I Want Better Games With Worse Graphics And I'm Not Kidding - Aftermath
I know the saying starts with 'shorter' games, but this is about one game in particular
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.
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.
yeah also small team or even open source achievable.
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.
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/
tbf elden ring doesnt look that cutting edge.
Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it's nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.
I'd easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I'd still bet the difference wouldn't be that noticeable for 4K either.
And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid "open worlds", and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.
I hate that "realistic" graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it's consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.
I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.
Well it's a scaling effect and diminishing returns
To the human eye 480p vs 1080p is significant but 4k vs 8k is hard to tell
I think focusing on new technologies such as AI upscaling/world generation or VR is a better use of developers time and pushes the industry back into the innovative space it's supposed to be
Depends a bit on screen size and placement, too. I play on 27", 1440p, about 3 feet from my face, and my eyeballs are definitely the lowest resolution link in the chain. 32" screen on my desk, 60" screen in front of the couch, and 1080-1440 will start showing their pixels. I'm not anxious to upgrade my screen, because 1440p gives me great framerates with a cheaper video card. Also a 32" screen at a viewing distance of 3' is hard to actually see everything.
I'd much rather have a good game that runs fast at 1080p than have to get a $700 card for OK framerate and style-over-substance gameplay just to get 4k.
Agree that using VR to get immersive, wide-field graphics from fewer pixels is a great alternative.
I'd easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I'd still bet the difference wouldn't be that noticeable for 4K either.
If you just count pixels, yes. But what really made a big step forward in this decade was the realistic animation. And it does require a lot of effort and time to make it right.
Honestly I'd still argue there's diminishing returns on this front as well.
I play plenty of older titles, and I wouldn't say I notice that much of a difference - though that is my very subjective opinion
There's hundreds of great games on pc to play without all the focus on graphics. You just can't focus on industry giant game devs. Go play Stardew Valley, or Hades, or Subnautica.
Subnautica is a game I play for the audio, and that's really saying something because the visuals are great. I bought open back headphones for that game.
Of course there are, and I do - but the focus of the article, and thus the thread was on the AAA gaming space and its obsession with graphics.
Smaller studios and Indies already figured out the whole "you don't need to be able to see every fibre of a character's hair in order for a game to be good" thing
Halo 4 at 1440p looks very good, and it's 12 years old. Fully agree. I'd rather see more entities on screen, more particles, and draw distance. Polygon count and textures don't really impress me anymore.
I'd rather see highly stylized games with a lot going on in the world, rather than wasting half of my frame render time on a character's face.
Exactly. If my graphics card is going to be chugging, I'd rather it be because of the sheer amount of stuff to interact with in an area, rather than a beautiful but vapid landscape
I don't have a 1080p monitor, but most games look like shit on 4K. Bumping texture resolution is not enough for 4K, you also need better geometry and much longer drawing distances. If it's not an Unreal 5 game with their virtually infinite geometry detailing, then it mostly likely looks like shit.
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 writing 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trepang2 looks amazing and it was made by like five people. I think a lot of these big budget games waste a ton of money on details that have seriously diminishing returns.
I want shorter games, on average. 10-20 hour completion times would be right up my alley.
I blame Far Cry 3 for this proliferation of open world bobbins. So much shit to do and almost none of it is worth doing.
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.
So... Battle bit?
July and August were so fun
Currently enjoying a several weeks-long run in Rimworld. Potato graphics go really far is the gameplay design is solid.
Ironically that can be a very hardware demanding game
Rimworld and AI gen are why I need to upgrade my Tower again
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"
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.
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.
this is such a mess amazing collection of ideas!
I advertised it in a group of kids I know that love this kind of shit, hope it helps :)
certain games need the ultra 8k graphics while others are fine with 1080p especially 2d games
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 🙄
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
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.
I just want games where the devs get to release the game they wanted to make without the studio enshittification microtransactions, always-online single player and so on tagged on to it.
They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.
Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers' visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.
Activision and Electronics Arts were both started by people who wanted to put game developers first. Gathering of Developers, as well, which was eventually absorbed into Take Two.
It's not something that seems to last in this industry.
They don't even get absorbed these days. They get bought and then laid off.
I personally want more physics simulations. I always loved 2D falling sand games where everything reacted with each other and after a long time not having games with those mechanics i found noita and i can't stop playing it. As much for the game loop then for the game's falling sand engine.
It's a cool sandbox with a bunch of different materials you can mess with.
I played around with OEcake and it's newer form phyziostudiopro before wich seems similar and i greatly enjoyed it! I'll give this one a try.
Same. I want more physics, more depth to character dialogue, more animations, etc. High res graphics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making games feel immersive. At this point a bunch of older games feel newer or more modern to me because they actually include this stuff.
I really enjoyed Osmos back in the day. Like a relaxing Katamari.
Numpty Physics, Box Stacker(Fdroid) or Neverputt are all pretty fun.
PowderToy is excellent as mentioned above.
Started reading your comment and was just about to recommend you play Noita lol.
I really thought that’s where it was all headed. After the release of battlefield bad company, where they introduced a game engine that can destroy whole buildings, I really had hope for the future.
I imagined games where you can just build and destroy entire cities.
Super flashy modern graphics are the RGB keyboard of gaming.
Hey man, I like playing ASCII graphics indies on my 2k gaming tower with its wireless rgb keyboard. I can be gaudy and tasteless abd still mostly avoid graphically intense games
!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.
thanks one problem with lemmy is that you gotta remember which instance is bussin if you wanna link
Yeah graphics are nice to have, but sometimes I want to game on a small and light laptop like I don't need revolutionary HD high quality all the time
Art Style > Graphics. Kingdom Hearts (2002) looks wildly better GTA: San Andreas (2004) and Fallout 3 (2008).
Depends on the genere. I think a very immersive game like Metro Exodus benefits a lot from its graphics and wouldn't work quite as well without them.
Obligatory: Starsector
Also Rimworld, Project Zomboid, Prison Architect, Factorio.... basically if you like sandbox games, there's a ton out there.
Kerbal Space Program, Derail Valley, Nucleares, ...
starsector deserves so much more popularity. 10/10 would cause the collapse of civilization using hyperillegal ai cores that accelerated the collapse in the first place while getting blackmailed by those self same ai cores again
When thinking of space games with limited graphics, the first thing that comes to mind is ASCII Sector.
But the Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters (or whatever it's name is now) gets my strongest recommendation. And Starsector looks inspired by it, so I'll have a look!
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 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
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.
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’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.
.!
I don't even understand what Star Field is supposed to be. And I don't think Bethesda know either. It's basically what No Man's Sky used to be before they fixed it, yet somehow worse.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn't just make fallout 5. Which would have worked better with the limitations of the engine as well.
After that they could have taken their time to reskill their staff on either a new engine of their own or just a off the shelf option.
The problem with that is the back catalogue of games that developers have to compete with. There already are better games with worse graphics, the big studios aren't going to risk competing in that crowded market that already has its crowned victors.
Then just browser itch.io for games
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.
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.
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😂)
There's room for both things. Call of duty sells a bazillion copies, and while I have zero interest in that kind of game, I don't hate that it exists.
I like that it exists because it keeps the CoD players playing CoD and not ruining other games' lobbies.
You are a wise gamer.
Honestly can't blame Activision for putting shit campaigns into CoD. Since Modern Warfare the focus has been almost entirely on the multiplayer side of things. I suspect most players don't even touch it now. They sell millions regardless.
Infinity Ward's original MW and MW2 are the only ones worth playing. Titanfall 2 as well, since it's the same people.
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.
Dusk runs buttery smooth on any modern, low end hardware. I'll take that over textures or models popping in when ever they feel like.
Just make guns and bombs work in MSFS.
until then: DCS
I mean Abiotic Factor just released to early access and that one looks like a GoldSRC game.
Northern Journey and Crystal Project are the games you want then.
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.
Oh yeah it def is. I'd be happy if it were shittier graphics is what I mean because the gameplay is really good.
Games were better when graphics were secondary
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.
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).
