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There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.
Whoosh.
We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)
There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.
Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.
Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.
Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.
Also, as others have pointed out, it’s capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn’t get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn’t give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said “we want our money back… now.” It’s a choice to release too early.
…but on the other hand it’s also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.
I honestly feel like this with Genshin Impact. It looks absolutely breathtaking and in 20 years it will still be beautiful. It runs on a damn potato. I personally like the lighting in a lot of scenes way better than the lighting in some titles that have path tracing.
I have always liked art styles in games better than realism.
In what world does Genshin runs well on a potato? Unless you have a different definition of potato than me. My Galaxy S10e can barely play the game, and it’s not even slow enough to be called a potato
Might be talking within the context of PC gaming, where even a relative potato will beat the performance of a flagship phone.
Yeah i was talking about pc haha. I don’t keep very up to date with phones and don’t know much about their performance.
Probably is, but I get why the other fella was confused by this.
Until right this moment I was under the impression that Genshin was literally just a phone game. Looks like I was wrong.
Haha, opposite experience for me! I don’t play it but know some people that do, and I only ever heard about them playing it on their PCs, so it was their comment that made me realize it was also available on phones :P
Sure, but I’m still going to say “fuck mihoyo”
Borderlands 1 and 2 still look great in comparison to a lot of games that came out around the same time. The stylized cel-shaded textures help hide the lower-poly environments and really make the world stand out. Most games at the time were trying to go for a “realistic” look that just resulted in bland brown and gray environments that look terrible.
Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.
I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.
I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.
Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is exactly the kind of product that is going to keep driving the realistic approach. It’s four years later now and the game’s visuals are still state-of-the-art in many areas. Even after earning as much backlash on release as any game in recent memory, it was a massively profitable project in the end.
This is why Sony, Microsoft, and the big third parties like Ubisoft keep taking shots in this realm.
Just wanna throw Windwaker into the examples of highly stylized art style games that aged great.
And I don‘t think games have to look that good either… I‘m currently playing MGSV and that game‘s 8 years old, runs at 60 fps on the Deck, and looks amazing. It feels like hundreds of millions are being burned on deminishing returns nowadays…
It’s bullshit accounting, they’re not spending it on the devs or the games, they’re spending it on advertising and the c levels Paydays. There are a ton of really good looking games, that had what would be considered shoestring budgets, but these companies bitching about it aren’t actually in it for the games anymore, its just for the money.
What are the good looking games with shoestring budgets?
10mil for Hellblade
36mil for KC:D one of the prettiest games of the time…which includes marketing.
The cost of some of these “AAAA” titles is a complete joke.
Another one, before THQ took over, metro 2033, 10-20 million estimate, and while it’s aged a bit, when it first was released it had a good bit of eye candy for a horror game.
Another one would be the first stalker, it’s not what we would consider it today, visual candy, but it’s also over a decade old now, but it was a pretty game when it came out. Cost 5mil to make
Another one:
Crysis 22mil, and if you remember it was one of the benchmarks for the longest times…can it run crysis.
Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we’re stretching the definition of shoestring. I’ll bet KC:D’s sequel spent far more, for one. I’m with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.
34 mil is nothing when you start looking at the cost of some of these other games, even Skyrim was over 100 million. Like GTA5, with marketing, was like 250 million. Just insanely expensive, and I guarantee you the devs are not pulling in a mil or two a year.
It’s true, and I’d certainly like to see some of these studios try to target making many games at that budget than a single game at ten times that every 7 or 8 years, but even these “cheaper” games you listed still take a long time to make, and I think that’s the problem to be solved. Games came out at a really rapid clip 20-25 years ago, where you’d often get 3 games in a series 3 years in a row. We can argue about the relative quality of those games compared to what people make now and how much crunch was involved, but if the typical game is taking more than 3 years to make, that still says to me that maybe their ambitions got out of hand. The time involved in making a game is what balloons a lot of these budgets, and whereas you could sell 3 full-priced games 3 years in a row back in the day, now you’re selling 1 every 6 years, and you need to sell way, way more of them to make the math work out.
Games had a lot less in them as well though, but even then games still took time. OoT, one of the biggest RPGs, released in 98, two 1/2 years of dev time. Games still required time, maybe less, but they also had less in them.
Sound design > Graphics
If you like sound design, the sound design in Don’t Starve is by far the best ive ever heard. It is the game that convinced me of your point.
The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.
Cheap shitty headphones, when the Koss KSC75 exist for $20 and sound better than anything I had bought before. I have better headphones now, but $20 is $20, and I still like how small they are. Despite having HD600s and HE1000s, they’re still my go-to for the average use case.
EDIT: Here’s a list of headphones worse than $20 funny disc with ear clip:
All Bluetooth headphones (and your $500 AirPods Max)
All gaming headsets
All in-store headphones that aren’t that one set of Audio-Technicas
In other words, 100% of what the average consumer buys. Get them in on this simple trick.
In my experience it’s both cheap shitty headset and expensive shitty headset. The arguments is always wireless + mic so people go and spend ridiculous money on something that can be done better with a cheap good headphones like the Koss + dedicated mic that may not be as convenient to use but will sound much better.
Still, good sound design may be enjoyed on a shitty headset, it’s just that good audio can add more to gameplay than just graphics. Like for example walking in the main HUB area in Starfield is like soul numbingly hilarious… it does not feel alive at all even when you see NPCs walking around all the time.
Story goes somewhere below Replay value, and controls go to number one. Gameplay and controls are pretty much interchangable unless you want a cinema simulator.
Add sound design as number two above music as number three and then the list is done.
Disagree, story is definitely more important than replayability for me.
All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope. But to even have replayability as a category is pretty pointless.
All other factors lead to replayability if you go by the order I suggested. Having a set story limits replayability, so that tracks for you.
All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope.
Sure, if your metric is hours of gameplay per dollar spent. But that’s no way to rate a video game if you ask me.
For instance I would rate The Talos Principle or Disco Elysium as much better games than, say, World of Warcraft, despite the fact that I played wow much more than the former two. But the story of those two games are just far more interesting and the games have left a much more impactful, lasting impression on me even though I don’t play them any more.
- FPS
Well, everyone has their priorities. The problem is that even the people, who do value realistic graphics the most, are not captured by new AAA games.
A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.
Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that’s achievable plays into what the design may be, although it’s not a direct correlation.
I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That’s probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.
My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don’t look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.
Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.
I don’t need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character’s face. I don’t need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won’t notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or “play” sections that may as well be cutscenes.
I don’t want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.
Then don’t, i doubt people get sad when they realize they don’t have to buy another overpriced gpu to run the game they anticipated the most.
I have a computer from 2017. It’s also a Mac. I can’t play recent games and I think I’ve just gotten more and more turned off by the whole emphasis on better graphics and the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on either a console or a really good graphics card for a PC has just turned me off of mainstream gaming completely.
Mostly I just go play games I played when I was a kid these days. 1980s graphics and yet I have yet to get tired of many of them…
I’ve got an old Mac and use a cloud gaming PC to play games. It’s like $50 a month and works great when you’re near the data center.
Plus my laptop doesn’t get really hot while playing games and the battery lasts a lot longer. All while getting 4k 60fps gaming with ray tracing.
I could not justify spending $50 a month on something like that and then buy games on top of it, but I am glad there are solutions.
I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don’t need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support. I’m thinking of a lot of early 3D games. Many of the older sprite based games still hold up great.
The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.
I would argue they don’t even need to be updated. They were fun already in their time. I wish people would just come up with totally new ideas. I don’t need the same characters in every game I play. Same with movies now too Everything is a remake or a sequel.
I love to play indie games though.
It’s not that I don’t like realistic graphics. But I’m not gonna pay 100 bucks per game + micro transactions and / or live service shenanigans to get it. Nowadays it’s not even that hard to have good looking games, thanks to all the work that went into modern engines. Obviously cutting edge graphics still need talented artists who create all the textures and high poly models but at some point the graphical fidelity gained becomes minuscule, compared to the effort put into it (and the performance it eats, since this bleeds into the absurd GPU topic too).
There’s also plenty of creative stylization options that can be explored that aren’t your typical WoW cartoon look that everyone goes for nowadays. Hell, I still love pixel art games too and they’re often considered to be on the bottom end of the graphical quality (which I’d heavily disagree with, but that’s also another topic).
What gamers want are good games that don’t feel like they get constantly milked or prioritize graphics over gameplay or story.
I agree 100%. I’d love a AAA game that uses the studio’s clout not for cutting edge graphics but a stellar, polished story and gameplay. The story doesn’t even need to be DEEP, just solid.
I always wonder how some big ass studio announcing a title that uses (high quality) 2D or 2.5D graphics would go. Like, pump it full of many hours of great gameplay and gut and / or heart wrenching story, with lovely & beautiful art, in 2025+. No online account requirements, no Denuvo, no micro or macro transactions, just a solid buy to play title that’s a blast to get immersed in. The problem is that suits would not dare to even try this, just like they don’t dare to try anything else that’s not your standard formula customer milking. And that’s how you get the 20iest iteration of generic graphic bliss with hundreds or even thousands of bucks to spend on macro transactions and other pain the ass bullshit. Innovation for the big companies is dead, which is why I focus so much on Indie studios and smaller developers now. At least there’s still some honest passion behind those games.
I linked the gift article. This link shouldn’t be necessary, right?
The archive link:
- Doesn’t have a tracker.
- Works with scripts disabled (good privacy & security practice).
- Will still be useful when nytimes.com eventually disables your gift ID or takes the article down.
Fair enough.
Oh man… I still can’t read it because of the atrocious background. I was hoping this link would have just been normal text.
Firefox reader mode fixes that background.
You can select the text that’s over that background to make reading easier. Most of the article is below it, so you should be fine after a couple taps of Page Down.
Or use Firefox reader view, which cleans it right up. :)
Is there a way to actually read the article without having to be exposed to whatever the drug fueled hellscape that website is?
Removed by mod
With due respect, dear mod: AI spam my ass.
Maybe it’s just me, but I like the style it’s presented in, and I have major adblockers in service so I’m not sure how it’s a drug fueled hellscape. It basically becomes a normal NYT article after a half-page of scrolling. Not all their readers are familiar with these games, so the NYT is doing its diligence by trying to show what they’re talking about, so their readers have a frame of reference. (Remember the NYT is actually aimed at an investor class who owns a second house in the Hamptons and may not be gamers at all. Go look at their Lifestyle section sometime.)
I think it’s fine but I guess I’m in the minority, but also maybe it’s less worse for me because of uBlock/Pihole/Bypass Paywalls Clean.
I use Firefox’s “reader mode”
Edit: nyt managed to enshittify even that. will wonders never cease
I can’t be bothered to visit any mainstream news site anymore. They’ve made the process of accessing the content so adversarial that there’s no point.
I’d recommend trying RSS and if they don’t support it just quit reading them.
Unfortunately, RSS doesn’t do anything for the links to the NYT in my Lemmy feed.
In a lot of cases, I find I’ve already read the underlying content or skipped it with my reader and therefore can go right to the comments. But ymmv of course.
Unpopular opinion but I preferer the graphics of a game were absolute trash but the ost be awesome. I can forget easyly how much individual hairs are in a 3d model, but good OST will live in my mind and heart forever.
And of course gameplay go first.
The Wii was a fantastic example of this. Less capable hardware used in very imaginative ways, and had the capacity to bring older people into the games
This is why so many indie games are awesome. The graphics don’t need to be great when the soundtracks and gameplay more than make up for it. Those are what actually matter. I have most of Undertale’s OST committed to memory at this point lol
Neir Automata had pretty good graphics, but nothing groundbreaking.
The soundtrack is fucking phenomenal.
This is my current addiction. No need graphix.
What is this?
Caves of Qud
Live and drink!
Your thirst is mine, my water is yours
HA! Now you have to come adventure with me if I can afford the rep loss!
I hope you like hauling bags of warm static~
🥺
seriously though AWESOME game, I must have 500+ hours in it at this point
Tried it about 10+ times, but I suck at it too much.
Hell yea
I just played Dragon Age Veilguard, and I’m now playing Dragon Age Origins, which was released 15 years ago. The difference in graphics and animation are startling. And it has a big effect on my enjoyment of the game. Origins is considered by many to be the best in the series, and I can see that they poured a ton into story options and such. But it doesn’t feel nearly as good as playing Veilguard.
Amazing graphics might not make or break a game, but the minimum level of what’s acceptable is always rising. Couple that with higher resolutions and other hardware advances, and art budgets are going to keep going up.
Agreed; Veilguard has pretty okay graphics. Not great, but acceptable - the high mark for me is BG3. But moving back to the earlier entries, they may have had stories that felt more ‘real’ (e.g., the setting felt more internally consistent) and gave more options, but the graphics and gameplay haven’t aged well.
Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas hasn’t aged so well. It was a great game, but it looks pretty rough now, unless you load it down with hi-res mods.
I don’t demand photorealism, but I’d like better visuals than PS3-level graphics.
It’s nice to see gaming covered in NYT at all. The article generally rings hollow to me. I’m not an industry expert, but:
- It’s easy to be profitable when you’re just making a sandbox and your players make the games, but at that point are you a game developer? (Roblox)
- High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
- AAA developers aren’t optimizing games as well as they used to, so only high end hardware would even run them
- AAA is more focused on loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes, and cinematics all wrapped up in great visuals. That’s at the expense of innovative gameplay and interesting stories. Making the graphics worse won’t get execs to greenlight better games, just uglier ones. And they’ll still be $70.
- Even when games are huge successes and profitable, studios are getting bought and shut down (EA, Microsoft, Sony?), so it’s hard to say the corps are hurting.
High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
Not only that, but mid range cards just haven’t really moved that much in terms of performance. The ultra high end used to be a terrible value only for people who want the best and didn’t care about money. Now it almost makes sense from a performance per dollar standpoint to go ultra high end. At launch the 4090 was almost twice the performance of the 4080, but only cost about 1.5x. And somehow the value gets worse the lower end you go.
Meanwhile mid-high end cards like the 4060 and 7600 (which used to be some of the best values) are barely outperforming their predecessors.
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
