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”
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There are constant high end GPU shortages, $1,000 is too cheap.
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No one wants to play potato games. And this is evident by the shortage of high end GPUs. People want better graphics and people have the money for GPUs. If you check Steam stats, then the top 15 cards are all 3060, 4060, 3070, 4070, and 3080. Steam has 132m active monthly users and 2% of their users have 3080 cards. That’s over 2.6m people with a high end card.
There are only 0.2% of Intel HD 4000 users. When you combine all the mid and high end GPU users it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no point making games for Intel HD 4000.
this is such a
messamazing collection of ideas!I advertised it in a group of kids I know that love this kind of shit, hope it helps :)
certain games need the ultra 8k graphics while others are fine with 1080p especially 2d games
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.
Games were better when graphics were secondary
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.
After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout… But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn’t enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I’ve fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course… (Perhapsh I should join the mage’s college in Winterhold)
Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It’s the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.
funny how the first time i played fo3 i struggled to kill fire ants because i ran out of ammo for every weapon amd only had melee weapons
now when i fire it up i know so much of what to do that i am practically unstoppable
the survival mode in fo4 is actually quite a challenge though, thats fun to play (unless i die after not finding a bed for hours, then it sucks😂)
If you liked Fallout 1 and 2 you’ll probably like NV too. It has a far slower pace than 3, and has a much bigger emphasis on writing and player choice than 3 and 4.
I could never get into 3 or 4 personally, but have always loved 1, 2, and NV.
I liked New Vegas quite a lot. I remember not liking it as much as 3 at the time, but looking back years later with a different perspective (and after playing Fallout 1), I appreciate and vibe with it a lot more and can’t wait to play it again… Heavily modded… With Survival Mode on.
Fallout 2 really is the best game not just in the West-coast saga but the entire series.
I’ve only ever made it roughly 8 hours in, so I have the entire game ahead of me now that I’m starting anew. I’m super stoked.
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.
Activision and Electronics Arts were both started by people who wanted to put game developers first. Gathering of Developers, as well, which was eventually absorbed into Take Two.
It’s not something that seems to last in this industry.
They don’t even get absorbed these days. They get bought and then laid off.
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
One of my favourite games was Operation Flash Point Dragon Rising on Xbox 360.
Graphics were terrible then but the gameplay was amazing.
I go back today and still play it, unfortunately the AI hasn’t kept up and you can exploit it rather easily.
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.
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/
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.
Funny thing is, most multiplayer blokes play at low settings anyways to maximize performance for some form of advantage.
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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.
That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.
Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.
Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.
You can hire writers instead of visual artists.
Valheim
Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level.
What an absolutely batshit insane thing to say.
bro just have an AI do it
its just like, pixels or whatever
/s
Actually, would the masses care at all about ai art that is finished by a human to make it work? For something like Fortnite?
So, the big problem right now with AI art is that there’s no real way to modify it without basically completely redoing it.
You can alter the prompts, but due to the intentionally chaotic nature of the models, what you’ll get out is a completely different image. You can’t just be like “I want her head tilted a little more to the left, and give her a bigger smile, but keep everything else the same.” When you’re working on professional art, generally what happens is the artist presents you with each version, from rough sketches to finished line art, to rough paint work, and you request changes as you go. There’s a collaboration as you guide them towards the result you want. But with AI you’re just shotgunning outputs and hoping that one of them lands close enough. That’s fine for your bedroom wall, but not for a professional environment.
And if you want to have a human artist go in and make those changes to the finished image, they have to contend with the fact that they only have a finished image, not any of the layers from sketch through to brush work to lighting and so on. So they’re basically stuck trying to seamlessly paint over the existing image. That’s harder than it sounds.
Can artists use AI as a tool? Absolutely. Generate like 50 versions of a scene, use them as references. Or ask it for a sketch, then paint over that in your style. You can correct mistakes and make adjustments along the way. But the idea that humans can just “touch up” AI art to fix the mistakes doesn’t really work.
Ok but if possible would the masses care if it was ai generated is my point.
I would confidently assume that folks are researching having generative ai actually conducting the tasks of wireframing, skinning, landscaping, skyboxing, WFC tile generation etc
It’s not happening now, but absolutely will.
But again my point is most folks will not give a shit as long as they can unlock newer better glitter shit
Tell me you’re uncreative without telling me you’re uncreative.
Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you’re severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they’re assembly line workers isn’t going to result in a compelling world.
In either case communication is the limiting factor and that scales with quadratic complexity with larger groups (everyone has to be on the same page with everyone else).
The studios who do this mostly aren’t looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.
Bethesta has the worst of both worlds.
It doesn’t. You can do so much more in an isometric world than a 3D one. Modern games are more about the game engine than the game itself.
Spruce up some old school MUDs, imo. Make the original Legend of Zelda, but massively upgraded for what you can do with today’s tech. (Similar to Bastion, I suppose.) There’s a lot of room for a triple A game similar to Albion Online.
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.
10 years not enough time for their level of skill. ;)
yeah also small team or even open source achievable.
tbf elden ring doesnt look that cutting edge.
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.
Trepang2 looks amazing and it was made by like five people. I think a lot of these big budget games waste a ton of money on details that have seriously diminishing returns.
How much better graphics?
Better graphics means much bigger budget and that means you’ll get writing for lowest common denominator of consumers as well as microtransactions to extract every last cent from them.
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 will never understand how limited someone’s imagination has to be to require first person and photorealism to be immersed.
To each their own? Like I’m not going to judge someone because they want a very specific piece of media. I want very specific things too. Just because the things I want don’t overlap with the things they want doesn’t mean either is absurd.
VR can be great without photorealism too. We can apply OP’s concept to VR games and find numerous fun games that will run well on lower-powered systems. Dragon Fist VR for example - it’s basically Tekken in VR and you fight life-size NPC opponents with your own Kung Fu skills, and the graphics are decent but not photorealistic by any stretch of imagination.
I get that, but a lot of times, people’s main (and seemingly only problem) is that they can’t (instantly) soyface over what they imagine “games as art” will be.
Elden Ring had great art direction, but I wouldn’t say it had great graphics.
It had great graphics, and its art direction elevated the graphics. It looks equally as good as any other game that released the same year.
Elden Ring certainly is a long leap from King’s Field compared to other games when that launched. For as fun as King’s Field was, its graphics were bad, even for the time.
It looks equally as good as any other game that released the same year.
Elden Ring is pretty, but this simply isn’t true.
When it comes to applying advanced modeling and rendering tech, fromsoft are amateurs.
Most famously, they have no clue what they are doing with shell texturing.
And the reason Elden Ring was a stuttery mess at launch on windows, was that they couldn’t figure out that doing directx shader compilation on the fly without caching, is a terrible, terrible idea.
I totally agree with you, while Elden ring looks very nice, it is far from state of the art graphics, demons Souls PS5 show what it should look like if it went that way. I am happy they didn’t and instead focus on gameplay and game zones. I really think a lot of game producers go for the extra graphical fidelity instead of focusing on game contents. Dragons dogma 2 recently is stunning production wise, but as much as I adore the game, I wish they went the Elden ring road and had a huge world with tons of stuff to do.
Certainly looks better than the average indie game. And before you come at me for saying that.
Indie is often touted as “better than AAA”. But in order for that to be the case, they need to at least offer something similar first. But most indie games are so far removed from even the average AAA game, that its basically apples and oranges.
AA, or mid-tier, is really where its at. Some of the best games in recent years have all been from the AA space. Even ones that launched rough like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk.
They are still leagues above the average indie game that most people here and “the site that shall not be named” tend to list off as their favourites.
So yes, Elden Ring indeed does have great graphics. Not the most cutting edge, but at least it looks like it belongs in the same generation as its competitors.
So… Battle bit?
July and August were so fun
Just make guns and bombs work in MSFS.
until then: DCS
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.
There’s just not really anything else quite like Noita, is there. What a great game.
I’m 200 hours in with no wins! It’s the first game that’s really grabbed me since I transitioned away from flatscreen gaming to VR a few years back.
Same. I’m always playing a variety of VR games and noita. But if i could play noita in VR i definitely would XD
I found this guy https://youtube.com/@grantkot?si=lRNFq8OeSnPm8wOO on youtube that has a great looking engine that has already partly implemented VR he says and i can’t wait to see where this goes!Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/@grantkot?si=lRNFq8OeSnPm8wOO
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Looks awesome, I’ll keep an eye on that! If you haven’t heard of Cabbibo you should definitely check out his work. This one fits in this thread nicely: Blaarp
Blaarp looks really cool! It makes me think of chroma lab i’m a big fan of these games!
I’m back to say i just played Blarp for like 2 hours and it was really fun! Once i got the flow of things i really enjoyed it. My final score was 47.
Glad you enjoyed it! You must have very good coordination I think my high score is under 30!
I really thought that’s where it was all headed. After the release of battlefield bad company, where they introduced a game engine that can destroy whole buildings, I really had hope for the future.
I imagined games where you can just build and destroy entire cities.
Same. I want more physics, more depth to character dialogue, more animations, etc. High res graphics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making games feel immersive. At this point a bunch of older games feel newer or more modern to me because they actually include this stuff.
Started reading your comment and was just about to recommend you play Noita lol.
I really enjoyed Osmos back in the day. Like a relaxing Katamari.
Does it ever go on sale on steam? It’s already pretty cheap but i might as well wait for a discount.
No idea, I got it on a Humble Bundle about 15 years ago.
I just came back to say that i’m really enjoying osmos! Some levels are pretty challenging and i love it!
Glad you enjoyed the suggestion!
It’s a cool sandbox with a bunch of different materials you can mess with.
I played around with OEcake and it’s newer form phyziostudiopro before wich seems similar and i greatly enjoyed it! I’ll give this one a try.
Numpty Physics, Box Stacker(Fdroid) or Neverputt are all pretty fun.
PowderToy is excellent as mentioned above.
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.
There’s hundreds of great games on pc to play without all the focus on graphics. You just can’t focus on industry giant game devs. Go play Stardew Valley, or Hades, or Subnautica.
Subnautica is a game I play for the audio, and that’s really saying something because the visuals are great. I bought open back headphones for that game.
Of course there are, and I do - but the focus of the article, and thus the thread was on the AAA gaming space and its obsession with graphics.
Smaller studios and Indies already figured out the whole “you don’t need to be able to see every fibre of a character’s hair in order for a game to be good” thing
Halo 4 at 1440p looks very good, and it’s 12 years old. Fully agree. I’d rather see more entities on screen, more particles, and draw distance. Polygon count and textures don’t really impress me anymore.
I’d rather see highly stylized games with a lot going on in the world, rather than wasting half of my frame render time on a character’s face.
Exactly. If my graphics card is going to be chugging, I’d rather it be because of the sheer amount of stuff to interact with in an area, rather than a beautiful but vapid landscape
I don’t have a 1080p monitor, but most games look like shit on 4K. Bumping texture resolution is not enough for 4K, you also need better geometry and much longer drawing distances. If it’s not an Unreal 5 game with their virtually infinite geometry detailing, then it mostly likely looks like shit.
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
Depends a bit on screen size and placement, too. I play on 27", 1440p, about 3 feet from my face, and my eyeballs are definitely the lowest resolution link in the chain. 32" screen on my desk, 60" screen in front of the couch, and 1080-1440 will start showing their pixels. I’m not anxious to upgrade my screen, because 1440p gives me great framerates with a cheaper video card. Also a 32" screen at a viewing distance of 3’ is hard to actually see everything.
I’d much rather have a good game that runs fast at 1080p than have to get a $700 card for OK framerate and style-over-substance gameplay just to get 4k.
Agree that using VR to get immersive, wide-field graphics from fewer pixels is a great alternative.
VR will always stay a niche technology just because of the limited circumstances where people can use it (e.g. not on the move, not while watching kids,…).
I agree
I should’ve clarified VR/ AR. I do think AR will be a large part of daily life and apply much further than video games in the not too distant future
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.
If you just count pixels, yes. But what really made a big step forward in this decade was the realistic animation. And it does require a lot of effort and time to make it right.
Honestly I’d still argue there’s diminishing returns on this front as well.
I play plenty of older titles, and I wouldn’t say I notice that much of a difference - though that is my very subjective opinion
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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.
.!
I don’t even understand what Star Field is supposed to be. And I don’t think Bethesda know either. It’s basically what No Man’s Sky used to be before they fixed it, yet somehow worse.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5. Which would have worked better with the limitations of the engine as well.
After that they could have taken their time to reskill their staff on either a new engine of their own or just a off the shelf option.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5
I’m pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.
2 years to go from pre-production to complete release, and with extensive special effects requirements as well. Na, It may have begun prep work in 2022 but it’s been known about longer than that. Pre-production takes a very long time, you have to scout locations, you have to hold auditions, you have to work out schedules, you have to work out your set design and your costume, you have to get the script written. There’s a lot before anyone shouts action.
Also that would have been a fair amount of time before that where the studio and Bethesda were negotiating the IP license.
Also I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid got in a way of all of that as well. So we really could be looking at 2019 or even 2018 is a start date so it’s entirely believable that they weren’t that far through production and giving the problems that they would have found by then, they really should have switched gears.
If you’re going to reach back into the time period before they hired the writers/showrunners to actually develop a script in early 2022, or selling the rights to Amazon in 2020, then you’re talking about a project that was far from certain it would actually get made. Hard to say that they “knew” a tv show was coming before 2022.
I won’t lie, they pulled the wool over my eyes with Starfield. I kept waiting for that moment where they brought it all together and suddenly it would be a great game. I was shook when the credits rolled and I hadn’t yet found the fun part.
Kudos for even making it til the end. I just noticed half way in, I might as well watch paint dry instead or play something else.
