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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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I feel like games have gotten less realistic in recent years. Like we had destructible terrain on the PS2 with red faction and games today still don't really do it.
I still blame the advent of graphics. Look at final fantasy: up until 10, everything was simple graphics for the most part and storytelling was key. Then graphics began to explode and everything became about the visuals. One of the more modern Final Fantasy, 13, was basically a 30 hour tutorial in the beginning. Just stuck on rails getting cutscenes after cutscene. The same thing happened with other games around that time(roughly when the ps2 launched). Now everything is raytracing this, lighting that, dynamic shadows this.
Don't get me wrong, it's all very cool. But it feels like the AAA focus went towards graphics and it's taken the Indie scene (and Nintendo, love them or hate them), to keep pumping out creative and "just fun to play' games.
ETA: To be clear, I'm referring to the ratio of games. I know AAA masterpieces still exist. But games like Crysis used to be the exception, not the norm. Bleeding edge, test your hardware games used to be more rare and now almost every new AAA game is a hard drive, ram hogging behemoth for the sake of its graphics.
Meanwhile I still play Mount & Blade: Warband. The graphics hold up today, but it's not like they're good. But the game is just so damn good they mean absolutely nothing.
Edit: I should also mention I'm young, I'm sure somebody would point out that Warband isn't old compared to a lot of games, but in my eyes 2010 (which was 14 years ago, that makes my young ass feel old too) is an old game, although I'm going to be honest, I totally thought it was from like 2006
I think your point stands well. You're playing an older game despite less fancy graphics because the gameplay itself is engaging. 2010 counts as "old" in my book. Anything previous generation and beyond definitely isn't "modern".
I'm dead. I died of old age reading that. I played Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
I agree. FF is an interesting example though. It was always very much about the visuals, even when isometric. But it wasn't just about the visuals as it seems to be now. The story has gotten less and less coherent over time.
I actually really enjoyed 13, but this new stuff is awful. If I wanted an action RPG, there are better places for that.
Final fantasy changed some core gameplay elements that, unfortunately for me, took them away from games I wanted to play.
I like turn based combat. I liked relatively straight forward leveling and character/weapon progressions. I liked essentially a single gimmicky system like materia. Or the card games in 8.
I hate the full action battles all the time now. It feels like the game is much more intense and twitchy. It ruins the pace of the story for me. It used to be something I would read my way through, explore at my own pace, take a journey. Stories aren't always fast action, and that's what I feel like the more modern battle system make the game feel like.
Same. I understand the combat in the earlier games wasn't great, and it's was difficult to do something with it. But this direction wasn't it.
It 100% needed to remain turn/menu based for one.
I agree. I wish that everything wasn't just decoration, aside from some designated destructible boxes or barrels.
It feels like old cartoons(Tom & Jerry/Looney Toons era) where they drew the background as a muted static cell and only freshly animated things that moved. Objects in games are either entirely real, or just a painting on a texture. We're still at "if I can touch it, it's probably important. Otherwise ignore it".
The issue with something like destructible terrain is that if your one and only goal is graphical fidelity, the only thing the AAA companies care about, then it actually becomes a massive resource hog. You'll need to have artists render each photorealistic way that a piece of a scene could turn to debris. It's the kinda thing that sounds simple, but could take a team of artists months or even years to accomplish.
If you look at an incredible game like Teardown which really delivers on full destructibility, you can see that they're using voxels and the game looks a little blocky. It's the kinda thing you can easily ignore with good art direction though, which Teardown has. The problem is that you need talented directors to conceptualize that, and most of the talent in the Western games industry is being wasted by corps that want to treat developers like single-use plastics and trash them once the current project is out.
Unfortunately if you have walls today that get destroyed like Red Faction, you would get people complaining that it's lazy and looks weird. But to get a wall to break with the standards we have now takes an exponential amount more processing power because not only do you need the walls to break "realistically" but it also has to render the super nice graphics on each little piece of that wall break.
I disagree and counter with Minecraft. Art styles don't need to be hyper realistic to accomplish immersion.
I counter with all the realism hype about Arma 3. Players were literally talking about the grass and moon cycles. Meanwhile the actual combat simulation part was worse than a game cooked up by the US Army Recruiting command.
I swear if a wall didn't break exactly right they would have written a 20 page dissertation on it and mailed it directly to the lead graphics artist.
Their existence doesn't negate the people who enjoyed Minecraft. You basically said "the people who bought a hyper realistic sim expected hyper realism". Yes, a tautology is a tautology.
Again, plenty of people find non hyper realistic graphics satisfying. An entire Indie catalogue proves this. Games like Lethal Company or Among Us or Terraria or Stardew Valley are huge hits with pixel graphics or graphics from 1995.
Your argument is boiling down to "well someone will complain, so might as well not even try". It's very cynical and defeatist. Acting like hype against Arma means no one else enjoyed anything. You take too much from other people's opinions. Enjoy what you enjoy. Stop basing your opinions on what others on the Internet say.
That's not it at all. You were talking about immersion and I'm just pointing out that some people see the environment as more important than the core gameplay mechanics. That doesn't invalidate people who enjoy Minecraft. And yeah the problem is big game companies are listening to those gamers who are basically the squeaky wheel.
The relative success of Teardown refutes this, I think.
That's actually exactly what I was going to add on to my post but decided against it. I assumed OP was talking about AAA games since those are the topic of this post. There's plenty of indie games that have less worse graphics with breakable walls.
Battlebit: Remastered before the devs bailed on it, too