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.
Graphics are important. Polygon count is not. There is no real value in being able to see each individual eyelash, but I also don’t think there’s much benefit to making every game look like the original Lode Runner.
Wouldn’t it save data power? I would imagine that a game with the simpler visuals from the golden age of video games would cost a machine less bytes to perform.
It depends on a lot of factors. Minecraft, despite its signature simplistic artstyle, takes a surprising amount of CPU power to run - a lot more so if you run mods. Even a Minecraft server, which doesn’t render graphics at all, takes a beefy machine and a lot of RAM.
It’s as much about graphical fidelity as it is quality of code, and unfortunately, there are a lot of game studios that don’t seem especially bothered about optimising their games. To the extent that you can fill, say, an Xbox’s hard drive with only two or three AAA games.
All that said, you’re right in that simpler graphics in general mean less work for the graphics card to do. Just that it’s not the only factor.
I feel like people who talk about graphics fundamentally misunderstand what they themselves crave.
People want things that are nice to look at. Some artstyles require more computation than others, but ultimately all of gaming is art, and all of art is a conjuring trick, much like Cinema, how something is accomplished or how “believable” it looks is secondary to how invested you are in what you are consuming, yanno?
I do however have personal opinions, and my personal opinion is that gaming peaked during the PS2/GameCube/Xbox years. Hardware was just about good enough that pretty much anything developers wanted to make, they could achieve. Nothing looked like real life, sure, but it looked good enough. And the more detail you are throwing at the screen, the more expensive it is to make. So back then we had a lot of mid-budget games. That had resources not available to modern Indie studios to do ambitious things, but were also not these insane investments that had to please every executive under the sun and monetise everything in order to break even.
The perfect balance between niceness and feasibility.
You wouldn’t be wrong about games peaking in the PS2 years, in fact the PS3 specifically made itself backward compatible with the PS1 and not the PS2 because it would’ve given the PS2 an unwanted W in how utterly overshadowing it was.
The move to “HD” when the PS3/360 were dominant was the death knell of hundreds of mid-sized studios, and gaming never really recovered from it.
Photo realism with no artistic direction is pointless.
And people wonder why Wind Waker did so well compared to Twilight Princess.
As someone else pointed out, that is false.
What IS true is that Wind Waker seems to generally be remembered more fondly than Twilight Princess. Plus it aged much better.
I’m not saying it did better than Twilight Princess, just that they’re comparable.
Twilight princess had double the global sales of WW though lol
Possibly because one was on a console that sold “okay”, and the other was on one of the biggest-selling systems of all time
Not unlikely. Still means TP was better commercially than WW. I love them both
Personally, I’ve never been particularly wowed by good graphics. I’m perfectly happy to play a game with crunchy graphics from decades ago if the gameplay is fun, or a modern indie title with low poly or pixel art graphics. There are plenty of great games out there where the graphics are nothing special.
Do you use an emulator or do you do it the old fashioned way?
Both, but mainly I play PC games bought on Steam, not emulated console games.
It’s becoming ever more obvious as graphics improve that it doesn’t really matter what the game looks like as long as the game is fun.
Companies better have a damn good reason to spend production resources on high end graphics given how little they matter compared with thematic harmony, creativity and originality.
At this point probably to look like they can compete with other games, which might explain the fact nobody complains indie games seem primitive.
I’m with you. I think “peak graphics” for me was around XBox 360. I’d much rather have resources used for better gameplay, larger worlds, more expansive story, etc. Also, just less resource usage in general; I stopped PC gaming forever ago because I got sick of chasing the GPU dragon.
Not sure I’d want to go all the way back to 8-bit, but somewhere between there and XB360 would be fine. That said, I do like seeing new “retro” games that are 8-bit era appropriate.
Somewhere between 8-bit and XB360 would be PS1.
I dislike PS1 graphics. Too many games use 3D graphics for no reason, and they used dark and muted colours to be “realistic”.
N64 games are usually more colourful and more pleasing, even though they lack texture.
XB360 had enough power to finally show 3D without feeling “trying too hard”.
I meant it as more of a range than a hard point on a line, lol.
But yeah, PS1 games are pretty rough to look at.
Wait, was Pokémon Red/Blue 8-bit or 16-bit? You got me second-guessing now.
8-bit. They were released for the original Gameboy.
“Function over form” is a mantra I live by. This is reflected in the software I use/make, as well as the games I play.
What software do you make?
Nothing noteworthy. Mostly just utility stuff that I use myself, or work related stuff. A typical example is a self-test script that I wrote in perl because I’m lazy, and somehow it became a company standard and made it’s way into written procedures - It just checks various services and misc network stuff, and let’s you know if there’s something obviously wrong happening.
I care about art direction. Graphical capability can give digital artists more freedom especially for photorealistic styles. But few games actually make good use of such artistic freedom.
My favourite 3D game graphics is Super Mario Galaxy. Other than that I mostly prefer game graphics from 16-bit consoles.
i think stardew valley is itself proof that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play.
Stardew looks fantastic, what are you saying?
that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play
They’re not, but your example is a game with detailed graphics…
yep, that is an interesting opinion on graphics.
…It’s not really an opinion, but okay
whatever floats your boat semantic master
I’m on the same boat. Photorealism only gets you so far, and pixel-art like graphics have their own charm. .
I care – all else held equal, I’d rather have snazzier graphics – but I feel like there’s pretty strongly diminishing returns.
And because resources are finite, all else isn’t held equal. You’re giving up time spent working on gameplay or whatever to stick fancier graphic assets in.
Some of my favorite games don’t have much by way of graphics.
I do kind of wish that I could get upscaled versions of a number of games that I enjoy with low-resolution pixel graphics, though – I’d like “high-resolution DLC” to be a thing for successful games like that. Think Caves of Qud or something like that. IIRC Cave Story did that, along with a handful of other games. Would like to have higher-res versions of Balatro. Same for Noita, though there I guess the resolution hooks into the game mechanics, so have to be careful how to deal with that.
I’ve also seen some games with untextured polygons that have worked out pretty well. Star Fox for the Super Nintendo and Avara and Flying Nightmares for the classic Mac came from an era when texturing wasn’t always possible. Carrier Command 2 is much newer, and uses only limited texturing.
Minecraft went a long way with very technically-limited graphics.
There are a lot of good roguelikes that just use text.
And because resources are finite, all else isn’t held equal. You’re giving up time spent working on gameplay or whatever to stick fancier graphic assets in.
That’s not how game design works. The people who work on the gameplay and level design and dialog are not the same people who work on the graphics. Sure, making the game prettier takes more time, but it has no effect on how long the rest of the game takes to be built. And lower-quality assets can be used in the interim for things like scripting animations, with higher quality assets swapped in later.
yeah, but I assume you are a terminal nerd and not a normie. I kinda feel same like you however I do so because I can’t afford a graphic card. I wonder if someone has already made a text based open world game.
plus it also depends on your age. I assume you are a old and don’t like new stuff. but graphics has it’s own place. eg, you can play plain minecraft and you play minecraft with realistic graphics mod. you will find a huge difference.
I’m 24 and do like new stuff, I just think of visual appeal as secondary. Imagine if the same processing power for one 3D Pokémon world powered all the Pokémon worlds in two dimensions.
2D Pokemon games are really great. I used to play Pokemon firered in a potato mobile phone for hours and hours. even though It didn’t have great graphics it was fun. I agree with you that some games can be really good in 2D too. however modern games like COD and GOW has their own place.
TIL you can play Pokémon Firered on a phone.
Oh man, you are gonna love emulators.
I have one, just didn’t know any were phone-compatible like that.
Speaking as a story-heavy RPG enthusiast, so my focus is more on story-telling and exploration. I don’t think it’s the graphics that’s holding back the exploration potential, but rather the complexity of actually creating huge game worlds. You tend to end up with either a procedural generated world without a lot of cohesion, or one that’s a mile wide but an inch deep in interactivity.
Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a hugely complex and reactive game world, but it’s locations and the way you are allowed to explore them are reduced to three linear chapters. Even if you switched to, say Baldur’s Gate 2 era graphics, it would still not be possible to create a game in a single huge explorable world with the same level of complexity and story telling.Though I’m definitely with you on scaling down the graphics in exchange for richer and more interactive worlds, I do think there’s a hard limit on how much better those worlds would get.
Don’t forget though there’s more than one way to make interactivity. The original Legend of Zelda was the 8-bit equivalent of Breath of the Wild and offered a lot of intrigue in each stage when it came to where to go next by having the right cause and effect system.
I only care so far as if they can make it look good, I’d like it to.
My favorite game of all time is Dwarf Fortress. But if someone made the exact same game but with modern 3D graphics, I’d be more likely to play the one that looks nice.
Nobody is making games like that, though. Most modern games have less than half of the depth in mechanics of games I grew up with in the 90’s in favor of better graphics and larger worlds. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the kind of game I wanna see and it’s popularity and why it got so popular show that people want games of the mid to late 90’s more than they want modern games that only have great graphics going for them; BG3 takes the same design ideas from back then and just makes it prettier to look at.
