I guess normies still equate graphic quality with overall game quality, so that's why there's such a big emphasis on photorrealism for many AAA games. An old colleague from university, ~2010, only liked to play the shiniest, "best looking" stuff and scoffed at 2D games, "we're way past super nintendos".
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
356 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
60168 readers
2740 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The graphics are too expensive for AAA games? AAA means they are throwing the highest category budget for developing a game. And they ONLY invest in graphics, discarding the rest like a proper story (if any), decent characters, bug fixing, balancing, etc. Now they create junk only 1% of players with a 4090 can run somewhay decently on medium settings with 30fps average and loads of framedrops.
Wow guys, amazing, thanks I guess, this costed me 80 euros. Can't you tone down the graphics by at least 60% and focus on the "game" part of the game instead?
There are plenty of titles that do just that you can buy instead you know.
Oh I do, I'm skipping all AAA games. I illegally download them out of curiosity, but often delete them after 30min of playtime. But it still gets me angry because it basically is a major scam. Luring in loads of people with cool looking videos, then to deliver a bug simulator with most content locked behind more purchases (DLC's, loot boxes, subscriptions), completely unbalanced and abandoned after the fist sale period because fixing the bugs and balance doesn't provide more income so might as well quit and start a new scam. And then the audacity to complain people should not expect Baldur's Gate 3 to be a standard to compare other games to. Maybe do see it as a standard and try to create a properly working product with actual decent content worth it's money?
People care about graphics.
But they care about other things more
So the graphics need to be in service to something.
Imo the problem is that studios have become risk adverse because their budget is so big, so they pick an already popular IP, choose a marketable aspect of that IP, and spend that fortune turning the dial of that aspect up to 11.
Like X but bigger map
Like Y but more playable characters
Like Z but better graphics
Etc
But none of the time actually innovating any new player experience.
And players are finally getting fed up with playing the same handful of AAA game experiences again and again with different titles.
Graphics just happens to be the marketable attribute they like to crank most often
What they need to do is throw some spaghetti at the wall, see what's fun, then throw their hundreds of millions of dollars behind THAT.
Imho, graphics don't make the game. There are people here still playing doom and portal. Even games like Terraria aren't too demanding. You don't need amazing graphics.
Or any graphics for dwarf fortress and nethack (other rouguelikes also apply)
Yeah, been playing Enter the Gungeon and it's amazing as well
There have been massive diminishing returns on graphical quality vs. hardware and developer requirements since the PS3 era.
I will always put an emphasis on art style and gameplay over trend-chasing and what takes the most computing power.
People still love cult movies and other classics from 100 to 50 years ago, with handcrafted or minimal budget special effects, no CGI. It's because it's an entire art form and it can't just be reduced solely to aesthetic appeal. That kind of approach is just a result of the commodification of art. You want to reduce a successful work of art to some quantifiable metric besides popularity/sales, so that you can create repeatable processes around producing it and selling it, and optimize them for cost, but art defies quantification. Even just basic "enjoyable gameplay" defies that.
This guy MBAs.
That should have come across as critical of the commodification.
It did. Not sure why they said that. And I agree with you 100%. In fact, the success of Minecraft and Roblox alone should show that sometimes paying attention to the graphics is not necessarily what a developer should be doing.
There is room for AAA games with mindblowing graphics, but there should also be room for AAA games where they focus on other features over worrying about how amazing the graphics are.
Mufasa wouldn't have been a bad movie if they just sprang for animation, and voice actors who even attempt to sound like the characters they're playing.
Maybe they'd do better if they tried selling games instead of games as a service and stores with a game attached.
you can make the most beautiful cake and its worth nothing if there is just sawdust inside
Yup, first and foremost, figure out your gameplay loops.
Get that right and you can pretty it all up later.
I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.
On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don't think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.
BG3 wasn't nearly as far as they're trying to push though. For example it was beautiful on the normal PS5, as were the Horizon Zero Dawn games. And yet somehow that's not far enough for them.
Fidelity has value but gets diminishing returns the harder it gets.
The NYT article doesn't mention that new AAA console games often cost $70. I have not bought a brand new game in years because I just can't justify that cost. I have such a huge backlog between PS4 and PC, that there is just no reason to buy new games
I am betting, adjusted for inflation, that would not be especially higher than a new NES game.
It might even be cheaper.
That's definitely true. Didn't think about inflation. I still think $70 is a lot more than the many other ways to play, including inexpensive older games, Steam sales, Epic/Amazon giveaways, etc, all of which have "good enough" graphics for me
Yeah I’m always surprised when people are complaining about the cost to buy (not to produce) a game nowadays.
Where I live, games are way cheaper than they used to be during the Playstation 1 Era and it’s now really easy to buy used games online.
Of course if you buy every season pass or special skin for they used to game, it ends up more expensive.
Fuck cutting-edge graphics
I'm also going to add my stone to the pile here and point out that this hyperfixation on more and more "graphics" usually results in it ultimately being impossible to actually see what the fuck is happening on the screen.
You are a realistic barbarian dude who is brown, and wearing brown. standing in a realistic landscape which is brown, against a realistic highly textured and bump mapped bunch of trees which are brown, with leaves that are waving around in all directions realistically and are brown, trying to dodge arrows (which are brown) raining on you from the half dozen hairy orcs in the distance, who are also brown. And about nine pixels tall, and hidden in the bushes. Which are brown. And if this isn't happening verbatim (or even if it is), 2/3 of the screen is also covered by a zillion glowy particle effects, motion blur, and bloom, which are the only colorful parts of the image but still add up to you not being able to actually see jack shit out of what's important.
Bonus points if this also requires near frame-perfect inputs to handle, and you have half a second of input lag in between all the shit your console is trying to render plus the two or three frames eaten by postprocessing to make it "look pretty."
Yeah, fuck all that.
A major part of game deign that everyone seems to forget a lot these days in the name of making everything realistic and/or extra graphicy is clearly communicating to the player just what the hell is going on. Older games, I find, often did a significantly better job of this.
This was actually a lot worse in the early 2000s, as this video shows: https://youtu.be/6qQIhIOaiY4 I agree that there tends to be too much visual clutter on the screen sometimes in current games, especially particle effects. It's ironic that almost every 3rd person game seems to have a "Batman vision" toggle these days that simplifies what you see on screen so you have a chance to actual see stuff that's important. Also the often criticised yellow markers for climbing passages.
I totally agree. It's actually difficult for my brain to process all that detail. Part of it may be due to me being raised with ps1/ps2 graphics.
This screams anecdotal. I don't find that this is true of next gen titles in general. Lots and lots of absolutely stunning, gorgeous games are available to play where not everything is brown, or otherwise difficult to see.
The concept of realistic graphics doesn't necessarily have to equate to realism either. Hear me out. Games can look so gorgeous and realistic without having graphics that portray something that looks like this world in which we live. Alien worlds, unnatural colors, but still with light that behaves physically correct using advanced techniques.
I'm all for amazing graphics, and giving developers the tools they need to fulfill their visions. If it looks like garbage though, don't buy the shit.
view more: next ›