Insiders say cutting-edge graphics are too costly for AAA games

Then stop making games with cutting edge graphics. I just want to play it on a steamdeck anyway.

Shooters with beard hair that waves in the wind but gunplay that sucks and broken physics.

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).

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

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.

Industry Crysis you say?

Watch them start selling ray tracing as dlc 😂

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

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?

you can make the most beautiful cake and its worth nothing if there is just sawdust inside

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

The graphics are too expensive for AAA games? AAA means they are throwing the highest category budget for developing a game. And they ONLY invest in graphics, discarding the rest like a proper story (if any), decent characters, bug fixing, balancing, etc. Now they create junk only 1% of players with a 4090 can run somewhay decently on medium settings with 30fps average and loads of framedrops.

Wow guys, amazing, thanks I guess, this costed me 80 euros. Can't you tone down the graphics by at least 60% and focus on the "game" part of the game instead?

Graphics are not everything, for me it's game-play first. I'm playing Carrier Command 2 now for a month straight and it has mediocre pixel and low-poly graphics, but the immersion is fantastic. It's a time sink and I forget when I should quit playing it. Hyper realistic graphics have their audience, but now they're at the point where a little improvement in graphics has diminishing returns, hence the high cost.

Hardware to run them is getting too costly for consumers. I think there is a solution everyone can be happy with somewhere.

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.

Maybe they'd do better if they tried selling games instead of games as a service and stores with a game attached.

The NYT article doesn't mention that new AAA console games often cost $70. I have not bought a brand new game in years because I just can't justify that cost. I have such a huge backlog between PS4 and PC, that there is just no reason to buy new games

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.

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

I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.

On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don't think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.

People still love cult movies and other classics from 100 to 50 years ago, with handcrafted or minimal budget special effects, no CGI. It's because it's an entire art form and it can't just be reduced solely to aesthetic appeal. That kind of approach is just a result of the commodification of art. You want to reduce a successful work of art to some quantifiable metric besides popularity/sales, so that you can create repeatable processes around producing it and selling it, and optimize them for cost, but art defies quantification. Even just basic "enjoyable gameplay" defies that.

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.

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.

People care about graphics.
But they care about other things more
So the graphics need to be in service to something.

Imo the problem is that studios have become risk adverse because their budget is so big, so they pick an already popular IP, choose a marketable aspect of that IP, and spend that fortune turning the dial of that aspect up to 11.

Like X but bigger map
Like Y but more playable characters
Like Z but better graphics
Etc
But none of the time actually innovating any new player experience.

And players are finally getting fed up with playing the same handful of AAA game experiences again and again with different titles.

Graphics just happens to be the marketable attribute they like to crank most often

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.

that's fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it'll run fine even without upscaling.

[…], particularly when end users tend to despise particularly greedy live service business models.

Have you considered making your business models … not particularly greedy?

There have been massive diminishing returns on graphical quality vs. hardware and developer requirements since the PS3 era.

I will always put an emphasis on art style and gameplay over trend-chasing and what takes the most computing power.

Imho, graphics don't make the game. There are people here still playing doom and portal. Even games like Terraria aren't too demanding. You don't need amazing graphics.

I'm also going to add my stone to the pile here and point out that this hyperfixation on more and more "graphics" usually results in it ultimately being impossible to actually see what the fuck is happening on the screen.

You are a realistic barbarian dude who is brown, and wearing brown. standing in a realistic landscape which is brown, against a realistic highly textured and bump mapped bunch of trees which are brown, with leaves that are waving around in all directions realistically and are brown, trying to dodge arrows (which are brown) raining on you from the half dozen hairy orcs in the distance, who are also brown. And about nine pixels tall, and hidden in the bushes. Which are brown. And if this isn't happening verbatim (or even if it is), 2/3 of the screen is also covered by a zillion glowy particle effects, motion blur, and bloom, which are the only colorful parts of the image but still add up to you not being able to actually see jack shit out of what's important.

Bonus points if this also requires near frame-perfect inputs to handle, and you have half a second of input lag in between all the shit your console is trying to render plus the two or three frames eaten by postprocessing to make it "look pretty."

Yeah, fuck all that.

A major part of game deign that everyone seems to forget a lot these days in the name of making everything realistic and/or extra graphicy is clearly communicating to the player just what the hell is going on. Older games, I find, often did a significantly better job of this.

Insiders, outsiders, everyone knows at this point.

You can’t make these insanely open world games with hyper realistic graphics on a reasonable budget or in a reasonable amount of time. Games take too long and cost too much to make. Too many eggs in the basket.

I remember being struck playing TLOU2 by just how damn long it is. I would’ve been happy with half the playtime and paid the same price.

bruh Im out here still playing Beyond Oasis. Just make a good fucking game and I'll play it for 30 years. I dont think people making games actually listen to people playing games.

Mufasa wouldn't have been a bad movie if they just sprang for animation, and voice actors who even attempt to sound like the characters they're playing.

I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…

Oh these fuckers.

So now the horribly expensive games with micro transactions isn't enough for them? Well of course.

Nothing is ever enough for them.

Fucking are we gonna have to do a violent armed socialist revolution just to checks notes keep having graphics in games we have to pay an arm and a leg for?

The opposite issue that Gamefreak has...

Personally, I think new games DO NOT need to surpass Monster Hunter: World and GTA 5. These games still look great to me. I can't imagine most people wanting 4K monitors and the PC parts required to run it. A game running on a good 1440p preset looks fantastic anyways.

Fuck cutting-edge graphics

Anno 1800 looks great, better than all the previous titles and is definitely a plus

Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don't exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.

I guess normies still equate graphic quality with overall game quality, so that's why there's such a big emphasis on photorrealism for many AAA games. An old colleague from university, ~2010, only liked to play the shiniest, "best looking" stuff and scoffed at 2D games, "we're way past super nintendos".

Here's a thought. Maybe don't make every game have the same, hyper realistic artstyle, and just make a game that fits its theme

They pushed this on us so they can make us buy new video cards every other year.

Is this article from a decade ago when the Nintendo Wii proved that graphics don't mean shit if the gameplay sucks?

Do we need cutting-edge tables, cutting-edge water pipes, cutting-edge paintings, cutting-edge windows, cutting-edge power generators even?

That kind of competition really is unhealthy.

If not for this bullshit, we'd have a better choice of personal computer hardware and operating systems. We wouldn't have a lot of what they call enshittification.

What I don't understand is where the wide masses of normies got all this progress-signaling? I first sat behind a PC as a kid, it was DOS, someone showed me how to navigate directories, but I don't remember any specifics. Then Windows 98 at home. Then we got a new PC and there was Windows 2000 on it. I didn't like any Windows after it, but XP was fine.

That was me, like, being 9? I understood a bit more about computers than the average normie since then.

So - why did that me never have this progress-signaling, idea that buying something "cutting-edge" they don't understand somehow makes sense, but the whole crowd of people not knowing what a transistor is would apparently care so much for progress and cutting-edge?

I just don't understand. What do people knowing nothing about certain industry would get from caring about its development?