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.
Games were better when graphics were secondary
Obligatory: Starsector
Also Rimworld, Project Zomboid, Prison Architect, Factorio… basically if you like sandbox games, there’s a ton out there.
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!
Kerbal Space Program, Derail Valley, Nucleares, …
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.
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
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).
Fallout 3 looks like dog shit man. It has since day 1. It’s one of my favorite games and I have 100% on it, but it has never looked good.
Every bethesda game looks like dogshit.
not skyrim. or fallout 4. beautiful landscapes everywhere
Because you’re playing the game wrong You’re supposed to install at least 300 mods first /s
Fo76 looks amazing on max settings and nvidia upscaling. It still has ugly elements but overall I made so many screenshots the only other game I made this many screenshots is modded Skyrim.
I will link one later actually to demonstrate it
No it doesnt. It looks like an upscaled 2003 game. Hell, Starfield also looks like its from 2010. Plays like it too
It’s just like your opinion man
Idk, I’m playing FO76 on ultra on 4K right now and it looks like shit. Not much different than Skyrim. Compare it to something like Forza Horizon 5 and it’s not even funny how bad FO76 looks like.
I guess I compare it more with games like Elder Scrolls Online that are so ugly and without physics that they are unplayable to me. Valheim also barely makes it fidelity wise so fo76 looking this good and having physics and stuff and everything from a singleplayer game was a shock.
It is genius level of game dev. You don’t even feel it is online most of the time, no lags and such. There are some bugs it is Bethesda after all but overall wow. Why can’t all online games be like this?
Not to mention it has the best open map since frikin elder scrolls morrowind. It feels like the same person designed the map with ash region and stuff.
Now, if they improved it with some sandbox type economy a la eve online that would be shared between all instances and some kind of control territory map also shared between instances connected to camps… there is huge potential here. I want a fallout game with elements from Star Wars Galaxies while still preserving fidelity on the level of a single player game.
There is another project that tries to achieve something in that direction since 12 years and 700 milion dollars called Star Citizen but it’s been a real mess with few redeeming qualities if any.
San Andreas is my favourite GTA but man that game wasn’t good looking at all even at launch on PC
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.
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.
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.
As a game dev who’s making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
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.
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 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”
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 :)
I mean Abiotic Factor just released to early access and that one looks like a GoldSRC game.
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
Just make guns and bombs work in MSFS.
until then: DCS
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.
There’s just not really anything else quite like Noita, is there. What a great game.
I’m 200 hours in with no wins! It’s the first game that’s really grabbed me since I transitioned away from flatscreen gaming to VR a few years back.
Same. I’m always playing a variety of VR games and noita. But if i could play noita in VR i definitely would XD
I found this guy https://youtube.com/@grantkot?si=lRNFq8OeSnPm8wOO on youtube that has a great looking engine that has already partly implemented VR he says and i can’t wait to see where this goes!Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/@grantkot?si=lRNFq8OeSnPm8wOO
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Looks awesome, I’ll keep an eye on that! If you haven’t heard of Cabbibo you should definitely check out his work. This one fits in this thread nicely: Blaarp
Blaarp looks really cool! It makes me think of chroma lab i’m a big fan of these games!
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.
I really enjoyed Osmos back in the day. Like a relaxing Katamari.
Does it ever go on sale on steam? It’s already pretty cheap but i might as well wait for a discount.
No idea, I got it on a Humble Bundle about 15 years ago.
Started reading your comment and was just about to recommend you play Noita lol.
Numpty Physics, Box Stacker(Fdroid) or Neverputt are all pretty fun.
PowderToy is excellent as mentioned above.
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.
It’s a cool sandbox with a bunch of different materials you can mess with.
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.
