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.
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.