Technology

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?

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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.