I mean, look at Nintendo. Obviously aggressive legal tactics aside, they make some damn fun games because they know that gameplay matters more than graphics.
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good
Submitted 1 day ago by ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
The few times they’ve pursued more gritty realism (Twilight Princess) are all the times that haven’t aged as well.
Twilight Princess came out after Wind Waker, but Wind Waker obviously aged far better.
newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Oh don’t dismiss that they’re also graphics and programming wizards. They don’t work with the cutting edge, but they run circles around anyone on the lower end, making games look and run better on potato hardware is no easy feat.
I’d argue the optimization required to make something like that happen is significantly more skillful than all of the crap AAA stuff that takes 250gb and requires shader compilations every boot.
DNU@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
What a group of Wizards. Xenoblade games are great jrpgs but i just cant get over how bad they look at times and performance is often times horrendous. This is only good as long as you don’t care.
pjwestin@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
They call this design philosophy, “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.” Basically, “using old tech we understand very well in new and innovative ways.” For example, they were slower to get their 16-bit console to market, but while working on it, they used their expertise in 8-bit consoles to release the first cartridge-based handheld system.
Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I have spent years trying to find a Super Mario World or Super Mario Galaxy feel to games. I am not looking for photo realistic. I am looking for a game.
SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
Spyro remasters?
afansfw@lemmynsfw.com 16 hours ago
Breath of the wild is a technical masterpiece though. The way that they’ve managed to do lights, shadows, LODs, distant effects. And they’ve managed to add even more to ToTK, plus physics based audio, plus physics objects interacting better than any modern AAA game on “big” consoles. They squeezed every last bit of performance that switch could provide to make these games look as good as humanly possible.
They work with what they have in terms of hardware, and care a lot about gameplay, but they also do invest heavily into graphics and other technical aspects of their games.
Old_Yharnam@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Constant framerate drops is not what I would call squeezing every last drop of performance humanly possible
WereCat@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Sound design > Graphics
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.
HEXN3T@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
Cheap shitty headphones, when the Koss KSC75 exist for $20 and sound better than anything I had bought before. I have better headphones now, but $20 is $20, and I still like how small they are. Despite having HD600s and HE1000s, they’re still my go-to for the average use case.
bmdhacks@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
If you like sound design, the sound design in Don’t Starve is by far the best ive ever heard. It is the game that convinced me of your point.
makyo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
7dev7random7@suppo.fi 9 minutes ago
- FPS
TheV2@programming.dev 1 day ago
Well, everyone has their priorities. The problem is that even the people, who do value realistic graphics the most, are not captured by new AAA games.
teslasaur@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Story goes somewhere below Replay value, and controls go to number one. Gameplay and controls are pretty much interchangable unless you want a cinema simulator.
Add sound design as number two above music as number three and then the list is done.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 14 hours ago
Disagree, story is definitely more important than replayability for me.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.
Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that’s achievable plays into what the design may be, although it’s not a direct correlation.
I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That’s probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.
My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don’t look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.
Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.
I don’t need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character’s face. I don’t need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won’t notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or “play” sections that may as well be cutscenes.
I don’t want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
This author has no fucking clue that the indie gaming industry exists.
Like Balatro… you know, the fucking Indie Game of the Year, that was also nominated for Best Game of the Year at the Game Awards.
Localthunk was able to build this in Lua… WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 15 hours ago
I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.
Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.
How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This article wasn’t about indie games.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Ignoring indie games here is ignoring the answer to the entire premise.
xavier666@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I’m sorry sir, but I’m not an indie dev. I need to show the investors that my game will earn $100 million otherwise it’s a failure.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
My favourite games don’t look nearly as good as in my memory. Graphics don’t matter, they might even hurt, because there is less left to imagination.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.
And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.
Demdaru@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I may be outsider but lower graphic level horror games actually work more for me, because imagination fills the gaps better than engine rendering plastic looking tentacles can
CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Then don’t, i doubt people get sad when they realize they don’t have to buy another overpriced gpu to run the game they anticipated the most.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
noxypaws@pawb.social 1 day ago
Live and drink!
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Your thirst is mine, my water is yours
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
I have a computer from 2017. It’s also a Mac. I can’t play recent games and I think I’ve just gotten more and more turned off by the whole emphasis on better graphics and the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on either a console or a really good graphics card for a PC has just turned me off of mainstream gaming completely.
Mostly I just go play games I played when I was a kid these days. 1980s graphics and yet I have yet to get tired of many of them…
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don’t need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support.
The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.
RagingRobot@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I would argue they don’t even need to be updated. They were fun already in their time. I wish people would just come up with totally new ideas. I don’t need the same characters in every game I play. Same with movies now too Everything is a remake or a sequel.
I love to play indie games though.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I’ve got an old Mac and use a cloud gaming PC to play games. It’s like $50 a month and works great when you’re near the data center.
Plus my laptop doesn’t get really hot while playing games and the battery lasts a lot longer. All while getting 4k 60fps gaming with ray tracing.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I could not justify spending $50 a month on something like that and then buy games on top of it, but I am glad there are solutions.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 1 day ago
How hard is it for them to realize this? Graphics are a nice to have, they’re great, but they do not hold up an entire game. Star wars outlaws looked great, but the story was boring. If they took just a fraction of the money they spent on realism to give to writers and then let the writers do their job freely without getting in their way they could make some truly great games.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Look, I’m gonna be real with you, the pool of writers who are exceptionally good at specifically writing for games is really damn small.
Everyone is trained on novels and movies, and so many games try to hamfist in a three-act arc because they haven’t figured out that this is an entirely different medium and needs its own set of rules for how art plays out.
Traditional filmmaking ideas includes stuff like the direction a character is moving on the screen impacting what the scene “means.” Stuff like that is basically impossible to cultivate in, say, a first or third-person game where you can’t be sure what direction characters will be seen moving. Thus, games need their own narrative rules.
I think the first person to really crack those rules was Yoko Taro, that guy knows how to write for a game specifically.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
Yoko Taro is also a pretty cool dude. I dig his dedication to living life as he wants in a society/species that strongly pushes conformity.
For anyone not in the know, he doesn’t like being photographed or videoed, so he wears a big freaky smile mask for interviews. I also learned he has a leprechaun mask.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s hard for them to realize because good graphics used to effectively sell lots of copies of games. If they spent their graphics budget on writers, they’d have spent way too much on writing.
Grangle1@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Yep, it’s a byproduct of the “bit wars” in the gaming culture of the '80s and '90s where each successive console generation had much more of a visual grqphical upgrade without sacrificing too much in other technical aspects like framerate/performance. Nowadays if you want that kind of upgrade you’re better off making a big investment in a beefy gaming rig because consoles have a realistic price point to consider, and even then we’re getting to a point of diminishing returns when it comes to the real noticeable graphical differences. Even back in the '80s/'90s the most powerful consoles of the time (such as the Neo Geo) were prohibitively expensive for most people. Either way, the most lauded games of the past few years have been the ones that put the biggest focus on aspects like engaging gameplay and/or immersive story and setting. One of the strongest candidates for this year’s Game of the Year could probably run on a potato and was basically poker with some interesting twists: essentially the opposite of a big studio AAA game. Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60, and indie hits such as the aforementioned Balatro are showing then that you can make games look and play great without all the super realistic graphics or immense budget if you have that solid gameplay, story/setting and art style. Call of Duty Black Ops 48393 with the only real “innovation” being more realistic sun glare on your rifle is just asking for failure.
SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
I don’t think any amount of money could’ve saved the writing for Outlaws. People should not expect great writing from studios like Ubisoft. Not to say that Ubisoft doesn’t have great talent, but it’s a “too many cooks” situation there.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Yeah, but you can’t make a TV ad about good writing.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 21 hours ago
Sure you can, just do like “reviewers/players gush about ‘riveting plot’ and ‘characters that feel real’ and ‘a truly compelling story’” or whatever it is.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
The game of the year was a cutesy cartoon game about a robot. I don’t think there’s a problem here.
Neon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Read the Article pleasw
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Yeah I did read the article. That’s why I know what the article is about, and the fact that he’s complaining about graphical fidelity in games and not getting the profit benefit. clearly AAA studios aren’t actually having this issue because, like I said, the winner of the game awards this year was a cartoony game, so clearly they are well aware that graphics aren’t everything.
Nexy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Unpopular opinion but I preferer the graphics of a game were absolute trash but the ost be awesome. I can forget easyly how much individual hairs are in a 3d model, but good OST will live in my mind and heart forever.
And of course gameplay go first.
Snowpix@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
This is why so many indie games are awesome. The graphics don’t need to be great when the soundtracks and gameplay more than make up for it. Those are what actually matter.
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
The Wii was a fantastic example of this. Less capable hardware used in very imaginative ways, and had the capacity to bring older people into the games
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
Neir Automata had pretty good graphics, but nothing groundbreaking.
But the soundtrack is fucking phenomenal.
cybervseas@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s nice to see gaming covered in NYT at all. The article generally rings hollow to me. I’m not an industry expert, but:
- It’s easy to be profitable when you’re just making a sandbox and your players make the games, but at that point are you a game developer? (Roblox)
- High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
- AAA developers aren’t optimizing games as well as they used to, so only high end hardware would even run them
- AAA is more focused on loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes, and cinematics all wrapped up in great visuals. That’s at the expense of innovative gameplay and interesting stories. Making the graphics worse won’t get execs to greenlight better games, just uglier ones. And they’ll still be $70.
- Even when games are huge successes and profitable, studios are getting bought and shut down (EA, Microsoft, Sony?), so it’s hard to say the corps are hurting.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
Not only that, but mid range cards just haven’t really moved that much in terms of performance. The ultra high end used to be a terrible value only for people who want the best and didn’t care about money. Now it almost makes sense from a performance per dollar standpoint to go ultra high end. At launch the 4090 was almost twice the performance of the 4080, but only cost about 1.5x. And somehow the value gets worse the lower end you go.
Meanwhile mid-high end cards like the 4060 and 7600 (which used to be some of the best values) are barely outperforming their predecessors.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Is there a way to actually read the article without having to be exposed to whatever the drug fueled hellscape that website is?
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
Gifted my kids, both of them already young adults, one of those retro gaming sticks. An absolute bang/for/buck wonder, full of retro emulators and ROMs. Christmas Day, at grandmas was a retro fest, with even grandma playing. Pac man, frogger, space invaders, galaga, donkey Kong, early console games…. Retro gaming has amazing games, where gameplay and concepts had to make do with the limited resources.
yesman@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This article’s reasoning is faith based. The cornerstone assumption is that industry profits and layoffs obey the preferences of the market.
To those who follow the industry, this is demonstrably false. What follows is the lack of awareness on full display:
and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
caut_R@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And I don‘t think games have to look that good either… I‘m currently playing MGSV and that game‘s 8 years old, runs at 60 fps on the Deck, and looks amazing. It feels like hundreds of millions are being burned on deminishing returns nowadays…
anakin78z@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I just played Dragon Age Veilguard, and I’m now playing Dragon Age Origins, which was released 15 years ago. The difference in graphics and animation are startling. And it has a big effect on my enjoyment of the game. Origins is considered by many to be the best in the series, and I can see that they poured a ton into story options and such. But it doesn’t feel nearly as good as playing Veilguard.
Amazing graphics might not make or break a game, but the minimum level of what’s acceptable is always rising. Couple that with higher resolutions and other hardware advances, and art budgets are going to keep going up.
apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It is hard for me to take seriously a hand-wringing industry that makes more money than most entertainment industries. Capitalism is the primary cause öd articles like this. They simply demand moar each year, otherwise it is somehow a sign of stagnation or poor performance.
AAA studios could be different, but they choose to play the same game as every other sector. Small studios and independents suffer much more because of the downstream effects of the greedy AAAs establishing market norms.
We need unionization, folks. Broad unionization across sectors to fight against ownership/investor greed. It won’t solve everything but it will certainly stem the worst of it.
PanArab@lemm.ee 18 hours ago
I had a lot of fun playing Romancing Saga 2 and Ara Fell recently. Sometimes games can be more immersive by not having high fidelity graphics.
Anahkiasen@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Overall good article but the answer to the articles question is to me an easy no. The whole industry won’t recover because its an industry. It follows the rules of capitalism and its a constant race to the worse and while good games by good people happen on the side, they happen in spite of the system. Everything else is working as expected and will continue until you pay per minute to stream games you rent with intermittent forced ads and paid level unlocks.
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 day ago
You know the budget is spent almost entirely on the art when you actually pay attention to the credits and you have like 250 artists, but only 3-5 programmers.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“Hyperrealistic” weirdly means “more almost realistic”.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
squid_slime@lemm.ee 1 day ago
GSC in my opinion ruined stalker 2 in the chase for “next gen” graphics. And modern graphics is now so dependent on upscaling and frame gen, sad to see but trailers sell.
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Eh. I want hyper realistic graphics, but I also want a solid story and good gameplay mechanics. If hyper realistic graphics took a backseat to story and mechanics I’d be just as annoyed as a focus on hyper realistic graphics over story and mechanics.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Whoosh.
We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style)
There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.
Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.
Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.
RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I honestly feel like this with Genshin Impact. It looks absolutely breathtaking and in 20 years it will still be beautiful. It runs on a damn potato. I personally like the lighting in a lot of scenes way better than the lighting in some titles that have path tracing.
I have always liked art styles in games better than realism.
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stephen01king@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
In what world does Genshin runs well on a potato? Unless you have a different definition of potato than me. My Galaxy S10e can barely play the game, and it’s not even slow enough to be called a potato
HollowNaught@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sure, but I’m still going to say "fuck mihoyo’
Ashtear@lemm.ee 1 day ago
Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is exactly the kind of product that is going to keep driving the realistic approach. It’s four years later now and the game’s visuals are still state-of-the-art in many areas. Even after earning as much backlash on release as any game in recent memory, it was a massively profitable project in the end.
This is why Sony, Microsoft, and the big third parties like Ubisoft keep taking shots in this realm.
Snowpix@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
Borderlands 1 and 2 still look great in comparison to a lot of games that came out around the same time. The stylized cel-shaded textures help hide the lower-poly environments and really make the world stand out. Most games at the time were trying to go for a “realistic” look that just resulted in bland brown and gray environments that look terrible.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.
I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.
I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Just wanna throw Windwaker into the examples of highly stylized art style games that aged great.