Insiders say cutting-edge graphics are too costly for AAA games

Then stop making games with cutting edge graphics. I just want to play it on a steamdeck anyway.

Honestly. I prefer games that don't make the steam deck use its fans.
- What games accomplish that?
  
  Aside from indies or 2D games I guess.
The problem is all the AAA publishers just keep increasing budgets to keep up. This creates a situation where games are so expensive they can't take risks, so they just follow a formula and are boring and generic. That's how we've gotten to where we are now. AAA games are failing because their budgets are too large. They need to make more smaller, interesting and unique games rather than one massive budget game.

I have essentially fully turned away from AAA personally. Thinking about it, I can't actually tell you the last one I played. Indie games are where all the good stuff is.
- The only AAA I play are Nintendo ones (and RTS/MOBA since its a niche genre and you need a community for PvP). Since quite some times already. But I only look out for indies, I love getting new experiences and gameplay.
  
  And even when the gameplay is not new, the attention to details (gameplay wise) is at 1000% only on indies (Celeste, Hollow knight, Factorio, …)
- Same! Maybe builders gate 3 but they kind of straddle the line between aaa and indie.
For real. I'm just having a blast playing Hades right now.
This is a totally reasonable request yup.

Shooters with beard hair that waves in the wind but gunplay that sucks and broken physics.

Nailed it. Here I am playing Celeste on Pico-8 and loving it. Gameplay matters before graphics. This is why Nintendo has a loyal following despite their litigious ways.
- And hardware that's GENERATIONS behind.
- But also graphics doesn't necessarily mean crazy 3d graphics, pick any game by supergiant and it's gorgeous with beautiful music and fun gameplay.
  
  Know what you're willing to invest in and make design choices to reflect that.

Art style fuelled by pure intent and vision trumps photorealism any day of the week.

Heavily biased here, but just look at Warframe. It is undeniably one of the best looking games out there because it has a voice of its own, and it still runs just fine on decade-old hardware. Same with most pixel/voxel graphics games.

We really don't need to see a billion open pores per square centimeter of facial skin as long as the gameplay's solid, the story's good, and the characters are well-written. Add a touch of art style as I've mentioned before, and you're golden.

Plus I'd rather have a functional game than a pretty one any day of the week. The current trend of rushing big budget/high-tech games to market then finishing them over a couple of years is really getting on my nerves - looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077, Darktide, Baldur's Gate 3 (hate me all you want, but that game was a technical mess at launch), Rogue Trader, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, Space Marine 2, (insert ~75% of big budget games released since 2018 here).

I just bought 2077 and No Man's Sky with some Christmas money. They were $25 each. If they screw up the launch, that just means it'll be in the bargain bin quicker for us patient gamers.

I haven't tried Cyberpunk yet, but NMS is very solid for $25. I don't think I'd ever have paid full price for it though.
- That's the silver lining, but it still doesn't excuse the practice in my eyes... It's like someone selling you a house advertised as fully complete, then spending another year or two finishing up the interiors and the plumbing, while you're living there... Or a Cybertruck...
- Cyberpunk is 4 years old or more, afaik it never got more than 50% discount, too much for me
Uhm, googling warframe screenshot (to avoid promo material), i'd count Warframe as a more fotorealistic game, aside frome the weird humanoid figures. I mean, look at this:

"AER memories of old" (currently 90% sale) is what i count as own, simple, art style.

Or maybe Satisfactory, that's good enough in realism, playable on my Cezanne Vega 8 iGPU.
- There's a vaguely cartoon or fun look to the game but I'm having trouble thinking of good examples. Things have the right proportions but it's stylized just enough.
  
  The Plains of Eidolon (your screenshot) is the first open world area, and looks more plain compared to Venus and the cambion drift. Most of the game is made of stylized tiles stitched into levels. It's more obvious as you see all the syandanas and weird frames and the individual factions.
- Aah, but they're tricking you through really good lighting and scene composition;) Everything in this game has its own distinctive twist, like a realistic cartoon. Plus DE are aces at painting a scene!
  
  Granted, their modeling and texture work is damned near witchcraft, I still don't understand how they manage to cram so much detail into a 3D model...
  
  And thank you for the recs! I've already played a bit of Satisfactory and it is very satisfactory (sorry...)! Also bought AER because it looks gorgeous!
- AER was a lovely stop-gap for me after I'd finished Outer Wilds and was a bit bereft. Not remotely the same but I loved the music and flying around.
Not to mention the extra strain on the environment and a person's wallet.
- True! One of my favourite games is Cultist Simulator, I literally get stuck standing for hours in my kitchen exploring the library and trying not to die on my phone... That game just stinks of vision, love it!
I'm mad about Space Marine 2. It could have been so good but instead, after losing my progress a bunch of times, I don't really play it at all. I understand dudes are still losing progress even? And the matchmaking is still broken? What the heck are those devs doing?
- I don't know, either... They have such a solid core with the gameplay and the world building/art style, but seem to be headed in the wrong direction in terms of ongoing development.
  
  And, yeah, the multiplayer UX is questionable, to say the least...
Art style ages much better too
- Agreed. I have a concrete example in mind for this: while it's clear that GSC are still acing the Ukrainian Fallout style, I feel STALKER 2 lost a lot of the series' personality by switching to Unreal... The grit's no longer there, and that grit was a defining element of their atmosphere. I still feel a lot more tension in the first three than in this last one, because I'm sucked into their mindset right from the menu.
  
  Edit: I think S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 is still a good game (technical issues notwithstanding), it's just... lost some charm along the way.
Honestly, Warframe should be what every corpo gaming company is trying to emulate. There's a so much content, amazing game play, stupidly complex story, the monetization doesn't harm the playerbase or limit the game, and the devs not only care, but actively play the game themselves.

They've got a dozen different genres of game crammed in there now, don't want first person shooter? You can play space battle, kiju hunter, street fighter, fishing sim, cabalela's big game hunter, tony hawk pro skater 2, interior design sim, and more without ever opening a different game. I keep trying to play something else and keep going back because it's both a fun and exciting game, and playing different game modes reward you with things that help your other game modes. Imagine if spending an hour shooting things in CoD and fishing in animal crossing rewarded you with better magic in Skyrim.

Frankly, corpo companies spend millions to have this kind of walled garden system and warframe managed to do it on a budget and to the player's benefit instead of harm. It's what gaming needs to strive to be.
- DE truly are impressive in how utterly not greedy they are. Not to mention that, as you've said, Warframe really seems to be a passion project for them and it shows in every single detail - especially the Warframes themselves, every model is a display-worthy sculpture, I swear!
  
  And, yeah, they are perfectly attuned to the community, actively participate not only within said community, but also mobilise people toward helping other noble causes (see the explosive success they've had with fundraising for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation)!
  
  And I totally understand what you mean about the almost paralysing amount of choices on offer in the game itself, I have 2.5k hours in it, playing relatively regularly for 5 years now, and they thoroughly hooked me in with their last batches of updates! Again! I have to consciously make myself play other games every now and again just so that I won't burn myself out!
Hell BG3 still feels like a technical mess.

It looks good enough, but runs like shit on the Deck. And I'm not sure why, it's not like there is a ton of render distance or detail needed.
- Heh, I started considering if I should edit in a rant about BG3 in my initial comment and you've graciously provided the window I needed, thank you!:))
  
  I don't know what they did, either, I mean Rogue Trader used to run better while in Beta, and it wasn't even supposed to run on the Deck as it was... Hell, even my PC starts trying to lift off during most of Act III...
  
  Plus, and I may get nuked for this, the game is incomplete as well. Yes, first and foremost Justice for Karlach and Minthara, the most endearing and the most emotionally complex characters in recent memory respectively (try a Good romance with Minthara and get whiplash going from total domination, blood and carnage to the healthiest concept of a romantic relationship in the entire game, that needed sooo much more exploration!), who both got severely shafted content-wise.
  
  But even beyond that, the bits they cut out near the end can really be felt as rushed amputations rather than anything planned... At least, that's how they feel to me. Credit where it's due, Act I and II, and most of Act III are pretty much RPG perfection, but it hurts so much seeing it fumble right as the crescendo boils to an end...

Like, we found acceptable, beautiful levels of graphics years ago.

We’re not the ones saying “make it look even better.” They are the ones that seem to be whipping themselves into some frenzy and saying “we can’t keep doing this!”

So fuckin stop.

I'm fine with graphics from 20 years ago, i just need it to run 4k 120fps with no stutters. GTA SA (the original) is totally fine for me visually with a few mods to allow high res, widescreen and high fps fix.

recent games are graphically too intensive for my gpu even on lowest settings, and i paid fucking 800€ for it a few years ago!
If appearances are so important for their game, they can make it an interactive movie with everything pre-rendered. Works well for crap without actual player influence on the events.

Or - a hint - there are such esteemed genres as classical quest and visual novella, very much alive in the indie world.

That's hilarious because cutting edge graphics is all they have left

All the best games I've played recently are deliberately low poly models, low res textures, and 100% focused on JUST satisfying gamefeel and fun gameplay mechanics.

Fuck graphical fidelity and fuck "AAA" studios for wasting our time and money on it.

I WANT SHORTER GAMES WITH WORSE GRAPHICS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID MORE TO WORK LESS AND I'M NOT KIDDING

I WANT SHORTER GAMES

Can I have my cake and eat it too? I want games with a short critical path, but satisfying ways to spend more time with it if it's fun.

So like interesting NG+ stuff, boss rush modes, different builds, whatever.
- built in randomizers please
- Actually, on that point, I love it when a game becomes a platform for continuous content. Minecraft is a bit trite as an example but it fits: You buy it once, and you can beat it in a couple hours if you really want to, but you can extract as much enjoyment out of it as your imagination will allow, and the developers are constantly adding more stuff to do (although not all of what's added feels great all the time...)
Absolutely on the shorter games. I just do not have time for 30 to 40 hour games anymore. 8 to 10 hours is the sweet spot for me. After that I get bored and the game feels like a drag.
- Imo it feels like the content is not very fresh compared to when you played that first rpg/open world/etc. It just does not feel like these aaa studios are innovating anymore- I'm looking for compelling stories and tight gameplay loops but they're feeding us rehashed side quests fillers and eye candy. Anyone feel like they're just playing borderlands sequels where you're constantly forced into a meaningless quest to do somebody's bidding?
BUT HOW DO WE FORCE PEOPLE TO BUY OUR NEW CONSOLES?
- You would think if anyone had any brains they wouldn't want you to have to buy new consoles all the time. Aside from Nintendo, the hardware is usually a loss leader for the other major players and they make all their money on the licensing costs on the software, i.e. game sales, whereas they lose money every time a console ships out the door. Especially nowadays when the distribution is mostly digital and costs them practically nothing vs. the bad old days when they had to press discs and print labels and shit. Machine sales themselves have never been profitable at least for the first several years each system is out for the last several console generations.
  
  It would be more profitable for Sony and Microsoft to keep you on the same console generation forever -- with the inevitable falling cost of manufacturing the things, to boot -- keeping it at the same MSRP and simply selling you more and more games for it.
  
  Plus it would make their console sales numbers look really badass... eventually. "The Microsoft Xbox X One X S XS Series OneX S is the best selling video game console in history, selling 1.2 billion units over its 45 year life cycle, and counting!"
- That's the fun part: you don't! :D
  
  That is to say, they tried. And now there are basically no fucking games on whatever they're calling the latest X-turd, and barely anything worth note on the PS5.
I don't really think it should be "worse" or specifically low-poly. There is a balance that can be struck and I feel that accepting the lowest quality possible is an excuse for developers to put in as little work as possible while still charging us as much as possible.

Some of the game industry followed the movie format: make a visual masterpiece with barely a plot or purpose.

Unlike the movie crowd, gamers usually want more depth and fun. Personally, I've been grabbing indie games with simple/pixel graphics and great gameplay.

I've put like 1000 hours each into Stardew Valley and Rimworld. Not a single ray traced, no advanced boob physics, just good fun.
- I recently got Necesse and Oxygen not included. Each one has the potential for many many game hours.
I remember when Gears came out - it was made as a playable movie, and they did it well because it had a story line with characters we were invested in. Character deaths sucked, it was engaging, and it was unpredictable but comfortable.

Nothing wrong with the movie format, but you've got to tell the story.
- Yep, offering more advanced graphics has always been a factor in gaming. But not the only one. I will never understand how much money a big company can spend, while ignoring the importance of writing, voice acting, and telling an impactful story.
That's because games require some engagement/ investment. Even if avatar has a mid plot you can still turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle. But you're not going to put mental effort into learning a boss with shitty mechanics to "save the land" you barely care about.
They apparently are aiming for photorealism these days. That's much harder than good anime graphics or good "dreamy painting" graphics. Also kinda harmful, even people without special conditions don't feel too good after looking at such graphics.

Industry Crysis you say?

Can the industry run Crysis?
- Don't be silly, Crysis can't run Crysis

Watch them start selling ray tracing as dlc 😂

Honestly, that’s not a bad idea. Some of us can’t run RT anyway so why not charge extra for developing it?
- They'll still charge the same for the base game without it, don't think otherwise.
- The steamdeck is my most powerful gpu, so if it can’t run there then it can’t run in my home.

Damn, nobody in here is excited for the future of graphics? Guess I'll be the outlier.

I'm looking forward to ray tracing being commonly available. Having actual reflections in game really improves that subconscious immersion and even could open up strategy in some cases. Imagine using a mirror the see someone coming around the corner.

Every time I walk into a bathroom and the mirror is just some generic gray texture it pulls me out.

Realistic lighting, textures, and character models are also pretty great. I want to see the pores on the protagonist's face.

That said, obviously the game needs to be fun more than have good graphics, but man do I love the immersion of high quality visuals.

Look when full path tracing becomes playable easily on a 60 series mainstream level card, I’d be all for devs spending their time on it. Until then what’s the point? I have a 4080 and not a single path tracing game runs in playable framerate/resolution
- That why I said I'm looking forward to it.
According too the article, you’re a vocal gamer in your 40’s or 50’s.
- Or someone with disposable income.
Deus Ex had mirrors, dude. Duke 3D had them, even.
- Yeah, they're just cameras. And they have to be intentional. Pretty different from having all reflective surfaces reflecting what's really going on in the scene.
raytracing is insanely expensive. If you saw what current cards can render in real time, you would see a very very noisy, incomplete image that looks like shit. Without ai denoising and a lot of temporal shit (which only looks good in screenshots). It is very very very far from being able to render an actual frame with decent performance.
I think at a high enough level, the likes of raytracing could actually reduce costs for the developers.

We seem a long way from that though.
I am. I love great graphics and more offten than not play at 40fps 4k native max settings than 60gpd and reduct graphics. I mostly play single player or co op games though so I'm I'm the minority. Thing is cheating the graphics dragon is an expencive hobby which game industry is trying g to cheat and fake with AI and upscaling. I'm all 4 best graphics, what i am not for is fake graphics tricks and unoptimized pules of AAA garbage with a fancy package.
Imagine using a mirror the see someone coming around the corner.

I don’t need a mirror to see someone coming from behind me in Super Mario Bros. Sometimes it is a matter of perspective, point of view and camera angle.

Graphics in my opinion peaked at around 2015. I still boot up games from that time and I think they’re not that different from today’s titles

The amount of effort for such imperceptible improvements is insane.

Also insane is how shit modern games run without multi thousand dollar hardware, even if you turn down settings, but then it also looks like ass in addition to running like shit.
I recently tried Star Wars Battlefront from 2015 on my PC and holy crap it looks good.
So true. A couple years ago, I upgraded from an RX 480 to an RTX 3070. I was excited for ray tracing and so much more. It was very underwhelming.
Yup. I got the Mad Max game or $3 at a steam sale and it's graphics and gameplay is just right.

Art design will always trump straight up graphical wizbangs anyway. There’s a reason Tears of the Kingdom is gorgeous and impressive over here running on a potato versus a lot of games that need more horsepower to run.

The latest game where I thought "damn this looks good" was Sifu. I get like 200fps on my half-potato (5500XT), and that's at ultra quality, definitely "let's turn on vsync to get rid of the fan noise" territory. The reason it looks good is good lightening choices, fluid animation, as well as well-decorated levels. As you can see the textures and geometry are often very simple -- a red fire hose box in a a hallway is just a red box. No fine detail at all, and that's sufficient: It's enough detail so that things don't feel empty, your brain isn't thinking "there should be more here", a whole uncanny valley of its own as the brain gets kinda queasy if there's nothing that it can ignore, but not enough detail as to be cluttering, that is, detract from the readability of the graphics.

Good style and execution will always win out over realism.

And yes it's a 30G game, high-res textures and not kitbashing the levels tends to do that. Also, storing stuff uncompressed the download size is 20G.

(And btw whoever made that video is a good player deliberately playing like ass. You can tell by how they're taking ages to get through the level, the pitiful score, but still not dying or really taking much damage at all).
TOTK looks and runs like crap. Also the world feels bland and empty compared to most other open world RPG's. At least a little effort from Nintendo would go a long way, but especially climbing some mountains with crappy textures and jagged edges looks eerily similar to a lot of PS2 games I still play.
- I agree with you. TOTK (and other open world games) on the Switch is an unpleasant experience. The hardware just isn’t capable of it
  
  I do however think the developers did put some effort into attempting to mitigate the underperforming hardware - hence the seeming emptiness of the world. It just wasn’t enough. There are games that run well on the Switch - Metroid Prime Remastered is incredible, for example, but we must ask why: the answer is that that game’s world consists of a large number of small rooms, basically the polar opposite of an open world design.
  
  Art style trumps graphical fidelity, but you do need a decent baseline capability to be able to pull it off.
  
  Also, if you enjoyed TOTK don’t let me ruin your fun - it’s a subjective thing. Just don’t tell me there’s objectively no problems with it, because there clearly are

you can make the most beautiful cake and its worth nothing if there is just sawdust inside

Yup, first and foremost, figure out your gameplay loops.

Get that right and you can pretty it all up later.

I mean, how are they supposed to pay the execs millions of dollars if they have to pay the developers to make the game do the thing?

Games reached real enough like 2016, and they were so optimized I can run them on a GTX 1050, now they look 5% better but need a 2k GPU, thx I'll keep playing Titanfall 2

Gaming really peaked with TF2. It’s been downhill ever since.
- Yep it was the last good AAA game, it doesn't have any in-game casino or loot boxes or battle passes, you want a skin you just buy it, and has skins that are unlocked only with skill, so you can feel good you unlocked it because you are good
For me "real enough" would be KotORII:TSL . Or maybe HP5 game.

I mean, what does "real enough" in games matter when you know characters are nothing like real?

The graphics are too expensive for AAA games? AAA means they are throwing the highest category budget for developing a game. And they ONLY invest in graphics, discarding the rest like a proper story (if any), decent characters, bug fixing, balancing, etc. Now they create junk only 1% of players with a 4090 can run somewhay decently on medium settings with 30fps average and loads of framedrops.

Wow guys, amazing, thanks I guess, this costed me 80 euros. Can't you tone down the graphics by at least 60% and focus on the "game" part of the game instead?

There are plenty of titles that do just that you can buy instead you know.
- Oh I do, I'm skipping all AAA games. I illegally download them out of curiosity, but often delete them after 30min of playtime. But it still gets me angry because it basically is a major scam. Luring in loads of people with cool looking videos, then to deliver a bug simulator with most content locked behind more purchases (DLC's, loot boxes, subscriptions), completely unbalanced and abandoned after the fist sale period because fixing the bugs and balance doesn't provide more income so might as well quit and start a new scam. And then the audacity to complain people should not expect Baldur's Gate 3 to be a standard to compare other games to. Maybe do see it as a standard and try to create a properly working product with actual decent content worth it's money?

Hardware to run them is getting too costly for consumers. I think there is a solution everyone can be happy with somewhere.

Indie devs have been there forever. Can't compete on the AAA features? Compensate with interesting art and smart tech.
- At this point, to me, "AAA" features means it's full of microtransactions, predatory marketing, and lootbox gambling.
- And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint... but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.
There is. The Switch cannot push graphics like the PS5 Pro, but is still one of the best selling consoles in history. Most Nintendo produced games are graphically basic, but so well stylized and optimized that nobody cares! They are good fun games.
- PC master race is in shambles!

Graphics are not everything, for me it's game-play first. I'm playing Carrier Command 2 now for a month straight and it has mediocre pixel and low-poly graphics, but the immersion is fantastic. It's a time sink and I forget when I should quit playing it. Hyper realistic graphics have their audience, but now they're at the point where a little improvement in graphics has diminishing returns, hence the high cost.

Great, new game to try. Love me some quality time sinks.

Fully agree on graphics- I want to enjoy a game, graphics are only a component of that, and its not necessarily hyper realistic.
I used to play carrier command back in the day. It had low poly graphics, but it was great for the time. I used to love flying a Manta to escort a walrus to hit a long distance target. Did you play the original? How does it compare?
- Unfortunately I haven't played the original but the sequel is fine for me. I just beat for Christmas 4 AI enemy carriers and it was fun. Sure, the game feels unfinished because it was cut out mid production due to time constrains, but according to me, the game devs are sitting on a golden goose. They simply have to finish the game and make it more popular. I'm pretty sure the game would rock. Up until now it's fine as a RTS in first person perspective, but definitively it needs QOL improvements that the community behind it are desperately asking for. It can get stale and boring after a while. More variety of play is needed and definitely more complex islands to invade and conquer.

Maybe they'd do better if they tried selling games instead of games as a service and stores with a game attached.

9 times out of 10, I won't see your brand new AAA title for several years after release. While there are occasional exceptions, I don't really buy at launch. Your cutting edge graphics mean nothing to me without story, characters, and writing. If you invest in looks without substance, I will never waste my time with you.

the broader genre of single-player action games has mostly diminished to Soulslikes and gacha games a la Genshin Impact

I call bullshit. There are all kinds of awesome, successful, action games that don't fit this mold. This whole piece reads like it was placed by a high level exec that's preparing to lay off a bunch of graphic artists and devs.

Art > graphics, but this article sucks.

What about destructible environment, physics, attention to details?

All what I see nowadays are mediocre products in flashy packaging. Consumers seem to prioritize aesthetics over quality; if a game is colorful and visually appealing, it often sells well. Whats up with freedom of jumping on that crate, blowing up that wall, shooting up the props etc.

At times, it feels as though I am confined within an enclosure, where the visuals and sounds serve merely to distract me from this realization.

I think it’s crazy that we always want prettier games when you still have visual glitches like cars disappearing in your rearview mirror, buildings and textures appearing late, screen tearing when you make your POV spin.

I don’t really need way better graphics, but I’d need these things gone as they take me out of my game way more than no raytracing or a slight fps drop.

I think these things would be easy to solve if we didn’t always get better graphics.

Object permanence in a game still has yet to blow my mind. Dwarf fortress does it pretty well (abandoning a mine to ruin only to revisit the walls you etched aeons ago as an adventurer), and minecraft of course, but any game with decent graphics seem to just abandon this altogether. You're just visiting that world, you're not making any change
- Well I meant more something like you driving a car fast in an open world and having objects appearing in front of you because everything isn’t loaded yet.
  
  Or landscape disappearing from your rear view mirror in racing games in order to save some memory.
  
  These things wouldn’t cost anything to solve if we gave up some graphical fidelity.
- Also, interactivity. Both games you mentioned have unparalleled interactivity when compared with the triple A space.
  
  Not saying it's necessary, but at a certain level of fidelity/realism it starts to look really weird when the world doesn't meaningfully react to your actions.
- Star Citizen is putting a lot of effort into this, and it looks like they're getting good results.
- Even for games that have the most minimum required, it's an issue. Modern games can't populate the maps anymore because of the system requirements to do that while also having "pretty graphics".
You can hide glitches from videos and screenshots, but you can't hide the graphics.

Glitches are something people notice after they spend their money, which is why corporations don't care about them as much.

The NYT article doesn't mention that new AAA console games often cost $70. I have not bought a brand new game in years because I just can't justify that cost. I have such a huge backlog between PS4 and PC, that there is just no reason to buy new games

What cutting edge graphics? The blurry as smudge that is TAA in all the modern games? Fuck off. What's expensive is the actual slop that is modern games

TAA, motion blur, depth of field. Why do "technologies" to turn a good looking game into a trash looking game even exist?
Space Marine 2 is sharp AF BTW. Also not Unreal Engine, but the Swarm Engine, BTW.

The texture detail in that game is crazy, even though you normally don't see most of it because it's too small.

It also has a really fun gameplay loop, that I haven't felt in a while. Good shit.
Yeah and we are going to see more of that in the future since everyone and their mom are switching to UE5.

I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.

On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don't think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.

Fidelity has value but gets diminishing returns the harder it gets.
BG3 wasn't nearly as far as they're trying to push though. For example it was beautiful on the normal PS5, as were the Horizon Zero Dawn games. And yet somehow that's not far enough for them.

I can only really think of two games that really justify enormous development costs, and that's Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.

If your game isn't pushing things to that level of expectation, you really need to rethink what you're doing with that budget.

Neee more micro transactions and loots boxes?

So tired of these corpo parasites opions being injected to my socials feeds.

STFU and make good games, maybe I will start buying them again

People still love cult movies and other classics from 100 to 50 years ago, with handcrafted or minimal budget special effects, no CGI. It's because it's an entire art form and it can't just be reduced solely to aesthetic appeal. That kind of approach is just a result of the commodification of art. You want to reduce a successful work of art to some quantifiable metric besides popularity/sales, so that you can create repeatable processes around producing it and selling it, and optimize them for cost, but art defies quantification. Even just basic "enjoyable gameplay" defies that.

This guy MBAs.
- That should have come across as critical of the commodification.

People care about graphics.
But they care about other things more
So the graphics need to be in service to something.

Imo the problem is that studios have become risk adverse because their budget is so big, so they pick an already popular IP, choose a marketable aspect of that IP, and spend that fortune turning the dial of that aspect up to 11.

Like X but bigger map
Like Y but more playable characters
Like Z but better graphics
Etc
But none of the time actually innovating any new player experience.

And players are finally getting fed up with playing the same handful of AAA game experiences again and again with different titles.

Graphics just happens to be the marketable attribute they like to crank most often

What they need to do is throw some spaghetti at the wall, see what's fun, then throw their hundreds of millions of dollars behind THAT.

add me to the crowd where graphics is not a major thing. its great ad can make one game preferable to another but im all about character customization both in look and abilities.

Animal Well was the best game I played this year and it was made by one dude who built his own engine.

Balatro is a close second with the best soundtrack. The Dev bought it on Fiverr.

that's fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it'll run fine even without upscaling.

[…], particularly when end users tend to despise particularly greedy live service business models.

Have you considered making your business models … not particularly greedy?

If the company is publicly traded, it is obligated to be most particularly greedy.

I'm also going to add my stone to the pile here and point out that this hyperfixation on more and more "graphics" usually results in it ultimately being impossible to actually see what the fuck is happening on the screen.

You are a realistic barbarian dude who is brown, and wearing brown. standing in a realistic landscape which is brown, against a realistic highly textured and bump mapped bunch of trees which are brown, with leaves that are waving around in all directions realistically and are brown, trying to dodge arrows (which are brown) raining on you from the half dozen hairy orcs in the distance, who are also brown. And about nine pixels tall, and hidden in the bushes. Which are brown. And if this isn't happening verbatim (or even if it is), 2/3 of the screen is also covered by a zillion glowy particle effects, motion blur, and bloom, which are the only colorful parts of the image but still add up to you not being able to actually see jack shit out of what's important.

Bonus points if this also requires near frame-perfect inputs to handle, and you have half a second of input lag in between all the shit your console is trying to render plus the two or three frames eaten by postprocessing to make it "look pretty."

Yeah, fuck all that.

A major part of game deign that everyone seems to forget a lot these days in the name of making everything realistic and/or extra graphicy is clearly communicating to the player just what the hell is going on. Older games, I find, often did a significantly better job of this.

This was actually a lot worse in the early 2000s, as this video shows: https://youtu.be/6qQIhIOaiY4 I agree that there tends to be too much visual clutter on the screen sometimes in current games, especially particle effects. It's ironic that almost every 3rd person game seems to have a "Batman vision" toggle these days that simplifies what you see on screen so you have a chance to actual see stuff that's important. Also the often criticised yellow markers for climbing passages.
This screams anecdotal. I don't find that this is true of next gen titles in general. Lots and lots of absolutely stunning, gorgeous games are available to play where not everything is brown, or otherwise difficult to see.

The concept of realistic graphics doesn't necessarily have to equate to realism either. Hear me out. Games can look so gorgeous and realistic without having graphics that portray something that looks like this world in which we live. Alien worlds, unnatural colors, but still with light that behaves physically correct using advanced techniques.

I'm all for amazing graphics, and giving developers the tools they need to fulfill their visions. If it looks like garbage though, don't buy the shit.
I totally agree. It's actually difficult for my brain to process all that detail. Part of it may be due to me being raised with ps1/ps2 graphics.

Imho, graphics don't make the game. There are people here still playing doom and portal. Even games like Terraria aren't too demanding. You don't need amazing graphics.

Or any graphics for dwarf fortress and nethack (other rouguelikes also apply)
- Yeah, been playing Enter the Gungeon and it's amazing as well

There have been massive diminishing returns on graphical quality vs. hardware and developer requirements since the PS3 era.

I will always put an emphasis on art style and gameplay over trend-chasing and what takes the most computing power.

bruh Im out here still playing Beyond Oasis. Just make a good fucking game and I'll play it for 30 years. I dont think people making games actually listen to people playing games.

Mufasa wouldn't have been a bad movie if they just sprang for animation, and voice actors who even attempt to sound like the characters they're playing.

I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…

Oh these fuckers.

So now the horribly expensive games with micro transactions isn't enough for them? Well of course.

Nothing is ever enough for them.

Fucking are we gonna have to do a violent armed socialist revolution just to checks notes keep having graphics in games we have to pay an arm and a leg for?

The opposite issue that Gamefreak has...

Personally, I think new games DO NOT need to surpass Monster Hunter: World and GTA 5. These games still look great to me. I can't imagine most people wanting 4K monitors and the PC parts required to run it. A game running on a good 1440p preset looks fantastic anyways.

I guess normies still equate graphic quality with overall game quality, so that's why there's such a big emphasis on photorrealism for many AAA games. An old colleague from university, ~2010, only liked to play the shiniest, "best looking" stuff and scoffed at 2D games, "we're way past super nintendos".

Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don't exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.

Fuck cutting-edge graphics

Anno 1800 looks great, better than all the previous titles and is definitely a plus

They pushed this on us so they can make us buy new video cards every other year.

Do we need cutting-edge tables, cutting-edge water pipes, cutting-edge paintings, cutting-edge windows, cutting-edge power generators even?

That kind of competition really is unhealthy.

If not for this bullshit, we'd have a better choice of personal computer hardware and operating systems. We wouldn't have a lot of what they call enshittification.

What I don't understand is where the wide masses of normies got all this progress-signaling? I first sat behind a PC as a kid, it was DOS, someone showed me how to navigate directories, but I don't remember any specifics. Then Windows 98 at home. Then we got a new PC and there was Windows 2000 on it. I didn't like any Windows after it, but XP was fine.

That was me, like, being 9? I understood a bit more about computers than the average normie since then.

So - why did that me never have this progress-signaling, idea that buying something "cutting-edge" they don't understand somehow makes sense, but the whole crowd of people not knowing what a transistor is would apparently care so much for progress and cutting-edge?

I just don't understand. What do people knowing nothing about certain industry would get from caring about its development?

Thanks to valve/proton, the biggest issue for playing on linux nowadays is the kernel level anti-cheat they force on some competitive games.

Other than that most of the games just work, especially if they were made in a common engine (godot, unity, ue, …)