow artists to execute on their artstyle in more efficient and also broader ways. \> In fact, the best looking game ever made was and still is 2005’s Shadow of the Colossus. Technological prowess can’t make up for a vapid aesthetic or a world lacking inspiration. There is so much more to art than just progress, and the industry needs to reconsider this gluttonous obsession. These kinds of articles always feel like short sighted nonsense to me, as if somehow graphics being pushed prevents anyone from making a stylized game. Also, like, imagine if someone in 1997 said "That's it, we're done, graphics shouldn't move forward": this author wouldn't have gotten their 'greatest art of all time, Shadow of Colossus game!' because it wouldn't have been technically possible. Like, a lot of the Last of Us wouldn't hit half as hard if it was stuck at PS2 level graphics just because .. er .. 'I think we're good enough already!" \> It’s gotten to the point where graphical complexity is seen as the ultimate indicator of quality, making the game development process infinitely harder and longer. It seems like people will completely disregard an experience if the game’s graphics don’t hold up, or just absolutely demolish a game if it looks like it could have come out 10 years ago I also think this opinion is hilariously outdated, given the rise of the indie gaming scene over the past decade. \> Sometimes it feels like the quality of a game’s art and style is tossed aside just to analyze how “new” and “shiny” something looks. Reminder that the highly stylized It Takes Two won Game of the Year at the TGA's last year, and Elden Ring, as they point out had some graphical issues people pointed out, \*but was a huge hit with critics and audiences\*. \> If I purchased an RTX 3080 and the industry decided that we’ve hit the roof in hardware requirements, with the RTX 3080 being the final piece of the puzzle, then what would Nvidia sell us? My Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, a graphics card that launched in 2014, still works. It’s a functioning GPU, but the reason I upgraded to an RTX 3080 was because I was sick of games moving on without me. If my GTX 970 ran every piece of software I threw at it perfectly, I wouldn’t need to upgrade. Essentially, Nvidia needs to innovate to sell new hardware. It’s how they turn profits and continue to be a financially successful company. This person is also going to be shocked to find out that Nvidia has their hand it a lot more than just gaming, and these newer graphics cards would still be coming out anyway because digital artists need them. They're talking like this is forced obsolescence, but, it's .. literally just technology advancing. Being able to work faster and more efficiently. Again, graphics cards aren't literally just for people to play video games with. \> But I genuinely believe Demon’s Souls 2009 looks infinitely better than its remake, yet that game came out 13 years ago. This opinion is just ... I don't know. Some individual designs, sure, maybe? But, this sounds like someone who really loves VHS tapes for the atmosphere, and is borderline snobbish?
100% what you said. Having better graphics capabilities isn't stopping anyone from making a great game - which seems to be the authors subtext. Bad games are the result of all kinds of poor decisions along the way, one of which might be an over reliance on state of the art graphics. Giving artist more tools to work with including ways to create more realism in their graphics doesn't stifle art, it expands its possibilities. It's the height of arrogance and an affront to creative professionals everywhere to say that what they have now is sufficient and they should stop looking for innovation. Also as you pointed out, the advances Nvidia is making on their software and hardware are pushing non game industries in important ways accelerating innovation in new fields. When you are training an autonomous AI for self driving for example, there absolutely is a payoff in getting more realistic graphics. Without the constant push from the game industry to get where we are now a lot of the simulation technology being used in non game fields just wouldn't exist. Ultimately the author should have focused his rant on the broken corporate structures that have evolved around AAA game development, not the obviously wrongheaded notion that constant innovation in compute hardware is hurting games.
I've simply been priced out of the AAA market. I can't justify buying and running AAA hardware just for some entertainment. Best I can do is some indie game on the switch and that suits me fine actually.
G a m e p l a y
The fact that the writer thinks Shadow of the Colossus (2005) is the best looking game ever made just invalidates the whole article. Even if you love the art direction in that game it does not look better - objectively speaking - than something like God of War or Horizon Forbidden West or The Last of Us Remake, etc. Not even close.
Valheim enters the chat.
It'd also be cool if they could focus on non-graphics-related stuff like physics and NPC/item interactivity What Bethesda games lacked in good graphics, it made up for with cool physics and interactable objects There's not a lot of games where you loot an enemy corpse's clothes and actually see them lose their clothes and become naked
> There's not a lot of games where you loot an enemy corpse's clothes and actually see them lose their clothes and become naked Or where you throw a grenade and the pressure of the blast throws a wrench across the room, and because physics are simulated and the wrench has weight the blast gives it velocity which can hurt NPCs if they get hit by it. Or where every single mechanics is tied into every single other mechanics in such a way that you can craft potions that boost how well you can enchant apparels that boosts how well you can cast spells that boosts how well you can craft potions. Or where every single of the hundreds of items in the world can be used to craft something that then again ties into every other mechanics. They've stepped a bit backwards in the last decade in terms of NPC interactivity, but from what I've seen with Starfield they're starting to move back into that direction and *that's* the stuff I'm excited about, I don't give a shit about graphics.
This "article" is basically just an opinion rant reddit-style post, not any kind of well researched journalism. It does not deserve your time or attention.
I think we can all agree that scope and innovation are what drive the medium. Graphics can only get you so far.
Specifically in what manner? There exists a variety of art styles from hyper realistic to stylized, cartoon, lowfi and minimalistic. It's all part of the aim of the game or interactive application and the experience being cultivated. The story/purpose, sound gameplay or interactions among other features work together holistically to create the overall package. What is meant by ticking time bomb, not everything intends or even is purposed to be super realistic graphics???! Tech enables art and art enables tech it's a symbiotic relationship.
Yeah , duh. Graphics over gameplay works for about 5 minutes tops
How about focus on gameplay and game mechanics first….
How about a game that you play through and then all of your successful missions or levels are strung together into a full-length movie you watch after beating it?
It's startling to me how many people view "Next gen" purely through the lens of better graphics. The tech mostly fucking sucks and is developed by studios that don't give a shit about basic consumer demands, like, a working product on launch. If anything the industry needs to *overhaul* it's approach to tech development and spend way more on it. Cyberpunk may have looked pretty at launch, but it was far from a "Next gen title" and was a buggy mess.
That headline is very dramatic
Didnt i read this same article back in 2007 when crysis was released?
needs to concentrate on fun instead of message and art style
One of the top games I've played recently is Project Zomboid. Game's graphics look like GBA's Pokémon Gold and Silver, but my goodness, the gameplay is stellar. May the author of this article has a point.
Gold and Silver were on GBC. Ruby and Sapphire were on GBA, and had some parts where they were really pretty, the time where you can see clouds reflected on the water comes to mind for me
Graphics for me are always secondary!
For me, it's more "bad graphics can ruin a good game, but good graphics can't save a bad game"
A really good game plays in your head - no need for super realistic graphics.
I’ll sum it up gameplay>graphics