Technology

Damn, nobody in here is excited for the future of graphics? Guess I'll be the outlier.

I'm looking forward to ray tracing being commonly available. Having actual reflections in game really improves that subconscious immersion and even could open up strategy in some cases. Imagine using a mirror the see someone coming around the corner.

Every time I walk into a bathroom and the mirror is just some generic gray texture it pulls me out.

Realistic lighting, textures, and character models are also pretty great. I want to see the pores on the protagonist's face.

That said, obviously the game needs to be fun more than have good graphics, but man do I love the immersion of high quality visuals.

I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…

Art design will always trump straight up graphical wizbangs anyway. There’s a reason Tears of the Kingdom is gorgeous and impressive over here running on a potato versus a lot of games that need more horsepower to run.

Graphics in my opinion peaked at around 2015. I still boot up games from that time and I think they’re not that different from today’s titles

Do we need cutting-edge tables, cutting-edge water pipes, cutting-edge paintings, cutting-edge windows, cutting-edge power generators even?

That kind of competition really is unhealthy.

If not for this bullshit, we'd have a better choice of personal computer hardware and operating systems. We wouldn't have a lot of what they call enshittification.

What I don't understand is where the wide masses of normies got all this progress-signaling? I first sat behind a PC as a kid, it was DOS, someone showed me how to navigate directories, but I don't remember any specifics. Then Windows 98 at home. Then we got a new PC and there was Windows 2000 on it. I didn't like any Windows after it, but XP was fine.

That was me, like, being 9? I understood a bit more about computers than the average normie since then.

So - why did that me never have this progress-signaling, idea that buying something "cutting-edge" they don't understand somehow makes sense, but the whole crowd of people not knowing what a transistor is would apparently care so much for progress and cutting-edge?

I just don't understand. What do people knowing nothing about certain industry would get from caring about its development?

Some of the game industry followed the movie format: make a visual masterpiece with barely a plot or purpose.

Unlike the movie crowd, gamers usually want more depth and fun. Personally, I've been grabbing indie games with simple/pixel graphics and great gameplay.

that's fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it'll run fine even without upscaling.

Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don't exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.

Games reached real enough like 2016, and they were so optimized I can run them on a GTX 1050, now they look 5% better but need a 2k GPU, thx I'll keep playing Titanfall 2

They pushed this on us so they can make us buy new video cards every other year.

Is this article from a decade ago when the Nintendo Wii proved that graphics don't mean shit if the gameplay sucks?

Hardware to run them is getting too costly for consumers. I think there is a solution everyone can be happy with somewhere.