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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I have a computer from 2017. It's also a Mac. I can't play recent games and I think I've just gotten more and more turned off by the whole emphasis on better graphics and the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on either a console or a really good graphics card for a PC has just turned me off of mainstream gaming completely.
Mostly I just go play games I played when I was a kid these days. 1980s graphics and yet I have yet to get tired of many of them...
I've got an old Mac and use a cloud gaming PC to play games. It's like $50 a month and works great when you're near the data center.
Plus my laptop doesn't get really hot while playing games and the battery lasts a lot longer. All while getting 4k 60fps gaming with ray tracing.
I can think of many older games in dire need of facelifts, but the thing is they don't need a facelift into photo-realistic territory. Just enough to bring the vision out from developers reaching just a little further than their old tech could support. I'm thinking of a lot of early 3D games. Many of the older sprite based games still hold up great.
The AAA gaming industry has gone off the rails trying to wow us with graphics and the novelty has long worn off.
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.
The game of the year was a cutesy cartoon game about a robot. I don't think there's a problem here.
I had a lot of fun playing Romancing Saga 2 and Ara Fell recently. Sometimes games can be more immersive by not having high fidelity graphics.
I've seen a lot of cool indie games pop up out of heavily modified classic idTech engines like the DOOM and Quake engines. They're definitely not high fidelity, but a lot of them scratch an itch that slower paced modern games can't seem to scratch.
Gifted my kids, both of them already young adults, one of those retro gaming sticks. An absolute bang/for/buck wonder, full of retro emulators and ROMs. Christmas Day, at grandmas was a retro fest, with even grandma playing. Pac man, frogger, space invaders, galaga, donkey Kong, early console games…. Retro gaming has amazing games, where gameplay and concepts had to make do with the limited resources.
My son has a Steam deck, but he had a blast with the rest.
This is my current addiction. No need graphix.
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.
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!)
Is there a way to actually read the article without having to be exposed to whatever the drug fueled hellscape that website is?
I use Firefox's "reader mode"
Edit: nyt managed to enshittify even that. will wonders never cease
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.
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.
Unpopular opinion but I preferer the graphics of a game were absolute trash but the ost be awesome. I can forget easyly how much individual hairs are in a 3d model, but good OST will live in my mind and heart forever.
And of course gameplay go first.
This is why so many indie games are awesome. The graphics don't need to be great when the soundtracks and gameplay more than make up for it. Those are what actually matter. I have most of Undertale's OST committed to memory at this point lol
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