Technology

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

That's hilarious because cutting edge graphics is all they have left

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.

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

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.