Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
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Thing is, looking at some games, Horizon and Elden Ring being a prime examples, we can have both great games with great graphics.
You don't really want better games with worse graphics, you want better games that don't use great graphics as an excuse to bad gameplay.
He wants the resources being spent on graphics to be redirected to engineers and game designers. There is a reasonable top end budget to put towards any given game, so it is at least mostly 0 sum.
Bethesta has the worst of both worlds.
Big budget of cash; small budget of time and talent.
They take like 10 years to release a game
They have plenty of time, just not the talent or vision to do anything good with it. Their stories are extremely bare bones, the bugs are prolific, and the power creep is more a power slide straight into godhood by level 15 because of the short main quests.
The author has completely missed the MAIN reason the campaign was good in 2009 and isn't, now.
In 2009 the mindset was still that you needed a good single player game to get sales of a game. By 2015 call of duty had it figured out that they could almost completely ignore shoestringing a half asked campaign together and still get massive sales because their players were buying it for the multi-player, and all the money to be made by their fan boys buying it was in the multi-player.
We can have both but it will cost hundreds of millions like Horizon and often this means shitty monetization practices if the company isn’t the size of Sony, or the employees are heavily underpaid like with Elden Ring. Seriously pay at FromSoft is lower than the already low industry standard. https://www.pcgamer.com/report-highlights-underpay-and-some-level-of-crunching-at-fromsoftware/
Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it's nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.
I'd easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I'd still bet the difference wouldn't be that noticeable for 4K either.
And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid "open worlds", and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.
I hate that "realistic" graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it's consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.
I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.
Well it's a scaling effect and diminishing returns
To the human eye 480p vs 1080p is significant but 4k vs 8k is hard to tell
I think focusing on new technologies such as AI upscaling/world generation or VR is a better use of developers time and pushes the industry back into the innovative space it's supposed to be
I want better games with better graphics. The two are not mutually exclusive, games like Elden Ring prove it is possible to have both.
The problem this writer had with CoD wasn't even really the game. Its the same problem plaguing nearly all entertainment media at the moment: the writing just sucks. Its bad. Bad writing will make even a game with great gameplay turn sour.
Elden Ring had great art direction, but I wouldn't say it had great graphics.
The "worse graphics" stands for less photorealism. I could tell you about the times when someone wasn't pushing graphical limits, it was ditched by games journalists for postponing the time when they can finally put on a VR headset to relive the battle of Normandy in first person.
I want shorter games, on average. 10-20 hour completion times would be right up my alley.
I blame Far Cry 3 for this proliferation of open world bobbins. So much shit to do and almost none of it is worth doing.
I tried to play borderlands 2 and I was moving happily through the main story when I realized I was way, way under-levelled for the next part. I then realized I needed to go do half a dozen of the 30 or so fetch quests I had ignored up to that point. I did not continue playing Borderlands 2
You were more patient than me. I lasted about an hour of it. I just don't think FPS gameplay and RPG stats gel at all well. Can't stand Destiny for the exact same reason.
Call me a traditionalist, but I expect enemies that take bullets to the face to do the decent thing and drop down dead, rather than just take very slightly more damage.
Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn't be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it's supposed to look like.
This is how that "Doom 3 on a floppy disk" game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn't look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.
You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that's how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don't hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.
Currently enjoying a several weeks-long run in Rimworld. Potato graphics go really far is the gameplay design is solid.
As a game dev who's making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
I mean this with the greatest respect, I'm not making a judgement on the gameplay.
But there's a whole spectrum between Roblox and the latest Quadruple A™ that all consist of "worse graphics"
White letters on light brown wood texture (trailer on steam at 0:07). Also, the big "Press E to talk" looks heinous. Plus you don't have full control over where it appears, at one point in the trailer (0:42), it's on white background. Going by the trailer, you're trying to make the game look like the product of a inexperienced amateur, while the game itself is actually a subversive masterpiece, similar to the doom mod "MyHouse.wad". Hats off to you if you manage to pull it off, but if not, you'll have fallen flat on your face. Metaphorically, of course.
I just want games where the devs get to release the game they wanted to make without the studio enshittification microtransactions, always-online single player and so on tagged on to it.
They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.
Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers' visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.
I'd love to upvote this more than once. What's the point of all those super high quality graphics if the core gameplay hasn't advanced in the slightest 🙄
AAA studios
Best I can do is predatory monetization and half-baked dlc. Also, now the Eula prohibit you from making unflattering comparisons to that one game Larian made
I personally want more physics simulations. I always loved 2D falling sand games where everything reacted with each other and after a long time not having games with those mechanics i found noita and i can't stop playing it. As much for the game loop then for the game's falling sand engine.
Yeah graphics are nice to have, but sometimes I want to game on a small and light laptop like I don't need revolutionary HD high quality all the time
Art Style > Graphics. Kingdom Hearts (2002) looks wildly better GTA: San Andreas (2004) and Fallout 3 (2008).
Depends on the genere. I think a very immersive game like Metro Exodus benefits a lot from its graphics and wouldn't work quite as well without them.
Obligatory: Starsector
Also Rimworld, Project Zomboid, Prison Architect, Factorio.... basically if you like sandbox games, there's a ton out there.
I thought this right before I tried to play the really old pokemons again. And very quickly went back to new pokemons.
To be fair those had worse gameplay too
I think everything after Gen 1 holds up pretty well, even if it's a little rough. And once they figured out the physical/special split in Gen 4 they basically just published the same game over and over again with slightly different gimmicks and stories.
Personally I'd prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That's not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.
Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there's a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.
I’ve got pretty similar thoughts. I wasn’t into gaming all that much up until relatively recently when I built my first gaming PC at the beginning of pandemic. Thanks to that, I’m not only on market for bleeding edge AAA titles, but also discovering 3 dacades worth of PC games. My observation is that games got worse over time. They’re also a lot more expensive to make because it all must be visually impressive, which usually ends up with poor performance and bugs, requiring high-end hardware for the game to run somehow. Quite often games are broken and unoptimized on launch, they have that generic formula, watch cinematic, hold a button, watch some more, here’s your little tutorial fight, now more cutscene and a crappy puzzle. It really makes me feel, if game developers were more limited by hardware constraint and unable to feed legions of normie players to flashy graphics, they wouldn’t have other way to makes games attractive other than with better mechanics and level design.
Meanwhile Nintendo continues to release bangers for their ancient potato console.
The problem with that is the back catalogue of games that developers have to compete with. There already are better games with worse graphics, the big studios aren't going to risk competing in that crowded market that already has its crowned victors.
Then just browser itch.io for games
There's room for both things. Call of duty sells a bazillion copies, and while I have zero interest in that kind of game, I don't hate that it exists.
I like that it exists because it keeps the CoD players playing CoD and not ruining other games' lobbies.
Honestly can't blame Activision for putting shit campaigns into CoD. Since Modern Warfare the focus has been almost entirely on the multiplayer side of things. I suspect most players don't even touch it now. They sell millions regardless.
Infinity Ward's original MW and MW2 are the only ones worth playing. Titanfall 2 as well, since it's the same people.