At this point I just want to have quality games. The graphics are beyond good enough. I don’t need to custom render a photo realistic action movie from my PC.
As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.
Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.
You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.
I wish writing got more focus in general. There is a lot of theory to good writing that is often just completely ignored while the latest theoretical papers are taken into account for photorealistic rendering and such things that are much less important.
Yup, I honestly avoid the hyper-realistic games anyway. The closest I have gotten recently is the Yakuza series, and even that is very clearly a game, even in their high-quality renders. Gameplay is far more important than graphics quality. I don’t even care at all about RTX, just give me a fun game with an interesting story, and give the art team a lot of leeway on how to represent that.
I almost never buy games day 1 because they’re full of bugs (though they do look pretty), but do you know what game I’m excited to buy day 1? Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. It’s basically the opposite of the big-budget, hyper-realistic games, and I’m all for it. I expect great gameplay and minimal bugs, and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.
I wish the big studios went back to putting fun first, instead of trying to compete on who can run my PC temps the highest.
I’ll be honest, I have trouble with low graphic games. But mediumish is fine. I still enjoy plonking monsters on Diablo 2. But I also enjoy Satisfactory and Snow Runner. I can’t conceive of a good reason graphics need to go further. Hell, Balder’s Gate 3 was beautiful and these guys want us to buy more graphics capacity? Why? It’s ridiculous.
I’ve been repeatedly disappointed with most modern games, so I’ve taken to emulating my old games and playing them on my laptop. It’s honestly a pretty good time, would recommend.
I’m getting to play games I loved that I haven’t touched in over a decade (MotorStorm, all the Ratchet and Clank games, the good Need for Speeds, etc). Plus if there were any games I wanted as a kid but didn’t have the money, I can buy most of them off eBay for cheap.
It’s an underappreciated fact that art direction trumps graphical fidelity, and it’s not close. Grim Fandango for example is old as dirt but still holds up remarkably well thanks to its unique look and strong art direction, despite being challenged polygonally and resolution-wise etc. There are many other examples.
Exactly. And you can go pretty far with this as well. I really enjoyed Manifold Garden, which has pretty simple graphics, but definitely had a clear art direction and a very interesting 3D world to explore. There are probably more polygons on the face of a MC in a AAA game than in that entire game, yet I felt absolutely immersed while playing it.
Give me more unique experiences, not more GPU clock cycles…
It entirely depends on the genre. I probably would want a bit more detail on the faces than that if it was an emotional story line, say the kind of quality that To The Moon had.
At this point I just want to have quality games. The graphics are beyond good enough. I don’t need to custom render a photo realistic action movie from my PC.
As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.
Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.
I wish writing got more focus in general. There is a lot of theory to good writing that is often just completely ignored while the latest theoretical papers are taken into account for photorealistic rendering and such things that are much less important.
Yup, I honestly avoid the hyper-realistic games anyway. The closest I have gotten recently is the Yakuza series, and even that is very clearly a game, even in their high-quality renders. Gameplay is far more important than graphics quality. I don’t even care at all about RTX, just give me a fun game with an interesting story, and give the art team a lot of leeway on how to represent that.
I almost never buy games day 1 because they’re full of bugs (though they do look pretty), but do you know what game I’m excited to buy day 1? Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. It’s basically the opposite of the big-budget, hyper-realistic games, and I’m all for it. I expect great gameplay and minimal bugs, and I’m willing to pay a premium for that.
I wish the big studios went back to putting fun first, instead of trying to compete on who can run my PC temps the highest.
Exactly!
I find myself coming back to cataclysm dark days ahead, caves of qud, dwarf fortress and other “low graphical” games because of the content.
There is a limit on how long beautiful graphics can keep me playing a boring game.
The day I understood that, I started to pickup games based on content, and gosh I am richer than ever!
Nonetheless, I have plenty of games to play when I feel like it.
I’ll be honest, I have trouble with low graphic games. But mediumish is fine. I still enjoy plonking monsters on Diablo 2. But I also enjoy Satisfactory and Snow Runner. I can’t conceive of a good reason graphics need to go further. Hell, Balder’s Gate 3 was beautiful and these guys want us to buy more graphics capacity? Why? It’s ridiculous.
I’ve been repeatedly disappointed with most modern games, so I’ve taken to emulating my old games and playing them on my laptop. It’s honestly a pretty good time, would recommend.
I’m getting to play games I loved that I haven’t touched in over a decade (MotorStorm, all the Ratchet and Clank games, the good Need for Speeds, etc). Plus if there were any games I wanted as a kid but didn’t have the money, I can buy most of them off eBay for cheap.
Honestly if the gameplay and/or story are good enough, I don’t care one bit about hyper-realistic graphics
Hell, the more stylised the graphics of a game, generally the more interested I am.
Games like Obra Dinn, Lisa or Undertale that lean into the graphical limitations of the past are some of my all time favourites
It’s an underappreciated fact that art direction trumps graphical fidelity, and it’s not close. Grim Fandango for example is old as dirt but still holds up remarkably well thanks to its unique look and strong art direction, despite being challenged polygonally and resolution-wise etc. There are many other examples.
Exactly. And you can go pretty far with this as well. I really enjoyed Manifold Garden, which has pretty simple graphics, but definitely had a clear art direction and a very interesting 3D world to explore. There are probably more polygons on the face of a MC in a AAA game than in that entire game, yet I felt absolutely immersed while playing it.
Give me more unique experiences, not more GPU clock cycles…
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It entirely depends on the genre. I probably would want a bit more detail on the faces than that if it was an emotional story line, say the kind of quality that To The Moon had.