Am I the only one who doesn't really care about graphics?
Am I the only one who doesn't really care about graphics?
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.
Photo realism with no artistic direction is pointless.
Say that in a flight simulator forum. ;)
I know it's mostly in jest but I can't help replying lol.
I am a Euro Truck Simulator 2 enjoyer. Simulators are kind of another beast but I think "be as close to real life" can be a considered an artistic direction. It's bad when a game isn't being a simulation but pushing polygon count for its sake.
We probably can consider simulators as edge cases I guess lol.
And people wonder why Wind Waker did so well compared to Twilight Princess.
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 do care about art direction, I just care so much more about the world in the game that if whole parts of the in-game world can come at the same processing cost as a little realism, I'd choose more chunks of the world.
I'm on the same boat. Photorealism only gets you so far, and pixel-art like graphics have their own charm. .
That and it doesn't effect gameplay quality. A fun enough game retains its addictiveness no matter how real the visuals look.
i think stardew valley is itself proof that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play.
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.
"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.
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'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".
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.
Too realistic graphics take me out of the game, are visually overwhelming, and make it hard to see certain important details.
If I have to pick up a quest item, I don't want it's stone texture blending into the dirt floor. I want it highlighted so I can see the damn thing is interactable.
Reading this, I realize I'm surprised more games don't have colourblind accommodation.
I want a Fun game. Art (graphics) can help and be supplementary towards making a game fun, but it is not the end all be all. Some fun games I've played use intentionally shitty graphics to add to it, other games are so unfun because all they do is try to wow you with the images.
I've found lately the indie Dev sphere has been more focused on fun games and AAA studios have more focused on graphics alone. I think this mostly happened because early on when (video) games where becoming popularized hardware was increasing at such a rapid pace and graphics genuinely could be made better, not necessarily as just a stylistic choice. You could show off the new hardware capabilities with good story for more appeal. This also made them lazier over the years as those big hardware and software leap allowed them to focus on the consumer draw utilizing showcase imagry over story. As hardware advances slowed and graphic leaps became smaller the gains just aren't there. And you've left many consumers with nostalgia over the fight for when graphic improvements meant something, in a time when good story/gameplay was also pretty necessary.
On the bright side, games with intentionally shitty graphics are very memeable, especially Undertale.
Some fun games I’ve played use intentionally shitty graphics to add to it
If it adds to the experience, wouldn't the graphics then be good?
The graphics are good in the artistic sense, but not in terms of what's considered conventionally good graphics. Zelda BotW would be conventionally good graphics, as that's what would make most people think of it as visually appealing and therefore enjoyable. Undertale, a great example, does not.have conventionally good graphics but the total theme and portrayal makes the non-cenventional good.
Most of what I was speaking to was the use of conventionally good graphics at the expense of story or enjoyment factor of the game/gameplay itself
You should play Nethack
I can attest to how neat Nethack is.
While I agree with the OP, I don’t like dungeon crawlers due to the way you lose several hours of Progress for a simple mistake.
But that is why I play NetHack. It's like an endurance test
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 care about the art on an individual level and as a whole when compared to how it adds to the game. Applying a strict criteria of detail and other metrics is pointless when games are meant to be works of art and passion. Its too subjective to judge it. Like judging Salt & Sanctuary solely on its Dishwasher inspired art would be a misstep. The art adds to the bleakness of the world while also maintaining the studio's style
I remember when Wind Waker first came out, the graphics were something everyone complained about, and now two decades later, everyone misses that style of visual representation.
A game can only give you so many hours before it becomes boring. Sandbox games aside, most are done after 100 to 200 hours. More content wouldn't really revive them as you already know the gameplay loop.
Graphics isn't as important as art style, however I'd rather play a game with realistic graphics but lack of distinguishing art direction, than one with art direction but overall being too basic with their graphics. Graphics is a huge part of immersion to me.
I play a lot of indie games with poor graphics. Best example Minecraft, but when I can install higher resolution textures, realistic lighting and animated foliage, it is eye candy. I can just stand there and look at the beautiful world and relax. I do need zero gameplay at this point and am still entertained.
Gameplay is overrated, give me pretty graphics. Be it realistic or not.
Very interesting. Does story come into it at all for you? Audio?
Sometimes it feels like video games are actually ten different mediums that we lump together for no real reason.
Yes, audio is important too. I've played games that had almost no graphics but nice music that pulled me in. I'm a bit strange on even overlooking flaws, as long as the music is fantastic.
In my eyes games are the peak of art. They combine clever game design, mechanics, image, physics, story, music and sound and more.
I enjoy good stories, I'm just rarely surprised by a twist or enjoy following long expositions. I prefer "show, don't tell". I prefer open world sandbox games. The more details, the more graphics, the better. I can create my own story if I want to.
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.
Balatro is a perfect example of a game that I don't think would benefit at all from better graphics. It's the gameplay that matters.
Same. Most of the games I like are enjoyable due to the game mechanics. I can attest a Pokémon game for example could even be HTML (the old, old Pokémon MMORPG's were like this) and still be enjoyable, since it's at heart about strategy (hence why the TCG exists).
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.
Sure, the same people can't work on the different aspects, but budget for more designers who spend longer making more detailed graphics could be spent on other departments that do affect gameplay.
You could hire more game devs if that money wasn't spent on excessive prettiness.
And keep in mind, there's as much cost in an organization for management overhead, if not more.
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.
You are not alone. I do have a lower threshold that is above 8 bit, but I want enough of a difference from real life that I don't constantly think I'm watching a real person through the eyes of a drone.
I think there are possibilities for games that are 8bit, depending on what the game style is. Some simple games and side scrollers wouldn't need to be much higher that that.
Edit: but anything that has the depth as part of the gameplay should have at least PS2 level graphics. In driving games, first person shooters, open world games need that clarity to see where I'm going and what I can explore over there
So something like Wind Waker?
Don't feel bad, I don't even care about video games
What's your favorite one you've played?
I don't have one, I've literally played 2-3 games in the past 20 years
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.
I think I may have played Dwarf Fortress at one point. It reminds me a lot of the tycoon games. I had as much fun with those as, say, Minecraft. Literally the same idea but one is 2D, goes to show not everyones focuses on dimensions.
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.
PS3 had backwards compatibility with PS2 for the first couple of hardware revisions, it was removed later.
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.
I really don’t game. And so yeah. It is odd for me as when I look for a laptop, for example, I want a 16 inch, without a gpu. I do text and VNC. Please sir, may I have more screen?
Ironically advanced graphics processing is likely what shortened the life of my last device.
sounds like PC gamers should fire up an Amiga emulator and learn what gameplay could be.
I do this sometimes. Emulators are the best. I wish game companies would use them as a cue to revive the concept of having events around games they consider far in the past.
I say it always add to the experience. On skill based game I couldn't care less, but it is always better if there is better graphics.
Not always. Did you know that Final Fantasy VI had a mobile version with much higher resolution graphics? SquareEnix took it down and released the pixel remaster instead, which matches the original low-resolution graphics closely.
That's just one of the many examples when "better graphics" isn't always better.
When you say graphics...
I'm my opinion games, like movies or comics are a form of medium for sharing ideas, feelings, escapism or enjoyment. Graphics can be good without being realistic, I think it's art not realism that matter so we may have to have a semantic argument about the terms 'graphics'. We all remember those 8 bit games that brought us joy. Just finished playing Dave the Diver, a modern game in pixel at form, which conveyed so much feeling and care that I was moved by so much of it.
You're not the only one, realise that it's just a means of covering thought or feeling and worry less about the realism.
I thought graphics meant anything that has to do with visual representation. Like when I look at the graphics for Pokémon Gold/Silver versus the graphics for Pokémon Heartgold/Soulsilver, I think of the complexity.
Ghost Recon, Ravenfield, Battlebit etc are shooters with simple graphics. Ghost Recon was from constraints of its time (2001 release) but Ravenfield and Battlebit could be way more photorealistic (like Squad) but chose not to. And I like that. In shooters you want good visuals if you can but having consistent performance is a bigger deal than some other games. I don't care about frame rate stutters in a turn based game like X-Com for example.
Speaking of turn based, one of the graphically simplest games I've playes recently is Armored Commander II. It is very very basic graphically (think dwarf fortress or intellivision) and I shit you not it is more immersive than it has any right to. The graphics and display info gives you juuuust enough info to set your imagination into overdrive to fill in the rest.
When your Sherman is almost out of ammo, bogged down in a muddy field and taking fire from enemy tanks in a nearby farm the actual graphics don't really matter so much
While there are many fans of pixel art and low poly 3D, majority of gamers actually want high fidelity graphics. There are very few indie success stories with low quality VFX like Stardew Valley and pretty much no AAA games like that. Games like No Man's Sky won't be such hits if they were made in pixel art.
The reality is that it's not that games with good graphics are bad, it's that you can't afford RTX4090 and a QD OLED 4K monitor. There are plenty of great games with awesome graphics, it's time for you to upgrade.
It's not that I don't care at all about visuals, but I look at a machine like the Nintendo Switch, which currently hosts a number of Pokemon games in complete 3D and two enormous open world Zelda games, and I think how cool it would be if the graphics went back to 8-bit (like they were for the first Zelda and Pokemon games) and they used all that data to make a bigger world, which could now be literally a hundred times larger, and while they were at it maybe put in MMORPG functionality. If they could replicate the whole country of Denmark in a Minecraft server, they could replicate the whole world in something that sacrificed some of the visual advancements. It feels weird we're increasing our capacity for data power only to waste it all more and more as it progresses.
Again, No Man's Sky is an example where nothing is sacrificed.
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 was working on a text based open world game but it was kind of terrible so I stopped working on it. I should redo it but better some day.
Here it is but be warned it is not well made https://gitlab.com/TurboWafflz/terminalcraft
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.