Great point. I saw an interesting video recently that touched on this exact issue:
youtu.be/x4_8rIUh7E8?si=-E1VWA8bZ-eVibkL
As graphics increase in quality, the desire for developers to fill spaces with clutter grows – which makes it harder to make meaningful levels with thoughtful design.
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
There’s something special about a game like red dead 2 or ghost of tsushima that makes you stop and just enjoy the scenery. Games with good graphics have their place, it’s just that they need to also have all the other elements to be any good.
IMALlama@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
thing is, games aren’t pretty because they model every cell in every lifeform and have 5 gigabyte textures for each individual leaf, they’re pretty because they have good graphical design.
Just lighting alone is like 50% of making a scene look nice, you can literally just slap together a low-poly flat-colour scene in blender and set up nice lighting and people will call you talented.
A prime example of this is valheim: ps2-style models and textures and yet the lighting and general graphical design makes it look lovely and atmospheric, especially combined with the music.
Archelon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Hell, minecraft’s vanilla textures look downright gorgeous with lighting mods.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
it annoys me to no end that people think minecraft looks terrible and attribute that to the textures, it’s literally just pixel art! Other games are praised for having pixel art! aurgh!
Minecraft might be considered ugly, but in that case it’s probably moreso because its lighting is… rudimentary… or that person specifically just doesn’t like the artstyle.
Also something that almost no one ever talks about is render distance! Games with a gargantuan render distance look SOOOOOO much more appealing and are easier to navigate, but people just don’t think about it!
I recently played Satisfactory and holy shit that render distance, when i called down the space elevator it’s the only time i can recall a game ever making me just sit there in awe, never before have i felt such a visceral sense of scale from something on a display!
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Hyper Light Drifter is absolutely stunning and its a 2D pixel art game with amazing lighting.
RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This is exactly how i feel about genshin impact. Its art design is absolutely stunning and can run on a damn phone.
All the photorealism is nice and all but i prefer good art styles and better and more gameplay.