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Video Games can't afford to look this good
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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They focused so much on hyper realistic graphics that they forgot about the most important part of a game: being fun.
I've sunk way more hours in an "ugly" game such as space haven or balatro this year than in any ultra beautiful (and void of fun) AAA game.
I wonder if it has to do with the age of the player. I grew up playing old games, not first gen games but on commadore and such, ms-dos games. Win 3.1, SNES, etc. Graphics in games have never really meant much, sure pretty is pretty but I'm more than happy to play around with noita for a couple hours, simple art styles, blocky textures. I am also fine jumping in to cyberpunk or mgs or last of us or anything newer. As long as I find the gameplay fun that is first and foremost the most important part. IDGAF about multiplayer, to me multiplayer was a cop-out in the late 90s early 00s to not have to actually make decent games, and I still stand by that. IDGAF about stupid features. You make a game I find interesting and I'll likely play it, You make a game that looks pretty and has shitty gameplay I won't even spit in its general direction.
Minecraft is one of the biggest games on the planet. Very popular with the young. Not what many would consider beautiful.
Some bits of Minecraft can actually be quite beautiful (e.g. the caves where the axolotls occur) but the graphics are certainly not photorealistic.
I'm not really sure it's completely like that. In the early 2000's we had "beautiful" games (aka the most advanced graphics that technology could afford) but games were fun.
Devs invested in graphics, but they also invested in innovative formulas, in gameplay... You could tell a game was unique and beautiful.
Today, AAA games are just a checklist of things that must be included (almost none pointed at making the player have fun) with an incredible level of detail that makes every single leave of every tree move independently from the rest.
There have always been pretty tech demos without much gameplay. There was Incoming it was basically a super simple turret section showing off the awesome (at the time) capabilities of the first Voodoo card. It was impressive and fun for about 15 minutes. Still doesn't look too bad considering it came out in 1998.
The main problem with pretty graphics is that you actually lose out on the kind of variety a more abstract graphics style would allow, e.g. by distinguishing objects in a textual description you can have millions of distinct objects (e.g. in something like Dwarf Fortress with its item and character descriptions), much more than you could if you had to represent everything graphically.
Indeed. Today's problem is that graphical fidelity takes so much of the development time and resources that the rest of the aspects of the game are completely left aside.
Yeah, I can count how many freckles this character has in their face, but that's all these games offer now, and I don't need to count freckles, I can do that in real life. I want to have a good time with the game.
Well, I am not even talking about the resources used but literally about the fact that you can't make that many graphics because of the number of combinations of different properties you would have to model somehow.
Plus there are some things you can describe in text that you can never portray graphically, e.g. concepts like "the most beautiful woman he had ever seen"
You only remember the good ones. There has always been a lot of games that look good or even impressive, but play like crap.
Today there are still critically acclaimed games that happen to look good too. They're a tiny minority, but it's always been like that.
I'm guessing the prettiness attracts more than a great gameplay. But I'm basically there with you.
I suspect the prettiness sells better in the investment meetings to people who have no clue about gameplay anyway.