Games

Then don't, i doubt people get sad when they realize they don't have to buy another overpriced gpu to run the game they anticipated the most.

A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.

Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that's achievable plays into what the design may be, although it's not a direct correlation.

I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That's probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.

My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don't look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.

Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.

I don't need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character's face. I don't need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won't notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or "play" sections that may as well be cutscenes.

I don't want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.

I mean, look at Nintendo. Obviously aggressive legal tactics aside, they make some damn fun games because they know that gameplay matters more than graphics.

Sound design > Graphics

I have a computer from 2017. It's also a Mac. I can't play recent games and I think I've just gotten more and more turned off by the whole emphasis on better graphics and the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on either a console or a really good graphics card for a PC has just turned me off of mainstream gaming completely.

Mostly I just go play games I played when I was a kid these days. 1980s graphics and yet I have yet to get tired of many of them...

My favourite games don't look nearly as good as in my memory. Graphics don't matter, they might even hurt, because there is less left to imagination.

The game of the year was a cutesy cartoon game about a robot. I don't think there's a problem here.

This is my current addiction. No need graphix.

Gifted my kids, both of them already young adults, one of those retro gaming sticks. An absolute bang/for/buck wonder, full of retro emulators and ROMs. Christmas Day, at grandmas was a retro fest, with even grandma playing. Pac man, frogger, space invaders, galaga, donkey Kong, early console games…. Retro gaming has amazing games, where gameplay and concepts had to make do with the limited resources.

My son has a Steam deck, but he had a blast with the rest.

I had a lot of fun playing Romancing Saga 2 and Ara Fell recently. Sometimes games can be more immersive by not having high fidelity graphics.

This author has no fucking clue that the indie gaming industry exists.

Like Balatro... you know, the fucking Indie Game of the Year, that was also nominated for Best Game of the Year at the Game Awards.

Localthunk was able to build this in Lua... WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!

Is there a way to actually read the article without having to be exposed to whatever the drug fueled hellscape that website is?

There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.

Whoosh.

We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)

There's a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.

Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It's like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.

Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.

Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.

Also, as others have pointed out, it's capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn't get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn't give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said "we want our money back... now." It's a choice to release too early.

...but on the other hand it's also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.

Unpopular opinion but I preferer the graphics of a game were absolute trash but the ost be awesome. I can forget easyly how much individual hairs are in a 3d model, but good OST will live in my mind and heart forever.

And of course gameplay go first.