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Then stop making games with cutting edge graphics. I just want to play it on a steamdeck anyway.
Honestly. I prefer games that don't make the steam deck use its fans.
The problem is all the AAA publishers just keep increasing budgets to keep up. This creates a situation where games are so expensive they can't take risks, so they just follow a formula and are boring and generic. That's how we've gotten to where we are now. AAA games are failing because their budgets are too large. They need to make more smaller, interesting and unique games rather than one massive budget game.
I have essentially fully turned away from AAA personally. Thinking about it, I can't actually tell you the last one I played. Indie games are where all the good stuff is.
Shooters with beard hair that waves in the wind but gunplay that sucks and broken physics.
Nailed it. Here I am playing Celeste on Pico-8 and loving it. Gameplay matters before graphics. This is why Nintendo has a loyal following despite their litigious ways.
And hardware that's GENERATIONS behind.
Art style fuelled by pure intent and vision trumps photorealism any day of the week.
Heavily biased here, but just look at Warframe. It is undeniably one of the best looking games out there because it has a voice of its own, and it still runs just fine on decade-old hardware. Same with most pixel/voxel graphics games.
We really don't need to see a billion open pores per square centimeter of facial skin as long as the gameplay's solid, the story's good, and the characters are well-written. Add a touch of art style as I've mentioned before, and you're golden.
Plus I'd rather have a functional game than a pretty one any day of the week. The current trend of rushing big budget/high-tech games to market then finishing them over a couple of years is really getting on my nerves - looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077, Darktide, Baldur's Gate 3 (hate me all you want, but that game was a technical mess at launch), Rogue Trader, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, Space Marine 2, (insert ~75% of big budget games released since 2018 here).
I just bought 2077 and No Man's Sky with some Christmas money. They were $25 each. If they screw up the launch, that just means it'll be in the bargain bin quicker for us patient gamers.
I haven't tried Cyberpunk yet, but NMS is very solid for $25. I don't think I'd ever have paid full price for it though.
Uhm, googling warframe screenshot (to avoid promo material), i'd count Warframe as a more fotorealistic game, aside frome the weird humanoid figures. I mean, look at this:
"AER memories of old" (currently 90% sale) is what i count as own, simple, art style.
Or maybe Satisfactory, that's good enough in realism, playable on my Cezanne Vega 8 iGPU.
Like, we found acceptable, beautiful levels of graphics years ago.
We’re not the ones saying “make it look even better.” They are the ones that seem to be whipping themselves into some frenzy and saying “we can’t keep doing this!”
So fuckin stop.
That's hilarious because cutting edge graphics is all they have left
All the best games I've played recently are deliberately low poly models, low res textures, and 100% focused on JUST satisfying gamefeel and fun gameplay mechanics.
Fuck graphical fidelity and fuck "AAA" studios for wasting our time and money on it.
I WANT SHORTER GAMES WITH WORSE GRAPHICS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID MORE TO WORK LESS AND I'M NOT KIDDING
I don't really think it should be "worse" or specifically low-poly. There is a balance that can be struck and I feel that accepting the lowest quality possible is an excuse for developers to put in as little work as possible while still charging us as much as possible.
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.
I've put like 1000 hours each into Stardew Valley and Rimworld. Not a single ray traced, no advanced boob physics, just good fun.
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.
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
The amount of effort for such imperceptible improvements is insane.
Also insane is how shit modern games run without multi thousand dollar hardware, even if you turn down settings, but then it also looks like ass in addition to running like shit.
I mean, how are they supposed to pay the execs millions of dollars if they have to pay the developers to make the game do the thing?
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.
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
Hardware to run them is getting too costly for consumers. I think there is a solution everyone can be happy with somewhere.
Indie devs have been there forever. Can't compete on the AAA features? Compensate with interesting art and smart tech.
At this point, to me, "AAA" features means it's full of microtransactions, predatory marketing, and lootbox gambling.
And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint... but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.
There is. The Switch cannot push graphics like the PS5 Pro, but is still one of the best selling consoles in history. Most Nintendo produced games are graphically basic, but so well stylized and optimized that nobody cares! They are good fun games.
the broader genre of single-player action games has mostly diminished to Soulslikes and gacha games a la Genshin Impact
I call bullshit. There are all kinds of awesome, successful, action games that don't fit this mold. This whole piece reads like it was placed by a high level exec that's preparing to lay off a bunch of graphic artists and devs.
Art > graphics, but this article sucks.
9 times out of 10, I won't see your brand new AAA title for several years after release. While there are occasional exceptions, I don't really buy at launch. Your cutting edge graphics mean nothing to me without story, characters, and writing. If you invest in looks without substance, I will never waste my time with you.
What about destructible environment, physics, attention to details?
All what I see nowadays are mediocre products in flashy packaging. Consumers seem to prioritize aesthetics over quality; if a game is colorful and visually appealing, it often sells well. Whats up with freedom of jumping on that crate, blowing up that wall, shooting up the props etc.
At times, it feels as though I am confined within an enclosure, where the visuals and sounds serve merely to distract me from this realization.
I think it’s crazy that we always want prettier games when you still have visual glitches like cars disappearing in your rearview mirror, buildings and textures appearing late, screen tearing when you make your POV spin.
I don’t really need way better graphics, but I’d need these things gone as they take me out of my game way more than no raytracing or a slight fps drop.
I think these things would be easy to solve if we didn’t always get better graphics.
Object permanence in a game still has yet to blow my mind. Dwarf fortress does it pretty well (abandoning a mine to ruin only to revisit the walls you etched aeons ago as an adventurer), and minecraft of course, but any game with decent graphics seem to just abandon this altogether. You're just visiting that world, you're not making any change
What cutting edge graphics? The blurry as smudge that is TAA in all the modern games? Fuck off. What's expensive is the actual slop that is modern games
Yeah and we are going to see more of that in the future since everyone and their mom are switching to UE5.
Space Marine 2 is sharp AF BTW. Also not Unreal Engine, but the Swarm Engine, BTW.
The texture detail in that game is crazy, even though you normally don't see most of it because it's too small.
It also has a really fun gameplay loop, that I haven't felt in a while. Good shit.
Neee more micro transactions and loots boxes?
So tired of these corpo parasites opions being injected to my socials feeds.
STFU and make good games, maybe I will start buying them again
I can only really think of two games that really justify enormous development costs, and that's Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.
If your game isn't pushing things to that level of expectation, you really need to rethink what you're doing with that budget.
add me to the crowd where graphics is not a major thing. its great ad can make one game preferable to another but im all about character customization both in look and abilities.
Animal Well was the best game I played this year and it was made by one dude who built his own engine.
Balatro is a close second with the best soundtrack. The Dev bought it on Fiverr.
that's fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it'll run fine even without upscaling.