Thing is, looking at some games, Horizon and Elden Ring being a prime examples, we can have both great games with great graphics.
You don’t really want better games with worse graphics, you want better games that don’t use great graphics as an excuse to bad gameplay.
He wants the resources being spent on graphics to be redirected to engineers and game designers. There is a reasonable top end budget to put towards any given game, so it is at least mostly 0 sum.
Bethesta has the worst of both worlds.
Big budget of cash; small budget of time and talent.
They take like 10 years to release a game
They have plenty of time, just not the talent or vision to do anything good with it. Their stories are extremely bare bones, the bugs are prolific, and the power creep is more a power slide straight into godhood by level 15 because of the short main quests.
10 years not enough time for their level of skill. ;)
It doesn’t. You can do so much more in an isometric world than a 3D one. Modern games are more about the game engine than the game itself.
Spruce up some old school MUDs, imo. Make the original Legend of Zelda, but massively upgraded for what you can do with today’s tech. (Similar to Bastion, I suppose.) There’s a lot of room for a triple A game similar to Albion Online.
yeah also small team or even open source achievable.
That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.
Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.
Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.
Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level.
What an absolutely batshit insane thing to say.
bro just have an AI do it
its just like, pixels or whatever
/s
Actually, would the masses care at all about ai art that is finished by a human to make it work? For something like Fortnite?
So, the big problem right now with AI art is that there’s no real way to modify it without basically completely redoing it.
You can alter the prompts, but due to the intentionally chaotic nature of the models, what you’ll get out is a completely different image. You can’t just be like “I want her head tilted a little more to the left, and give her a bigger smile, but keep everything else the same.” When you’re working on professional art, generally what happens is the artist presents you with each version, from rough sketches to finished line art, to rough paint work, and you request changes as you go. There’s a collaboration as you guide them towards the result you want. But with AI you’re just shotgunning outputs and hoping that one of them lands close enough. That’s fine for your bedroom wall, but not for a professional environment.
And if you want to have a human artist go in and make those changes to the finished image, they have to contend with the fact that they only have a finished image, not any of the layers from sketch through to brush work to lighting and so on. So they’re basically stuck trying to seamlessly paint over the existing image. That’s harder than it sounds.
Can artists use AI as a tool? Absolutely. Generate like 50 versions of a scene, use them as references. Or ask it for a sketch, then paint over that in your style. You can correct mistakes and make adjustments along the way. But the idea that humans can just “touch up” AI art to fix the mistakes doesn’t really work.
Ok but if possible would the masses care if it was ai generated is my point.
I would confidently assume that folks are researching having generative ai actually conducting the tasks of wireframing, skinning, landscaping, skyboxing, WFC tile generation etc
It’s not happening now, but absolutely will.
But again my point is most folks will not give a shit as long as they can unlock newer better glitter shit
You can hire writers instead of visual artists.
Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you’re severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they’re assembly line workers isn’t going to result in a compelling world.
In either case communication is the limiting factor and that scales with quadratic complexity with larger groups (everyone has to be on the same page with everyone else).
The studios who do this mostly aren’t looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.
Valheim
Tell me you’re uncreative without telling me you’re uncreative.
We can have both but it will cost hundreds of millions like Horizon and often this means shitty monetization practices if the company isn’t the size of Sony, or the employees are heavily underpaid like with Elden Ring. Seriously pay at FromSoft is lower than the already low industry standard. https://www.pcgamer.com/report-highlights-underpay-and-some-level-of-crunching-at-fromsoftware/
The author has completely missed the MAIN reason the campaign was good in 2009 and isn’t, now.
In 2009 the mindset was still that you needed a good single player game to get sales of a game. By 2015 call of duty had it figured out that they could almost completely ignore shoestringing a half asked campaign together and still get massive sales because their players were buying it for the multi-player, and all the money to be made by their fan boys buying it was in the multi-player.
Funny thing is, most multiplayer blokes play at low settings anyways to maximize performance for some form of advantage.
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tbf elden ring doesnt look that cutting edge.
Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it’s nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.
I’d easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I’d still bet the difference wouldn’t be that noticeable for 4K either.
And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid “open worlds”, and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.I hate that “realistic” graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it’s consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.
I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.
Well it’s a scaling effect and diminishing returns
To the human eye 480p vs 1080p is significant but 4k vs 8k is hard to tell
I think focusing on new technologies such as AI upscaling/world generation or VR is a better use of developers time and pushes the industry back into the innovative space it’s supposed to be
VR will always stay a niche technology just because of the limited circumstances where people can use it (e.g. not on the move, not while watching kids,…).
I agree
I should’ve clarified VR/ AR. I do think AR will be a large part of daily life and apply much further than video games in the not too distant future
Depends a bit on screen size and placement, too. I play on 27", 1440p, about 3 feet from my face, and my eyeballs are definitely the lowest resolution link in the chain. 32" screen on my desk, 60" screen in front of the couch, and 1080-1440 will start showing their pixels. I’m not anxious to upgrade my screen, because 1440p gives me great framerates with a cheaper video card. Also a 32" screen at a viewing distance of 3’ is hard to actually see everything.
I’d much rather have a good game that runs fast at 1080p than have to get a $700 card for OK framerate and style-over-substance gameplay just to get 4k.
Agree that using VR to get immersive, wide-field graphics from fewer pixels is a great alternative.
I’d easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I’d still bet the difference wouldn’t be that noticeable for 4K either.
If you just count pixels, yes. But what really made a big step forward in this decade was the realistic animation. And it does require a lot of effort and time to make it right.
Honestly I’d still argue there’s diminishing returns on this front as well.
I play plenty of older titles, and I wouldn’t say I notice that much of a difference - though that is my very subjective opinion
There’s hundreds of great games on pc to play without all the focus on graphics. You just can’t focus on industry giant game devs. Go play Stardew Valley, or Hades, or Subnautica.
Of course there are, and I do - but the focus of the article, and thus the thread was on the AAA gaming space and its obsession with graphics.
Smaller studios and Indies already figured out the whole “you don’t need to be able to see every fibre of a character’s hair in order for a game to be good” thingSubnautica is a game I play for the audio, and that’s really saying something because the visuals are great. I bought open back headphones for that game.
Halo 4 at 1440p looks very good, and it’s 12 years old. Fully agree. I’d rather see more entities on screen, more particles, and draw distance. Polygon count and textures don’t really impress me anymore.
I’d rather see highly stylized games with a lot going on in the world, rather than wasting half of my frame render time on a character’s face.
I want better games with better graphics. The two are not mutually exclusive, games like Elden Ring prove it is possible to have both.
The problem this writer had with CoD wasn’t even really the game. Its the same problem plaguing nearly all entertainment media at the moment: the writing just sucks. Its bad. Bad writing will make even a game with great gameplay turn sour.
Elden Ring had great art direction, but I wouldn’t say it had great graphics.
It had great graphics, and its art direction elevated the graphics. It looks equally as good as any other game that released the same year.
Elden Ring certainly is a long leap from King’s Field compared to other games when that launched. For as fun as King’s Field was, its graphics were bad, even for the time.
It looks equally as good as any other game that released the same year.
Elden Ring is pretty, but this simply isn’t true.
When it comes to applying advanced modeling and rendering tech, fromsoft are amateurs.
Most famously, they have no clue what they are doing with shell texturing.
And the reason Elden Ring was a stuttery mess at launch on windows, was that they couldn’t figure out that doing directx shader compilation on the fly without caching, is a terrible, terrible idea.
I totally agree with you, while Elden ring looks very nice, it is far from state of the art graphics, demons Souls PS5 show what it should look like if it went that way. I am happy they didn’t and instead focus on gameplay and game zones. I really think a lot of game producers go for the extra graphical fidelity instead of focusing on game contents. Dragons dogma 2 recently is stunning production wise, but as much as I adore the game, I wish they went the Elden ring road and had a huge world with tons of stuff to do.
Certainly looks better than the average indie game. And before you come at me for saying that.
Indie is often touted as “better than AAA”. But in order for that to be the case, they need to at least offer something similar first. But most indie games are so far removed from even the average AAA game, that its basically apples and oranges.
AA, or mid-tier, is really where its at. Some of the best games in recent years have all been from the AA space. Even ones that launched rough like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk.
They are still leagues above the average indie game that most people here and “the site that shall not be named” tend to list off as their favourites.
So yes, Elden Ring indeed does have great graphics. Not the most cutting edge, but at least it looks like it belongs in the same generation as its competitors.
The “worse graphics” stands for less photorealism. I could tell you about the times when someone wasn’t pushing graphical limits, it was ditched by games journalists for postponing the time when they can finally put on a VR headset to relive the battle of Normandy in first person.
I will never understand how limited someone’s imagination has to be to require first person and photorealism to be immersed.
To each their own? Like I’m not going to judge someone because they want a very specific piece of media. I want very specific things too. Just because the things I want don’t overlap with the things they want doesn’t me either is absurd.
VR can be great without photorealism too. We can apply OP’s concept to VR games and find numerous fun games that will run well on lower-powered systems. Dragon Fist VR for example - it’s basically Tekken in VR and you fight life-size NPC opponents with your own Kung Fu skills, and the graphics are decent but not photorealistic by any stretch of imagination.
I get that, but a lot of times, people’s main (and seemingly only problem) is that they can’t (instantly) soyface over what they imagine “games as art” will be.
Better graphics means much bigger budget and that means you’ll get writing for lowest common denominator of consumers as well as microtransactions to extract every last cent from them.
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So… Battle bit?
I’d love to upvote this more than once. What’s the point of all those super high quality graphics if the core gameplay hasn’t advanced in the slightest 🙄
AAA studios
Best I can do is predatory monetization and half-baked dlc. Also, now the Eula prohibit you from making unflattering comparisons to that one game Larian made
One of my favourite games was Operation Flash Point Dragon Rising on Xbox 360.
Graphics were terrible then but the gameplay was amazing.
I go back today and still play it, unfortunately the AI hasn’t kept up and you can exploit it rather easily.
As a game dev who’s making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
I mean this with the greatest respect, I’m not making a judgement on the gameplay.
But there’s a whole spectrum between Roblox and the latest Quadruple A™ that all consist of “worse graphics”
As inflation continues to outpace wages, surely more people will start preferring this. $1000 for a gpu is a joke. If I ever develop an indie game my target system is going to be like, a 1.6ghz core i3 and garden variety basic opengl capable graphics card.
this is such a
messamazing collection of ideas!I advertised it in a group of kids I know that love this kind of shit, hope it helps :)
White letters on light brown wood texture (trailer on steam at 0:07). Also, the big “Press E to talk” looks heinous. Plus you don’t have full control over where it appears, at one point in the trailer (0:42), it’s on white background. Going by the trailer, you’re trying to make the game look like the product of a inexperienced amateur, while the game itself is actually a subversive masterpiece, similar to the doom mod “MyHouse.wad”. Hats off to you if you manage to pull it off, but if not, you’ll have fallen flat on your face. Metaphorically, of course.
certain games need the ultra 8k graphics while others are fine with 1080p especially 2d games
I want shorter games, on average. 10-20 hour completion times would be right up my alley.
I blame Far Cry 3 for this proliferation of open world bobbins. So much shit to do and almost none of it is worth doing.
I tried to play borderlands 2 and I was moving happily through the main story when I realized I was way, way under-levelled for the next part. I then realized I needed to go do half a dozen of the 30 or so fetch quests I had ignored up to that point. I did not continue playing Borderlands 2
You were more patient than me. I lasted about an hour of it. I just don’t think FPS gameplay and RPG stats gel at all well. Can’t stand Destiny for the exact same reason.
Call me a traditionalist, but I expect enemies that take bullets to the face to do the decent thing and drop down dead, rather than just take very slightly more damage.
for my own gaming purposes i would agree, but i have seen my son do some very interesting stuff with borderlands 2 and payday 2 builds.
Borderlands is great because you can just break the math. Like these skills and this perk and this gun synergize in such a way that any enemy explodes if you look at them sideways.
I enjoyed Fallout 3. But I agree with the general point. RPG/FPS’ rarely gel.
Fallout 3 isn’t a FPS. It’s got turn-based combat because of VATS, and that’s what makes it good.
So true. Although I didn’t always use VATS, sometimes I enjoyed the options.
That’s why Shadow Warrior 2 was so disappointing after the first reboot. Reboot was an updated fps thay even managed to make the sword melee relevant through the whole game. 2nd one was a bullet spongy mess
Steam says I played that game for 2.5 hours. Conversely, I’ve put over 150 hours into Nightmare Reaper.
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Halo: Infinite was fun the first time around, but on replays, I just want to get to the story events.
I also can’t play the open world parts on my PC. Somehow looks worst any of the retro or retro revival titles I play with single digit frame rates.
lol, replays of any Halo game past Reach? You’re funny. I could barely get through Infinite the first time. At least it was better than 5, but so is a turd sandwich.
I just want games where the devs get to release the game they wanted to make without the studio enshittification microtransactions, always-online single player and so on tagged on to it.
They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.
Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers’ visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.
Activision and Electronics Arts were both started by people who wanted to put game developers first. Gathering of Developers, as well, which was eventually absorbed into Take Two.
It’s not something that seems to last in this industry.
They don’t even get absorbed these days. They get bought and then laid off.
I personally want more physics simulations. I always loved 2D falling sand games where everything reacted with each other and after a long time not having games with those mechanics i found noita and i can’t stop playing it. As much for the game loop then for the game’s falling sand engine.
It’s a cool sandbox with a bunch of different materials you can mess with.
I played around with OEcake and it’s newer form phyziostudiopro before wich seems similar and i greatly enjoyed it! I’ll give this one a try.
There’s just not really anything else quite like Noita, is there. What a great game.
I’m 200 hours in with no wins! It’s the first game that’s really grabbed me since I transitioned away from flatscreen gaming to VR a few years back.
Same. I’m always playing a variety of VR games and noita. But if i could play noita in VR i definitely would XD
I found this guy https://youtube.com/@grantkot?si=lRNFq8OeSnPm8wOO on youtube that has a great looking engine that has already partly implemented VR he says and i can’t wait to see where this goes!Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
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Looks awesome, I’ll keep an eye on that! If you haven’t heard of Cabbibo you should definitely check out his work. This one fits in this thread nicely: Blaarp
Blaarp looks really cool! It makes me think of chroma lab i’m a big fan of these games!
I’m back to say i just played Blarp for like 2 hours and it was really fun! Once i got the flow of things i really enjoyed it. My final score was 47.
Glad you enjoyed it! You must have very good coordination I think my high score is under 30!
Same. I want more physics, more depth to character dialogue, more animations, etc. High res graphics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making games feel immersive. At this point a bunch of older games feel newer or more modern to me because they actually include this stuff.
Started reading your comment and was just about to recommend you play Noita lol.
Numpty Physics, Box Stacker(Fdroid) or Neverputt are all pretty fun.
PowderToy is excellent as mentioned above.
I really enjoyed Osmos back in the day. Like a relaxing Katamari.
Does it ever go on sale on steam? It’s already pretty cheap but i might as well wait for a discount.
No idea, I got it on a Humble Bundle about 15 years ago.
I just came back to say that i’m really enjoying osmos! Some levels are pretty challenging and i love it!
Glad you enjoyed the suggestion!
Currently enjoying a several weeks-long run in Rimworld. Potato graphics go really far is the gameplay design is solid.
Ironically that can be a very hardware demanding game
Rimworld and AI gen are why I need to upgrade my Tower again
Super flashy modern graphics are the RGB keyboard of gaming.
Hey man, I like playing ASCII graphics indies on my 2k gaming tower with its wireless rgb keyboard. I can be gaudy and tasteless abd still mostly avoid graphically intense games
!patientgamers would agree and so do I
Yup, most of the games I play are either indies or older games. I don’t care much about graphics, I care about gameplay and story, and modern AAA games often lack in both.
Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn’t be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it’s supposed to look like.
This is how that “Doom 3 on a floppy disk” game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn’t look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.
You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that’s how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don’t hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.
How do you think modern games are made? Procedural generation is used all over the place to create materials and entire landscapes.
Yeah graphics are nice to have, but sometimes I want to game on a small and light laptop like I don’t need revolutionary HD high quality all the time
Art Style > Graphics. Kingdom Hearts (2002) looks wildly better GTA: San Andreas (2004) and Fallout 3 (2008).
Fallout 3 looks like dog shit man. It has since day 1. It’s one of my favorite games and I have 100% on it, but it has never looked good.
Every bethesda game looks like dogshit.
San Andreas is my favourite GTA but man that game wasn’t good looking at all even at launch on PC
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