Graphics in my opinion peaked at around 2015. I still boot up games from that time and I think they’re not that different from today’s titles
So true. A couple years ago, I upgraded from an RX 480 to an RTX 3070. I was excited for ray tracing and so much more. It was very underwhelming.
The amount of effort for such imperceptible improvements is insane.
Also insane is how shit modern games run without multi thousand dollar hardware, even if you turn down settings, but then it also looks like ass in addition to running like shit.
I recently tried Star Wars Battlefront from 2015 on my PC and holy crap it looks good.
Oh these fuckers.
So now the horribly expensive games with micro transactions isn’t enough for them? Well of course.
Nothing is ever enough for them.
Fucking are we gonna have to do a violent armed socialist revolution just to checks notes keep having graphics in games we have to pay an arm and a leg for?
What cutting edge graphics? The blurry as smudge that is TAA in all the modern games? Fuck off. What’s expensive is the actual slop that is modern games
TAA, motion blur, depth of field. Why do “technologies” to turn a good looking game into a trash looking game even exist?
Art design will always trump straight up graphical wizbangs anyway. There’s a reason Tears of the Kingdom is gorgeous and impressive over here running on a potato versus a lot of games that need more horsepower to run.
The latest game where I thought “damn this looks good” was Sifu. I get like 200fps on my half-potato (5500XT), and that’s at ultra quality, definitely “let’s turn on vsync to get rid of the fan noise” territory. The reason it looks good is good lightening choices, fluid animation, as well as well-decorated levels. As you can see the textures and geometry are often very simple – a red fire house box in a a hallway is just a red box. No fine detail at all, and that’s sufficient: It’s enough detail so that things don’t feel empty, your brain isn’t thinking “there should be more here”, a whole uncanny valley of its own as the brain gets kinda queasy if there’s nothing that it can ignore, but not enough detail as to be cluttering, that is, detract from the readability of the graphics.
Good style and execution will always win out over realism.
And yes it’s a 30G game, high-res textures and not kitbashing the levels tends to do that. Also, storing stuff uncompressed the download size is 20G.
(And btw whoever made that video is a good player deliberately playing like ass. You can tell by how they’re taking ages to get through the level, the pitiful score, but still not dying or really taking much damage at all).
TOTK looks and runs like crap. Also the world feels bland and empty compared to most other open world RPG’s. At least a little effort from Nintendo would go a long way, but especially climbing some mountains with crappy textures and jagged edges looks eerily similar to a lot of PS2 games I still play.
I agree with you. TOTK (and other open world games) on the Switch is an unpleasant experience. The hardware just isn’t capable of it
I do however think the developers did put some effort into attempting to mitigate the underperforming hardware - hence the seeming emptiness of the world. It just wasn’t enough. There are games that run well on the Switch - Metroid Prime Remastered is incredible, for example, but we must ask why: the answer is that that game’s world consists of a large number of small rooms, basically the polar opposite of an open world design.
Art style trumps graphical fidelity, but you do need a decent baseline capability to be able to pull it off.
Also, if you enjoyed TOTK don’t let me ruin your fun - it’s a subjective thing. Just don’t tell me there’s objectively no problems with it, because there clearly are
Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don’t exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.
To be honest I haven’t read the article, but I think it’s crazy that we always want prettier games when you still have visual glitches like cars disappearing in your rearview mirror, buildings and textures appearing late, screen tearing when you make your POV spin.
I don’t really need way better graphics, but I’d need these things gone as they take me out of my game way more than no raytracing or a slight fps drop.
I think these things would be easy to solve if we didn’t always get better graphics.
Object permanence in a game still has yet to blow my mind. Dwarf fortress does it pretty well (abandoning a mine to ruin only to revisit the walls you etched aeons ago as an adventurer), and minecraft of course, but any game with decent graphics seem to just abandon this altogether. You’re just visiting that world, you’re not making any change
Also, interactivity. Both games you mentioned have unparalleled interactivity when compared with the triple A space.
Not saying it’s necessary, but at a certain level of fidelity/realism it starts to look really weird when the world doesn’t meaningfully react to your actions.
Well I meant more something like you driving a car fast in an open world and having objects appearing in front of you because everything isn’t loaded yet.
Or landscape disappearing from your rear view mirror in racing games in order to save some memory.
These things wouldn’t cost anything to solve if we gave up some graphical fidelity.
Even for games that have the most minimum required, it’s an issue. Modern games can’t populate the maps anymore because of the system requirements to do that while also having “pretty graphics”.
Star Citizen is putting a lot of effort into this, and it looks like they’re getting good results.
You can hide glitches from videos and screenshots, but you can’t hide the graphics.
Glitches are something people notice after they spend their money, which is why corporations don’t care about them as much.
Some of the game industry followed the movie format: make a visual masterpiece with barely a plot or purpose.
Unlike the movie crowd, gamers usually want more depth and fun. Personally, I’ve been grabbing indie games with simple/pixel graphics and great gameplay.
That’s because games require some engagement/ investment. Even if avatar has a mid plot you can still turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle. But you’re not going to put mental effort into learning a boss with shitty mechanics to “save the land” you barely care about.
They apparently are aiming for photorealism these days. That’s much harder than good anime graphics or good “dreamy painting” graphics. Also kinda harmful, even people without special conditions don’t feel too good after looking at such graphics.
I remember when Gears came out - it was made as a playable movie, and they did it well because it had a story line with characters we were invested in. Character deaths sucked, it was engaging, and it was unpredictable but comfortable.
Nothing wrong with the movie format, but you’ve got to tell the story.
I’ve put like 1000 hours each into Stardew Valley and Rimworld. Not a single ray traced, no advanced boob physics, just good fun.
Animal Well was the best game I played this year and it was made by one dude who built his own engine.
Balatro is a close second with the best soundtrack. The Dev bought it on Fiverr.
Do we need cutting-edge tables, cutting-edge water pipes, cutting-edge paintings, cutting-edge windows, cutting-edge power generators even?
That kind of competition really is unhealthy.
If not for this bullshit, we’d have a better choice of personal computer hardware and operating systems. We wouldn’t have a lot of what they call enshittification.
What I don’t understand is where the wide masses of normies got all this progress-signaling? I first sat behind a PC as a kid, it was DOS, someone showed me how to navigate directories, but I don’t remember any specifics. Then Windows 98 at home. Then we got a new PC and there was Windows 2000 on it. I didn’t like any Windows after it, but XP was fine.
That was me, like, being 9? I understood a bit more about computers than the average normie since then.
So - why did that me never have this progress-signaling, idea that buying something “cutting-edge” they don’t understand somehow makes sense, but the whole crowd of people not knowing what a transistor is would apparently care so much for progress and cutting-edge?
I just don’t understand. What do people knowing nothing about certain industry would get from caring about its development?
9 times out of 10, I won’t see your brand new AAA title for several years after release. While there are occasional exceptions, I don’t really buy at launch. Your cutting edge graphics mean nothing to me without story, characters, and writing. If you invest in looks without substance, I will never waste my time with you.
add me to the crowd where graphics is not a major thing. its great ad can make one game preferable to another but im all about character customization both in look and abilities.
I mean, how are they supposed to pay the execs millions of dollars if they have to pay the developers to make the game do the thing?
They pushed this on us so they can make us buy new video cards every other year.
I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…
I can only really think of two games that really justify enormous development costs, and that’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.
If your game isn’t pushing things to that level of expectation, you really need to rethink what you’re doing with that budget.
