Basically Gray Zone. Great game, but even on my i9-12900K, 3080Ti, 128GB DDR5 I have to play it on low settings. Like I’d be happy if they just ratcheted down the graphics quality because the gameplay is great.
That’s probably due to optimization rather than graphics alone.
Games were better when graphics were secondary
Personally I’d prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That’s not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.
Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there’s a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.
I think graphics capped out around the 8th generation of consoles with the Xbox One (Sunset Overdrive holds up insanely well) and now everything that isn’t VR is just overkill
I think raytracing can improve graphics (especially lighting) without needing insane development resources to be thrown at it.
In terms of simple pixel pushing though, I struggle to see much difference between last gen and this gen. The models and textures look almost identical. Only real difference is framerate.
without needing insane development resources to be thrown at it.
Just graphical resources, bumping everything back to 30fps again (for console peasants, anyway).
After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout… But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn’t enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I’ve fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course… (Perhapsh I should join the mage’s college in Winterhold)
Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It’s the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.
Fallout 2 really is the best game not just in the West-coast saga but the entire series.
I’ve only ever made it roughly 8 hours in, so I have the entire game ahead of me now that I’m starting anew. I’m super stoked.
funny how the first time i played fo3 i struggled to kill fire ants because i ran out of ammo for every weapon amd only had melee weapons
now when i fire it up i know so much of what to do that i am practically unstoppable
the survival mode in fo4 is actually quite a challenge though, thats fun to play (unless i die after not finding a bed for hours, then it sucks😂)
If you liked Fallout 1 and 2 you’ll probably like NV too. It has a far slower pace than 3, and has a much bigger emphasis on writing and player choice than 3 and 4.
I could never get into 3 or 4 personally, but have always loved 1, 2, and NV.
I liked New Vegas quite a lot. I remember not liking it as much as 3 at the time, but looking back years later with a different perspective (and after playing Fallout 1), I appreciate and vibe with it a lot more and can’t wait to play it again… Heavily modded… With Survival Mode on.
You want a Dreamcast, a PS2 or a SNES.
Maybe, but there’s no reason we can’t leverage modern technology to make new games that aren’t trying to look realistic. Realism is just a style, and it’s not the best style. It’s just the “premium” style that sells new games. It also ages like crap because technology will always get better at that. A stylized design ages gracefully and can be a lot more performant and potentially easier to create too, though it requires more creativity and more work with the engine than just using it as it comes.
It also ages like crap because technology will always get better at that.
Try Torment: Tides of Numenara. It’s a hidden gem no one talks about.
I made a point a few years ago to play through every single unplayed game in my steam library. I’d picked up over a hundred games from random sales and humble bundles, And thought it was a disservice to myself to have unplayed games while buying new ones. This was one of them. I think this game had one of my favorite stories of any RPG I’ve ever played; it was number one until Baldur’s gate came out. I later learned it was a spiritual successor to planescape torment.
If you liked this one, another gem that I played during that time was Tyranny. I’m currently working my way through pillars of eternity; I’m really liking it as well so far.
I’ve got pretty similar thoughts. I wasn’t into gaming all that much up until relatively recently when I built my first gaming PC at the beginning of pandemic. Thanks to that, I’m not only on market for bleeding edge AAA titles, but also discovering 3 dacades worth of PC games. My observation is that games got worse over time. They’re also a lot more expensive to make because it all must be visually impressive, which usually ends up with poor performance and bugs, requiring high-end hardware for the game to run somehow. Quite often games are broken and unoptimized on launch, they have that generic formula, watch cinematic, hold a button, watch some more, here’s your little tutorial fight, now more cutscene and a crappy puzzle. It really makes me feel, if game developers were more limited by hardware constraint and unable to feed legions of normie players to flashy graphics, they wouldn’t have other way to makes games attractive other than with better mechanics and level design.
Meanwhile Nintendo continues to release bangers for their ancient potato console.
Game development got more expensive because people want more complex games. No one wants to play a shooter with loading screens, everyone wants to play an open world game. Even if you tone down the graphics, such development will still be a lot more expensive.
Modern Quality of Life settings, novel features, styled to look seamless with itself, optimal usage of resources so the experience is only about the content and not the settings.
!patientgamers would agree and so do I
Yup, most of the games I play are either indies or older games. I don’t care much about graphics, I care about gameplay and story, and modern AAA games often lack in both.
I want better games with better graphics. The two are not mutually exclusive, games like Elden Ring prove it is possible to have both.
The problem this writer had with CoD wasn’t even really the game. Its the same problem plaguing nearly all entertainment media at the moment: the weiting just sucks. Its bad. Bad writing will make even a game with great gameplay turn sour.
Elden Ring had great art direction, but I wouldn’t say it had great graphics.
Certainly looks better than the average indie game. And before you come at me for saying that.
Indie is often touted as “better than AAA”. But in order for that to be the case, they need to at least offer something similar first. But most indie games are so far removed from even the average AAA game, that its basically apples and oranges.
AA, or mid-tier, is really where its at. Some of the best games in recent years have all been from the AA space. Even ones that launched rough like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk.
They are still leagues above the average indie game that most people here and “the site that shall not be named” tend to list off as their favourites.
So yes, Elden Ring indeed does have great graphics. Not the most cutting edge, but at least it looks like it belongs in the same generation as its competitors.
It had great graphics, and its art direction elevated the graphics. It looks equally as good as any other game that released the same year.
Elden Ring certainly is a long leap from King’s Field compared to other games when that launched. For as fun as King’s Field was, its graphics were bad, even for the time.
It looks equally as good as any other game that released the same year.
Elden Ring is pretty, but this simply isn’t true.
When it comes applying advanced modeling and rendering tech, fromsoft are amateurs.
Most famously, they have no clue what they are doing with shell texturing.
I totally agree with you, while Elden ring like very nice, it is far from state of the art graphics, demons Souls PS5 show what it should look like if it went that way. I am happy they didn’t and instead focus on gameplay and game zones. I really think a lot of game producers go for the extra graphical fidelity instead of focusing on game contents.
The “worse graphics” stands for less photorealism. I could tell you about the times when someone wasn’t pushing graphical limits, it was ditched by games journalists for postponing the time when they can finally put on a VR headset to relive the battle of Normandy in first person.
I will never understand how limited someone’s imagination has to be to require first person and photorealism to be immersed.
To each their own? Like I’m not going to judge someone because they want a very specific piece of media. I want very specific things too. Just because the things I want don’t overlap with the things they want doesn’t me either is absurd.
VR can be great without photorealism too. We can apply OP’s concept to VR games and find numerous fun games that will run well on lower-powered systems. Dragon Fist VR for example - it’s basically Tekken in VR and you fight life-size NPC opponents with your own Kung Fu skills, and the graphics are decent but not photorealistic by any stretch of imagination.
How much better graphics?
Better graphics means much bigger budget and that means you’ll get writing for lowest common denominator of consumers as well as microtransactions to extract every last cent from them.
As a game dev who’s making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
I mean this with the greatest respect, I’m not making a judgement on the gameplay.
But there’s a whole spectrum between Roblox and the latest Quadruple A™ that all consist of “worse graphics”
As inflation continues to outpace wages, surely more people will start preferring this. $1000 for a gpu is a joke. If I ever develop an indie game my target system is going to be like, a 1.6ghz core i3 and garden variety basic opengl capable graphics card.
There are constant high end GPU shortages, $1,000 is too cheap.
idk, maybe we need to figure out how to get by with basic laptop opengl graphics. An Intel HD 4000 would have been a groundbreaking graphics card in 2005 but today you can barely run a unity project with one. More serious effort needs to go into optimization and efficiency I think and if that means everything has to have 2005 era graphics (which aren’t even that bad) then that’s what has to be done.
Making your own game engine an using open source 3d engine then filling in the rest is too much work for most indie devs but as enshitification continues this will eventually stop being the case. Tux kart was made this way and it can run on a potato.
No one wants to play potato games. And this is evident by the shortage of high end GPUs. People want better graphics and people have the money for GPUs. If you check Steam stats, then the top 15 cards are all 3060, 4060, 3070, 4070, and 3080. Steam has 132m active monthly users and 2% of their users have 3080 cards. That’s over 2.6m people with a high end card.
There are only 0.2% of Intel HD 4000 users. When you combine all the mid and high end GPU users it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no point making games for Intel HD 4000.
this is such a
messamazing collection of ideas!I advertised it in a group of kids I know that love this kind of shit, hope it helps :)
White letters on light brown wood texture (trailer on steam at 0:07). Also, the big “Press E to talk” looks heinous. Plus you don’t have full control over where it appears, at one point in the trailer (0:42), it’s on white background. Going by the trailer, you’re trying to make the game look like the product of a inexperienced amateur, while the game itself is actually a subversive masterpiece, similar to the doom mod “MyHouse.wad”. Hats off to you if you manage to pull it off, but if not, you’ll have fallen flat on your face. Metaphorically, of course.
I thought this right before I tried to play the really old pokemons again. And very quickly went back to new pokemons.
To be fair those had worse gameplay too
Quality of life has improved pretty significantly, the formula has stayed the same, and now there are more Pokemon with more unique properties. It was linear in just about every direction until the latest switch games.
I think everything after Gen 1 holds up pretty well, even if it’s a little rough. And once they figured out the physical/special split in Gen 4 they basically just published the same game over and over again with slightly different gimmicks and stories.
Thing is, looking at some games, Horizon and Elden Ring being a prime examples, we can have both great games with great graphics.
You don’t really want better games with worse graphics, you want better games that don’t use great graphics as an excuse to bad gameplay.
The author has completely missed the MAIN reason the campaign was good in 2009 and isn’t, now.
In 2009 the mindset was still that you needed a good single player game to get sales of a game. By 2015 call of duty had it figured out that they could almost completely ignore shoestringing a half asked campaign together and still get massive sales because their players were buying it for the multi-player, and all the money to be made by their fan boys buying it was in the multi-player.
Funny thing is, most multiplayer blokes play at low settings anyways to maximize performance for some form of advantage.
We can have both but it will cost hundreds of millions like Horizon and often this means shitty monetization practices if the company isn’t the size of Sony, or the employees are heavily underpaid like with Elden Ring. Seriously pay at FromSoft is lower than the already low industry standard. https://www.pcgamer.com/report-highlights-underpay-and-some-level-of-crunching-at-fromsoftware/
He wants the resources being spent on graphics to be redirected to engineers and game designers. There is a reasonable top end budget to put towards any given game, so it is at least mostly 0 sum.
Bethesta has the worst of both worlds.
It doesn’t. You can do so much more in an isometric world than a 3D one. Modern games are more about the game engine than the game itself.
Spruce up some old school MUDs, imo. Make the original Legend of Zelda, but massively upgraded for what you can do with today’s tech. (Similar to Bastion, I suppose.) There’s a lot of room for a triple A game similar to Albion Online.
Big budget of cash; small budget of time and talent.
They take like 10 years to release a game
They have plenty of time, just not the talent or vision to do anything good with it. Their stories are extremely bare bones, the bugs are prolific, and the power creep is more a power slide straight into godhood by level 15 because of the short main quests.
That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.
Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.
Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.
Valheim
Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level.
What an absolutely batshit insane thing to say.
bro just have an AI do it
its just like, pixels or whatever
/s
Actually, would the masses care at all about ai art that is finished by a human to make it work? For something like Fortnite?
So, the big problem right now with AI art is that there’s no real way to modify it without basically completely redoing it.
You can alter the prompts, but due to the intentionally chaotic nature of the models, what you’ll get out is a completely different image. You can’t just be like “I want her head tilted a little more to the left, and give her a bigger smile, but keep everything else the same.” When you’re working on professional art, generally what happens is the artist presents you with each version, from rough sketches to finished line art, to rough paint work, and you request changes as you go. There’s a collaboration as you guide them towards the result you want. But with AI you’re just shotgunning outputs and hoping that one of them lands close enough. That’s fine for your bedroom wall, but not for a professional environment.
And if you want to have a human artist go in and make those changes to the finished image, they have to contend with the fact that they only have a finished image, not any of the layers from sketch through to brush work to lighting and so on. So they’re basically stuck trying to seamlessly paint over the existing image. That’s harder than it sounds.
Can artists use AI as a tool? Absolutely. Generate like 50 versions of a scene, use them as references. Or ask it for a sketch, then paint over that in your style. You can correct mistakes and make adjustments along the way. But the idea that humans can just “touch up” AI art to fix the mistakes doesn’t really work.
Ok but if possible would the masses care if it was ai generated is my point.
I would confidently assume that folks are researching having generative ai actually conducting the tasks of wireframing, skinning, landscaping, skyboxing, WFC tile generation etc
It’s not happening now, but absolutely will.
But again my point is most folks will not give a shit as long as they can unlock newer better glitter shit
You can hire writers instead of visual artists.
Tell me you’re uncreative without telling me you’re uncreative.
Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you’re severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they’re assembly line workers isn’t going to result in a compelling world.
The studios who do this mostly aren’t looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.
In either case communication is the limiting factor and that scales with quadratic complexity with larger groups (everyone has to be on the same page with everyone else).
yeah also small team or even open source achievable.
tbf elden ring doesnt look that cutting edge.
I’d love to upvote this more than once. What’s the point of all those super high quality graphics if the core gameplay hasn’t advanced in the slightest 🙄
One of my favourite games was Operation Flash Point Dragon Rising on Xbox 360.
Graphics were terrible then but the gameplay was amazing.
I go back today and still play it, unfortunately the AI hasn’t kept up and you can exploit it rather easily.
AAA studios
Best I can do is predatory monetization and half-baked dlc. Also, now the Eula prohibit you from making unflattering comparisons to that one game Larian made
Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn’t be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it’s supposed to look like.
This is how that “Doom 3 on a floppy disk” game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn’t look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.
You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that’s how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don’t hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.
How do you think modern games are made? Procedural generation is used all over the place to create materials and entire landscapes.
But never ships clientside.
These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.
You propose an interesting approach. I just wonder how the individual streaks of different rust interact with typical graphics pipelines. You can certainly ship a generator, but then for rasterizing the image the texture still has to be generated and shipped off to GPU memory to be used in shaders, won’t you blow through VRAM limits or shader cache limits by having no texture reuse anywhere?
Any game with texture pop-in is already handling more data than you have space. “Rage” famously had unique textures across the entire world… and infamously streamed them from DVD, with the dumbest logic for loading and unloading. You could wait for everything to load, turn around, and it would all be blurry again.
Anyway if you’re rendering ten zillion copies of something way out in the distance, those can all be the same. It will not matter whether they’re high-res or unique when they’re eight pixels across. As Nvidia said: if you’re not cheating, you’re just not trying.
