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Logo uses joystick by liftarn
It's a corporate problem. Fucking Balatro was a smash hit for design, art, etc. These 'next gen' games are pushed because bigger numbers are absolute, and quantifiable. A CEO likes number go up, but real artists don't push polygons.
What I don't understand is why games look prettier but things like NPC AI (which is really path-finding and decision trees, not actual AI), interactivity of the game world, destructability of game objects - all those things are objectively worse than they have been in a game of 10-15 years ago (with some exceptions like RDR2).
How can a game like Starfield still have all the Bethesda jank but now the NPCs lack any kind of daily routine?
Most enemies in modern shooters barely know how to flank, compare that to something like F.E.A.R. which came out in 2006!
from the image it seems like you're expecting a fourth dimension in games now? I don't think you'd like the development cycle on that. miegakure is still on the way is it?
The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can't make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say "reality" is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it's far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it's still a big absolute improvement, it's relatively minor -- and you're never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that's not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that's part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically "etc.." to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.
I don't understand why developers and publishers aren't prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn't eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
There's no better generational leap than Monster Hunter Wilds, which looks like a PS2 game on its lowest settings and still chugs at 24fps on my PC.
Could've done your research before buying. Companies aren't held to standards bc people are uninformed buyers.
Never said I bought it. Why would I buy a 70€ game without running the benchmark tool first?
I just still find it ridiculous that it looks and runs like ass when MH World looks and runs way better on the same PC. Makes me wonder what's really behind whatever 'technological advancements' have been put into Wilds. It's like it's an actual scam to make people buy new hardware with no actual benefit.
To be fair there isn't just graphics.
Something like Zelda Twilight princess HHD to Zelda Breath of the wild was a huge leap in just gameplay. (And also in graphics but that's not my point)
Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then... the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
What could you really do in BotW that you couldn't do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem's Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
What? Botw was awesome! There was so much to explore, the world was interesting, the NPCs are good, and so on. Oot and Majora's Mask are both amazing too of course, but botw is a modern masterpiece.
I feel like we won't be able to see the difference until a couple of years, like CGI in old movies.
The generational leap from PS3 -> PS4 wasn't that significant already, and that happened more than 10 years ago. The biggest difference seem to be lights/shadows and texture size, the latter of which balloons game size and can tank performance
I don't mind the graphics that much, what really pisses me off is the lack of optimization and heavy reliance on frame gen.
I would argue that late SNES era games look far better than their early 3d era follow ups
Late 16 bit games had to lean into distinct art directions which allowed them the stand the test of time.
They said we'd never have consumer tech that could white clip in real time but look at us now.