There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.
Whoosh.
We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)
There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.
Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.
Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.
Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.
Also, as others have pointed out, it’s capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn’t get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn’t give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said “we want our money back… now.” It’s a choice to release too early.
…but on the other hand it’s also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.
I honestly feel like this with Genshin Impact. It looks absolutely breathtaking and in 20 years it will still be beautiful. It runs on a damn potato. I personally like the lighting in a lot of scenes way better than the lighting in some titles that have path tracing.
I have always liked art styles in games better than realism.
In what world does Genshin runs well on a potato? Unless you have a different definition of potato than me. My Galaxy S10e can barely play the game, and it’s not even slow enough to be called a potato
Might be talking within the context of PC gaming, where even a relative potato will beat the performance of a flagship phone.
Probably is, but I get why the other fella was confused by this.
Until right this moment I was under the impression that Genshin was literally just a phone game. Looks like I was wrong.
Haha, opposite experience for me! I don’t play it but know some people that do, and I only ever heard about them playing it on their PCs, so it was their comment that made me realize it was also available on phones :P
Yeah i was talking about pc haha. I don’t keep very up to date with phones and don’t know much about their performance.
Sure, but I’m still going to say “fuck mihoyo”
Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is exactly the kind of product that is going to keep driving the realistic approach. It’s four years later now and the game’s visuals are still state-of-the-art in many areas. Even after earning as much backlash on release as any game in recent memory, it was a massively profitable project in the end.
This is why Sony, Microsoft, and the big third parties like Ubisoft keep taking shots in this realm.
Just wanna throw Windwaker into the examples of highly stylized art style games that aged great.
Borderlands 1 and 2 still look great in comparison to a lot of games that came out around the same time. The stylized cel-shaded textures help hide the lower-poly environments and really make the world stand out. Most games at the time were trying to go for a “realistic” look that just resulted in bland brown and gray environments that look terrible.
Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.
I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.
I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.
I mean, look at Nintendo. Obviously aggressive legal tactics aside, they make some damn fun games because they know that gameplay matters more than graphics.
Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.
The few times they’ve pursued more gritty realism (Twilight Princess, for example) are all the times that haven’t aged as well.
Twilight Princess came out after Wind Waker, but Wind Waker obviously aged far better.
This is a good example. The cartoony graphics work well for Nintendo because it fits their hardware better as well.
For my personal example I can still play Starfox64 easily, but Goldeneye (one of my favorite childhood games) literally gives me a headache to look at. Goldeneye was going for a more realistic look on the engine of the time and aged terribly. Starfox is all big bright cartoon designs.
Oh don’t dismiss that they’re also graphics and programming wizards. They don’t work with the cutting edge, but they run circles around anyone on the lower end, making games look and run better on potato hardware is no easy feat.
I’d argue the optimization required to make something like that happen is significantly more skillful than all of the crap AAA stuff that takes 250gb and requires shader compilations every boot.
What a group of Wizards. Xenoblade games are great jrpgs but i just cant get over how bad they look at times and performance is often times horrendous. This is only good as long as you don’t care.
I blame Toyota for how poorly my Chevy ran.
Xenoblade
The Xenoblade series is made by a developer that is owned by Nintendo. If Nintendo doesn’t want people to rag on their products, they should make them better.
Your ability to connect disconnected concepts is legendary. Good luck with your life lol
Does Microsoft make Halo? Halo’s developer is owned by Microsoft, just as Xenoblade’s developer is owned by Nintendo.
They call this design philosophy, “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.” Basically, “using old tech we understand very well in new and innovative ways.” For example, they were slower to get their 16-bit console to market, but while working on it, they used their expertise in 8-bit consoles to release the first cartridge-based handheld system.
I have spent years trying to find a Super Mario World or Super Mario Galaxy feel to games. I am not looking for photo realistic. I am looking for a game.
Spyro remasters?
Breath of the wild is a technical masterpiece though. The way that they’ve managed to do lights, shadows, LODs, distant effects. And they’ve managed to add even more to ToTK, plus physics based audio, plus physics objects interacting better than any modern AAA game on “big” consoles. They squeezed every last bit of performance that switch could provide to make these games look as good as humanly possible.
They work with what they have in terms of hardware, and care a lot about gameplay, but they also do invest heavily into graphics and other technical aspects of their games.
Constant framerate drops is not what I would call squeezing every last drop of performance humanly possible
Sound design > Graphics
The worst thing is that some brilliant sound design is held back by some folks who will buy a top of the line video card but some cheap shitty headphones.
Cheap shitty headphones, when the Koss KSC75 exist for $20 and sound better than anything I had bought before. I have better headphones now, but $20 is $20, and I still like how small they are. Despite having HD600s and HE1000s, they’re still my go-to for the average use case.
EDIT: Here’s a list of headphones worse than $20 funny disc with ear clip:
All Bluetooth headphones (and your $500 AirPods Max)
All gaming headsets
All in-store headphones that aren’t that one set of Audio-Technicas
In other words, 100% of what the average consumer buys. Get them in on this simple trick.
In my experience it’s both cheap shitty headset and expensive shitty headset. The arguments is always wireless + mic so people go and spend ridiculous money on something that can be done better with a cheap good headphones like the Koss + dedicated mic that may not be as convenient to use but will sound much better.
Still, good sound design may be enjoyed on a shitty headset, it’s just that good audio can add more to gameplay than just graphics. Like for example walking in the main HUB area in Starfield is like soul numbingly hilarious… it does not feel alive at all even when you see NPCs walking around all the time.
If you like sound design, the sound design in Don’t Starve is by far the best ive ever heard. It is the game that convinced me of your point.
Well, everyone has their priorities. The problem is that even the people, who do value realistic graphics the most, are not captured by new AAA games.
- FPS
Story goes somewhere below Replay value, and controls go to number one. Gameplay and controls are pretty much interchangable unless you want a cinema simulator.
Add sound design as number two above music as number three and then the list is done.
Disagree, story is definitely more important than replayability for me.
All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope. But to even have replayability as a category is pretty pointless.
All other factors lead to replayability if you go by the order I suggested. Having a set story limits replayability, so that tracks for you.
All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope.
Sure, if your metric is hours of gameplay per dollar spent. But that’s no way to rate a video game if you ask me.
For instance I would rate The Talos Principle or Disco Elysium as much better games than, say, World of Warcraft, despite the fact that I played wow much more than the former two. But the story of those two games are just far more interesting and the games have left a much more impactful, lasting impression on me even though I don’t play them any more.
A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.
Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that’s achievable plays into what the design may be, although it’s not a direct correlation.
I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That’s probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.
My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don’t look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.
Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.
I don’t need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character’s face. I don’t need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won’t notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or “play” sections that may as well be cutscenes.
I don’t want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.
This is my current addiction. No need graphix.
Live and drink!
Your thirst is mine, my water is yours
HA! Now you have to come adventure with me if I can afford the rep loss!
I hope you like hauling bags of warm static~
🥺
seriously though AWESOME game, I must have 500+ hours in it at this point
Tried it about 10+ times, but I suck at it too much.
Hell yea
What is this?
Caves of Qud
This author has no fucking clue that the indie gaming industry exists.
Like Balatro… you know, the fucking Indie Game of the Year, that was also nominated for Best Game of the Year at the Game Awards.
Localthunk was able to build this in Lua… WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.
Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.
How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in
The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)
This article wasn’t about indie games.
Ignoring indie games here is ignoring the answer to the entire premise. It’s part of the equation.
It would be like complaining that there’s no place to see big cats, while not mentioning the zoo at all.
Please read the Article before commenting…
Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular
especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games
To quote from the Comment I replied to:
Ignoring indie games
That’s why I told him to read the Article. Because the Article literally talks about indie-games.
I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers
I’m sorry sir, but I’m not an indie dev. I need to show the investors that my game will earn $100 million otherwise it’s a failure.
My favourite games don’t look nearly as good as in my memory. Graphics don’t matter, they might even hurt, because there is less left to imagination.
I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.
And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.
I may be outsider but lower graphic level horror games actually work more for me, because imagination fills the gaps better than engine rendering plastic looking tentacles can
How hard is it for them to realize this? Graphics are a nice to have, they’re great, but they do not hold up an entire game. Star wars outlaws looked great, but the story was boring. If they took just a fraction of the money they spent on realism to give to writers and then let the writers do their job freely without getting in their way they could make some truly great games.
Look, I’m gonna be real with you, the pool of writers who are exceptionally good at specifically writing for games is really damn small.
Everyone is trained on novels and movies, and so many games try to hamfist in a three-act arc because they haven’t figured out that this is an entirely different medium and needs its own set of rules for how art plays out.
Traditional filmmaking ideas includes stuff like the direction a character is moving on the screen impacting what the scene “means.” Stuff like that is basically impossible to cultivate in, say, a first or third-person game where you can’t be sure what direction characters will be seen moving. Thus, games need their own narrative rules.
I think the first person to really crack those rules was Yoko Taro, that guy knows how to write for a game specifically.
deleted by creator
It’s hard for them to realize because good graphics used to effectively sell lots of copies of games. If they spent their graphics budget on writers, they’d have spent way too much on writing.
Yep, it’s a byproduct of the “bit wars” in the gaming culture of the '80s and '90s where each successive console generation had much more of a visual grqphical upgrade without sacrificing too much in other technical aspects like framerate/performance. Nowadays if you want that kind of upgrade you’re better off making a big investment in a beefy gaming rig because consoles have a realistic price point to consider, and even then we’re getting to a point of diminishing returns when it comes to the real noticeable graphical differences. Even back in the '80s/'90s the most powerful consoles of the time (such as the Neo Geo) were prohibitively expensive for most people. Either way, the most lauded games of the past few years have been the ones that put the biggest focus on aspects like engaging gameplay and/or immersive story and setting. One of the strongest candidates for this year’s Game of the Year could probably run on a potato and was basically poker with some interesting twists: essentially the opposite of a big studio AAA game. Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60, and indie hits such as the aforementioned Balatro are showing then that you can make games look and play great without all the super realistic graphics or immense budget if you have that solid gameplay, story/setting and art style. Call of Duty Black Ops 48393 with the only real “innovation” being more realistic sun glare on your rifle is just asking for failure.
Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60
This language always misses me. Every game I buy is complete. Adding an expansion to it later doesn’t make it less complete, and it’s not like BG3 wasn’t without major bugs.
I think we landed in a situation where some people don’t understand the different between graphical style and graphical quality. You can have high quality graphics that are still very simplistic. The important part is that they serve their purpose for the title you’re making. Obviously some games benefit from more realistic graphics, like TLoU Part 2 depicted in the thumbnail & briefly mentioned. The graphics help convey a lot of what the game tries to tell you. You can see the brutality of the world they are forced to live in through the realistic depiction of gore. But you can also see the raw emotion, the trauma on the character’s faces, which tells you how the reality of this world truly looks like. But there’s plenty of games with VERY simplistic graphic styles that are still high quality. CrossCode was one of the surprise hits for me a couple years ago and became one of my favorite RPGs, probably only topped by the old SNES title Terranigma. They both have simple yet beautiful graphics that serve them just as well as the realistic graphics of TLoU. Especially the suits / publishers will make this mistake since they are very detached from the actual gaming community and just look at numbers instead, getting trapped in various fallacies and then wonder why things don’t go as well as they calculated.
I don’t think any amount of money could’ve saved the writing for Outlaws. People should not expect great writing from studios like Ubisoft. Not to say that Ubisoft doesn’t have great talent, but it’s a “too many cooks” situation there.
Yeah, but you can’t make a TV ad about good writing.
Sure you can, just do like “reviewers/players gush about ‘riveting plot’ and ‘characters that feel real’ and ‘a truly compelling story’” or whatever it is.
Then don’t, i doubt people get sad when they realize they don’t have to buy another overpriced gpu to run the game they anticipated the most.
It’s nice to see gaming covered in NYT at all. The article generally rings hollow to me. I’m not an industry expert, but:
- It’s easy to be profitable when you’re just making a sandbox and your players make the games, but at that point are you a game developer? (Roblox)
- High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
- AAA developers aren’t optimizing games as well as they used to, so only high end hardware would even run them
- AAA is more focused on loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes, and cinematics all wrapped up in great visuals. That’s at the expense of innovative gameplay and interesting stories. Making the graphics worse won’t get execs to greenlight better games, just uglier ones. And they’ll still be $70.
- Even when games are huge successes and profitable, studios are getting bought and shut down (EA, Microsoft, Sony?), so it’s hard to say the corps are hurting.
High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
Not only that, but mid range cards just haven’t really moved that much in terms of performance. The ultra high end used to be a terrible value only for people who want the best and didn’t care about money. Now it almost makes sense from a performance per dollar standpoint to go ultra high end. At launch the 4090 was almost twice the performance of the 4080, but only cost about 1.5x. And somehow the value gets worse the lower end you go.
Meanwhile mid-high end cards like the 4060 and 7600 (which used to be some of the best values) are barely outperforming their predecessors.
The game of the year was a cutesy cartoon game about a robot. I don’t think there’s a problem here.
Read the Article pleasw
Yeah I did read the article. That’s why I know what the article is about, and the fact that he’s complaining about graphical fidelity in games and not getting the profit benefit. clearly AAA studios aren’t actually having this issue because, like I said, the winner of the game awards this year was a cartoony game, so clearly they are well aware that graphics aren’t everything.
Didn’t he tell you to read the article??
They did say pleasw.
This article’s reasoning is faith based. The cornerstone assumption is that industry profits and layoffs obey the preferences of the market.
To those who follow the industry, this is demonstrably false. What follows is the lack of awareness on full display:
and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
And I don‘t think games have to look that good either… I‘m currently playing MGSV and that game‘s 8 years old, runs at 60 fps on the Deck, and looks amazing. It feels like hundreds of millions are being burned on deminishing returns nowadays…
It’s bullshit accounting, they’re not spending it on the devs or the games, they’re spending it on advertising and the c levels Paydays. There are a ton of really good looking games, that had what would be considered shoestring budgets, but these companies bitching about it aren’t actually in it for the games anymore, its just for the money.
What are the good looking games with shoestring budgets?
10mil for Hellblade
36mil for KC:D one of the prettiest games of the time…which includes marketing.
The cost of some of these “AAAA” titles is a complete joke.
Another one, before THQ took over, metro 2033, 10-20 million estimate, and while it’s aged a bit, when it first was released it had a good bit of eye candy for a horror game.
Another one would be the first stalker, it’s not what we would consider it today, visual candy, but it’s also over a decade old now, but it was a pretty game when it came out. Cost 5mil to make
Another one:
Crysis 22mil, and if you remember it was one of the benchmarks for the longest times…can it run crysis.
Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we’re stretching the definition of shoestring. I’ll bet KC:D’s sequel spent far more, for one. I’m with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.
34 mil is nothing when you start looking at the cost of some of these other games, even Skyrim was over 100 million. Like GTA5, with marketing, was like 250 million. Just insanely expensive, and I guarantee you the devs are not pulling in a mil or two a year.
It’s true, and I’d certainly like to see some of these studios try to target making many games at that budget than a single game at ten times that every 7 or 8 years, but even these “cheaper” games you listed still take a long time to make, and I think that’s the problem to be solved. Games came out at a really rapid clip 20-25 years ago, where you’d often get 3 games in a series 3 years in a row. We can argue about the relative quality of those games compared to what people make now and how much crunch was involved, but if the typical game is taking more than 3 years to make, that still says to me that maybe their ambitions got out of hand. The time involved in making a game is what balloons a lot of these budgets, and whereas you could sell 3 full-priced games 3 years in a row back in the day, now you’re selling 1 every 6 years, and you need to sell way, way more of them to make the math work out.
Games had a lot less in them as well though, but even then games still took time. OoT, one of the biggest RPGs, released in 98, two 1/2 years of dev time. Games still required time, maybe less, but they also had less in them.
It’s not that I don’t like realistic graphics. But I’m not gonna pay 100 bucks per game + micro transactions and / or live service shenanigans to get it. Nowadays it’s not even that hard to have good looking games, thanks to all the work that went into modern engines. Obviously cutting edge graphics still need talented artists who create all the textures and high poly models but at some point the graphical fidelity gained becomes minuscule, compared to the effort put into it (and the performance it eats, since this bleeds into the absurd GPU topic too).
There’s also plenty of creative stylization options that can be explored that aren’t your typical WoW cartoon look that everyone goes for nowadays. Hell, I still love pixel art games too and they’re often considered to be on the bottom end of the graphical quality (which I’d heavily disagree with, but that’s also another topic).
What gamers want are good games that don’t feel like they get constantly milked or prioritize graphics over gameplay or story.
I agree 100%. I’d love a AAA game that uses the studio’s clout not for cutting edge graphics but a stellar, polished story and gameplay. The story doesn’t even need to be DEEP, just solid.
I always wonder how some big ass studio announcing a title that uses (high quality) 2D or 2.5D graphics would go. Like, pump it full of many hours of great gameplay and gut and / or heart wrenching story, with lovely & beautiful art, in 2025+. No online account requirements, no Denuvo, no micro or macro transactions, just a solid buy to play title that’s a blast to get immersed in. The problem is that suits would not dare to even try this, just like they don’t dare to try anything else that’s not your standard formula customer milking. And that’s how you get the 20iest iteration of generic graphic bliss with hundreds or even thousands of bucks to spend on macro transactions and other pain the ass bullshit. Innovation for the big companies is dead, which is why I focus so much on Indie studios and smaller developers now. At least there’s still some honest passion behind those games.
