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
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.
Exactly. If my graphics card is going to be chugging, I’d rather it be because of the sheer amount of stuff to interact with in an area, rather than a beautiful but vapid landscape
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.
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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Trepang2 looks amazing and it was made by like five people. I think a lot of these big budget games waste a ton of money on details that have seriously diminishing returns.
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.
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
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.
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.
Halo infinite is the first Halo that I only played once.
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.
My scalding hot take is that 5 is a more fun game than Infinite. 5 looked like shit and had an awful story, but at least the big cinematic moments still felt like Halo. Infinite just bored me and felt hollow.
The gameplay in 5 is actually really good. The set piece battles are very replayable. The biggest issue for me the the creeping Live Service shit, the “Cortana bad” story and the flat out false advertisement. The game only fans seem to think you need to read the books for it to make sense, but I’ve read the books and it wasn’t any better. Wish they made a spinoff game of Sangheili “Blooding Wars”. Those were the peak levels.
Halo 4 has a solid story and the campaign played fine, but the multi player at launch was bad. The MCC version actually fixed a lot of the issues I had though.
By Halo Infinite, including Halo Wars 2, we’ve had three games in a row that ditched the Big Bad from the previous game because the devs had a knee jerk response to loud fans and that AAA studios have a revolving door for upper staff. I’ve bailed on the franchise because I don’t think I’ll ever get a satisfying conclusion to The Endless story. Or any conclusion even.
We share the same opinion exactly. I completely agree with your point about the books. I’ve read every book, comic, etc and that game still made no sense.
I also agree about the gameplay. Warzone was probably some of the most fun I’ve had in a Halo. I never got good enough for regular slayer ranked though so I can’t comment there.
4 is my second favorite campaign for story, but I am a book fan so I may be biased.
Infinite lacking the set pieces is what really killed it for me. Where’s boarding a scarab? Where’s giving the covenant back their bomb? Where’s tank beats everything? Where’s the death star trench run while the best song ever blasts in your ears and the Earth hangs over you to show you what happens if you fail? Where’s jumping down an unfolding Guardian?
The open world is why we couldn’t have those set pieces in Infinite because approaching from any angle makes them basically impossible to choreograph well.
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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.
But never ships clientside.
These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.
You propose an interesting approach. I just wonder how the individual streaks of different rust interact with typical graphics pipelines. You can certainly ship a generator, but then for rasterizing the image the texture still has to be generated and shipped off to GPU memory to be used in shaders, won’t you blow through VRAM limits or shader cache limits by having no texture reuse anywhere?
Any game with texture pop-in is already handling more data than you have space. “Rage” famously had unique textures across the entire world… and infamously streamed them from DVD, with the dumbest logic for loading and unloading. You could wait for everything to load, turn around, and it would all be blurry again.
Anyway if you’re rendering ten zillion copies of something way out in the distance, those can all be the same. It will not matter whether they’re high-res or unique when they’re eight pixels across. As Nvidia said: if you’re not cheating, you’re just not trying.
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So… Battle bit?
July and August were so fun
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”
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.
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 :)
certain games need the ultra 8k graphics while others are fine with 1080p especially 2d games
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
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’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.
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!
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!
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.
Numpty Physics, Box Stacker(Fdroid) or Neverputt are all pretty fun.
PowderToy is excellent as mentioned above.
Started reading your comment and was just about to recommend you play Noita lol.
I really thought that’s where it was all headed. After the release of battlefield bad company, where they introduced a game engine that can destroy whole buildings, I really had hope for the future.
I imagined games where you can just build and destroy entire cities.
!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.
thanks one problem with lemmy is that you gotta remember which instance is bussin if you wanna link
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.
Fo76 looks amazing on max settings and nvidia upscaling. It still has ugly elements but overall I made so many screenshots the only other game I made this many screenshots is modded Skyrim.
I will link one later actually to demonstrate it
No it doesnt. It looks like an upscaled 2003 game. Hell, Starfield also looks like its from 2010. Plays like it too
It’s just like your opinion man
Because you’re playing the game wrong You’re supposed to install at least 300 mods first /s
Unironically what they say
not skyrim. or fallout 4. beautiful landscapes everywhere
Depends on the genere. I think a very immersive game like Metro Exodus benefits a lot from its graphics and wouldn’t work quite as well without them.
Obligatory: Starsector
Also Rimworld, Project Zomboid, Prison Architect, Factorio… basically if you like sandbox games, there’s a ton out there.
Kerbal Space Program, Derail Valley, Nucleares, …
When thinking of space games with limited graphics, the first thing that comes to mind is ASCII Sector.
But the Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters (or whatever it’s name is now) gets my strongest recommendation. And Starsector looks inspired by it, so I’ll have a look!
starsector deserves so much more popularity. 10/10 would cause the collapse of civilization using hyperillegal ai cores that accelerated the collapse in the first place while getting blackmailed by those self same ai cores again
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