As video games develop more and more over the years, companies have been making them more and more realistic-looking. I can guess this is related to expectations, but am I the only one who doesn’t care about graphics? We could be using the same processing power to store worlds that have as much exploration potential as the Earth itself if we weren’t afraid to save on processing power by going back to 8-bit.
Graphics are important. Polygon count is not. There is no real value in being able to see each individual eyelash, but I also don’t think there’s much benefit to making every game look like the original Lode Runner.
Wouldn’t it save data power? I would imagine that a game with the simpler visuals from the golden age of video games would cost a machine less bytes to perform.
It depends on a lot of factors. Minecraft, despite its signature simplistic artstyle, takes a surprising amount of CPU power to run - a lot more so if you run mods. Even a Minecraft server, which doesn’t render graphics at all, takes a beefy machine and a lot of RAM.
It’s as much about graphical fidelity as it is quality of code, and unfortunately, there are a lot of game studios that don’t seem especially bothered about optimising their games. To the extent that you can fill, say, an Xbox’s hard drive with only two or three AAA games.
All that said, you’re right in that simpler graphics in general mean less work for the graphics card to do. Just that it’s not the only factor.
I want a Fun game. Art (graphics) can help and be supplementary towards making a game fun, but it is not the end all be all. Some fun games I’ve played use intentionally shitty graphics to add to it, other games are so unfun because all they do is try to wow you with the images.
I’ve found lately the indie Dev sphere has been more focused on fun games and AAA studios have more focused on graphics alone. I think this mostly happened because early on when (video) games where becoming popularized hardware was increasing at such a rapid pace and graphics genuinely could be made better, not necessarily as just a stylistic choice. You could show off the new hardware capabilities with good story for more appeal. This also made them lazier over the years as those big hardware and software leap allowed them to focus on the consumer draw utilizing showcase imagry over story. As hardware advances slowed and graphic leaps became smaller the gains just aren’t there. And you’ve left many consumers with nostalgia over the fight for when graphic improvements meant something, in a time when good story/gameplay was also pretty necessary.
Some fun games I’ve played use intentionally shitty graphics to add to it
If it adds to the experience, wouldn’t the graphics then be good?
On the bright side, games with intentionally shitty graphics are very memeable, especially Undertale.
Personally, I’ve never been particularly wowed by good graphics. I’m perfectly happy to play a game with crunchy graphics from decades ago if the gameplay is fun, or a modern indie title with low poly or pixel art graphics. There are plenty of great games out there where the graphics are nothing special.
Do you use an emulator or do you do it the old fashioned way?
Both, but mainly I play PC games bought on Steam, not emulated console games.
A game can only give you so many hours before it becomes boring. Sandbox games aside, most are done after 100 to 200 hours. More content wouldn’t really revive them as you already know the gameplay loop.
Graphics isn’t as important as art style, however I’d rather play a game with realistic graphics but lack of distinguishing art direction, than one with art direction but overall being too basic with their graphics. Graphics is a huge part of immersion to me.
I play a lot of indie games with poor graphics. Best example Minecraft, but when I can install higher resolution textures, realistic lighting and animated foliage, it is eye candy. I can just stand there and look at the beautiful world and relax. I do need zero gameplay at this point and am still entertained.
Gameplay is overrated, give me pretty graphics. Be it realistic or not.
Very interesting. Does story come into it at all for you? Audio?
Sometimes it feels like video games are actually ten different mediums that we lump together for no real reason.
Yes, audio is important too. I’ve played games that had almost no graphics but nice music that pulled me in. I’m a bit strange on even overlooking flaws, as long as the music is fantastic.
In my eyes games are the peak of art. They combine clever game design, mechanics, image, physics, story, music and sound and more.
I enjoy good stories, I’m just rarely surprised by a twist or enjoy following long expositions. I prefer “show, don’t tell”. I prefer open world sandbox games. The more details, the more graphics, the better. I can create my own story if I want to.
TIL Minecraft is considered an Indie game. I thought it was a company one.
Microsoft bought Mojang after a few years.
Ah, that’s where the confusion comes from then.
I feel like people who talk about graphics fundamentally misunderstand what they themselves crave.
People want things that are nice to look at. Some artstyles require more computation than others, but ultimately all of gaming is art, and all of art is a conjuring trick, much like Cinema, how something is accomplished or how “believable” it looks is secondary to how invested you are in what you are consuming, yanno?
I do however have personal opinions, and my personal opinion is that gaming peaked during the PS2/GameCube/Xbox years. Hardware was just about good enough that pretty much anything developers wanted to make, they could achieve. Nothing looked like real life, sure, but it looked good enough. And the more detail you are throwing at the screen, the more expensive it is to make. So back then we had a lot of mid-budget games. That had resources not available to modern Indie studios to do ambitious things, but were also not these insane investments that had to please every executive under the sun and monetise everything in order to break even.
The perfect balance between niceness and feasibility.
You wouldn’t be wrong about games peaking in the PS2 years, in fact the PS3 specifically made itself backward compatible with the PS1 and not the PS2 because it would’ve given the PS2 an unwanted W in how utterly overshadowing it was.
The move to “HD” when the PS3/360 were dominant was the death knell of hundreds of mid-sized studios, and gaming never really recovered from it.
sounds like PC gamers should fire up an Amiga emulator and learn what gameplay could be.
I do this sometimes. Emulators are the best. I wish game companies would use them as a cue to revive the concept of having events around games they consider far in the past.
I only care so far as if they can make it look good, I’d like it to.
My favorite game of all time is Dwarf Fortress. But if someone made the exact same game but with modern 3D graphics, I’d be more likely to play the one that looks nice.
Nobody is making games like that, though. Most modern games have less than half of the depth in mechanics of games I grew up with in the 90’s in favor of better graphics and larger worlds. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the kind of game I wanna see and it’s popularity and why it got so popular show that people want games of the mid to late 90’s more than they want modern games that only have great graphics going for them; BG3 takes the same design ideas from back then and just makes it prettier to look at.
I think I may have played Dwarf Fortress at one point. It reminds me a lot of the tycoon games. I had as much fun with those as, say, Minecraft. Literally the same idea but one is 2D, goes to show not everyones focuses on dimensions.
While there are many fans of pixel art and low poly 3D, majority of gamers actually want high fidelity graphics. There are very few indie success stories with low quality VFX like Stardew Valley and pretty much no AAA games like that. Games like No Man’s Sky won’t be such hits if they were made in pixel art.
The reality is that it’s not that games with good graphics are bad, it’s that you can’t afford RTX4090 and a QD OLED 4K monitor. There are plenty of great games with awesome graphics, it’s time for you to upgrade.
It’s not that I don’t care at all about visuals, but I look at a machine like the Nintendo Switch, which currently hosts a number of Pokemon games in complete 3D and two enormous open world Zelda games, and I think how cool it would be if the graphics went back to 8-bit (like they were for the first Zelda and Pokemon games) and they used all that data to make a bigger world, which could now be literally a hundred times larger, and while they were at it maybe put in MMORPG functionality. If they could replicate the whole country of Denmark in a Minecraft server, they could replicate the whole world in something that sacrificed some of the visual advancements. It feels weird we’re increasing our capacity for data power only to waste it all more and more as it progresses.
Again, No Man’s Sky is an example where nothing is sacrificed.
Photo realism with no artistic direction is pointless.
Say that in a flight simulator forum. ;)
I know it’s mostly in jest but I can’t help replying lol.
I am a Euro Truck Simulator 2 enjoyer. Simulators are kind of another beast but I think “be as close to real life” can be a considered an artistic direction. It’s bad when a game isn’t being a simulation but pushing polygon count for its sake.
We probably can consider simulators as edge cases I guess lol.
And people wonder why Wind Waker did so well compared to Twilight Princess.
As someone else pointed out, that is false.
What IS true is that Wind Waker seems to generally be remembered more fondly than Twilight Princess. Plus it aged much better.
I’m not saying it did better than Twilight Princess, just that they’re comparable.
Twilight princess had double the global sales of WW though lol
Possibly because one was on a console that sold “okay”, and the other was on one of the biggest-selling systems of all time
Not unlikely. Still means TP was better commercially than WW. I love them both
I care about art direction. Graphical capability can give digital artists more freedom especially for photorealistic styles. But few games actually make good use of such artistic freedom.
My favourite 3D game graphics is Super Mario Galaxy. Other than that I mostly prefer game graphics from 16-bit consoles.
I do care about art direction, I just care so much more about the world in the game that if whole parts of the in-game world can come at the same processing cost as a little realism, I’d choose more chunks of the world.
I’m on the same boat. Photorealism only gets you so far, and pixel-art like graphics have their own charm. .
That and it doesn’t effect gameplay quality. A fun enough game retains its addictiveness no matter how real the visuals look.
i think stardew valley is itself proof that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play.
Stardew looks fantastic, what are you saying?
that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play
They’re not, but your example is a game with detailed graphics…
yep, that is an interesting opinion on graphics.
…It’s not really an opinion, but okay
whatever floats your boat semantic master
It’s not a proof, it’s an exception.
is earth proof of life across the universe or are we an exception?
That and Undertale.
It’s becoming ever more obvious as graphics improve that it doesn’t really matter what the game looks like as long as the game is fun.
Companies better have a damn good reason to spend production resources on high end graphics given how little they matter compared with thematic harmony, creativity and originality.
At this point probably to look like they can compete with other games, which might explain the fact nobody complains indie games seem primitive.
I’m with you. I think “peak graphics” for me was around XBox 360. I’d much rather have resources used for better gameplay, larger worlds, more expansive story, etc. Also, just less resource usage in general; I stopped PC gaming forever ago because I got sick of chasing the GPU dragon.
Not sure I’d want to go all the way back to 8-bit, but somewhere between there and XB360 would be fine. That said, I do like seeing new “retro” games that are 8-bit era appropriate.
Somewhere between 8-bit and XB360 would be PS1.
I dislike PS1 graphics. Too many games use 3D graphics for no reason, and they used dark and muted colours to be “realistic”.
N64 games are usually more colourful and more pleasing, even though they lack texture.
XB360 had enough power to finally show 3D without feeling “trying too hard”.
I meant it as more of a range than a hard point on a line, lol.
But yeah, PS1 games are pretty rough to look at.
Within the range, I would give: SNES: 10/10 (my favourite game graphics of all time. e.g. FF6) N64:6/10 (1st party games have good art direction) PS1: 5/10 (could be lower, but saved by games with pre-rendered backgrounds) PS2: 7/10 (some outstanding graphics such as Shadow of the Colossus)
Wait, was Pokémon Red/Blue 8-bit or 16-bit? You got me second-guessing now.
8-bit. They were released for the original Gameboy.
Too realistic graphics take me out of the game, are visually overwhelming, and make it hard to see certain important details.
If I have to pick up a quest item, I don’t want it’s stone texture blending into the dirt floor. I want it highlighted so I can see the damn thing is interactable.
Reading this, I realize I’m surprised more games don’t have colourblind accommodation.
