As video games develop more and more over the years, companies have been making them more and more realistic-looking. I can guess this is related to expectations, but am I the only one who doesn’t care about graphics? We could be using the same processing power to store worlds that have as much exploration potential as the Earth itself if we weren’t afraid to save on processing power by going back to 8-bit.
Speaking as a story-heavy RPG enthusiast, so my focus is more on story-telling and exploration. I don’t think it’s the graphics that’s holding back the exploration potential, but rather the complexity of actually creating huge game worlds. You tend to end up with either a procedural generated world without a lot of cohesion, or one that’s a mile wide but an inch deep in interactivity.
Just look at Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s a hugely complex and reactive game world, but it’s locations and the way you are allowed to explore them are reduced to three linear chapters. Even if you switched to, say Baldur’s Gate 2 era graphics, it would still not be possible to create a game in a single huge explorable world with the same level of complexity and story telling.Though I’m definitely with you on scaling down the graphics in exchange for richer and more interactive worlds, I do think there’s a hard limit on how much better those worlds would get.
Don’t forget though there’s more than one way to make interactivity. The original Legend of Zelda was the 8-bit equivalent of Breath of the Wild and offered a lot of intrigue in each stage when it came to where to go next by having the right cause and effect system.
Ghost Recon, Ravenfield, Battlebit etc are shooters with simple graphics. Ghost Recon was from constraints of its time (2001 release) but Ravenfield and Battlebit could be way more photorealistic (like Squad) but chose not to. And I like that. In shooters you want good visuals if you can but having consistent performance is a bigger deal than some other games. I don’t care about frame rate stutters in a turn based game like X-Com for example.
Speaking of turn based, one of the graphically simplest games I’ve playes recently is Armored Commander II. It is very very basic graphically (think dwarf fortress or intellivision) and I shit you not it is more immersive than it has any right to. The graphics and display info gives you juuuust enough info to set your imagination into overdrive to fill in the rest.
When your Sherman is almost out of ammo, bogged down in a muddy field and taking fire from enemy tanks in a nearby farm the actual graphics don’t really matter so much
Graphics are important. Polygon count is not. There is no real value in being able to see each individual eyelash, but I also don’t think there’s much benefit to making every game look like the original Lode Runner.
Wouldn’t it save data power? I would imagine that a game with the simpler visuals from the golden age of video games would cost a machine less bytes to perform.
It depends on a lot of factors. Minecraft, despite its signature simplistic artstyle, takes a surprising amount of CPU power to run - a lot more so if you run mods. Even a Minecraft server, which doesn’t render graphics at all, takes a beefy machine and a lot of RAM.
It’s as much about graphical fidelity as it is quality of code, and unfortunately, there are a lot of game studios that don’t seem especially bothered about optimising their games. To the extent that you can fill, say, an Xbox’s hard drive with only two or three AAA games.
All that said, you’re right in that simpler graphics in general mean less work for the graphics card to do. Just that it’s not the only factor.
sounds like PC gamers should fire up an Amiga emulator and learn what gameplay could be.
I do this sometimes. Emulators are the best. I wish game companies would use them as a cue to revive the concept of having events around games they consider far in the past.
I care about art direction. Graphical capability can give digital artists more freedom especially for photorealistic styles. But few games actually make good use of such artistic freedom.
My favourite 3D game graphics is Super Mario Galaxy. Other than that I mostly prefer game graphics from 16-bit consoles.
I do care about art direction, I just care so much more about the world in the game that if whole parts of the in-game world can come at the same processing cost as a little realism, I’d choose more chunks of the world.
I’m with you. I think “peak graphics” for me was around XBox 360. I’d much rather have resources used for better gameplay, larger worlds, more expansive story, etc. Also, just less resource usage in general; I stopped PC gaming forever ago because I got sick of chasing the GPU dragon.
Not sure I’d want to go all the way back to 8-bit, but somewhere between there and XB360 would be fine. That said, I do like seeing new “retro” games that are 8-bit era appropriate.
Somewhere between 8-bit and XB360 would be PS1.
I dislike PS1 graphics. Too many games use 3D graphics for no reason, and they used dark and muted colours to be “realistic”.
N64 games are usually more colourful and more pleasing, even though they lack texture.
XB360 had enough power to finally show 3D without feeling “trying too hard”.
I meant it as more of a range than a hard point on a line, lol.
But yeah, PS1 games are pretty rough to look at.
Within the range, I would give: SNES: 10/10 (my favourite game graphics of all time. e.g. FF6) N64:6/10 (1st party games have good art direction) PS1: 5/10 (could be lower, but saved by games with pre-rendered backgrounds) PS2: 7/10 (some outstanding graphics such as Shadow of the Colossus)
Wait, was Pokémon Red/Blue 8-bit or 16-bit? You got me second-guessing now.
8-bit. They were released for the original Gameboy.
i think stardew valley is itself proof that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play.
That and Undertale.
It’s not a proof, it’s an exception.
is earth proof of life across the universe or are we an exception?
Stardew looks fantastic, what are you saying?
that detailed graphics are not a requirement for good game play
They’re not, but your example is a game with detailed graphics…
yep, that is an interesting opinion on graphics.
…It’s not really an opinion, but okay
whatever floats your boat semantic master
I’m on the same boat. Photorealism only gets you so far, and pixel-art like graphics have their own charm. .
That and it doesn’t effect gameplay quality. A fun enough game retains its addictiveness no matter how real the visuals look.
yeah, but I assume you are a terminal nerd and not a normie. I kinda feel same like you however I do so because I can’t afford a graphic card. I wonder if someone has already made a text based open world game.
plus it also depends on your age. I assume you are a old and don’t like new stuff. but graphics has it’s own place. eg, you can play plain minecraft and you play minecraft with realistic graphics mod. you will find a huge difference.
I was working on a text based open world game but it was kind of terrible so I stopped working on it. I should redo it but better some day.
Here it is but be warned it is not well made https://gitlab.com/TurboWafflz/terminalcraft
the game you mentioned is good. however when I played it, it crashed saying “index out of range” error.
I’m 24 and do like new stuff, I just think of visual appeal as secondary. Imagine if the same processing power for one 3D Pokémon world powered all the Pokémon worlds in two dimensions.
2D Pokemon games are really great. I used to play Pokemon firered in a potato mobile phone for hours and hours. even though It didn’t have great graphics it was fun. I agree with you that some games can be really good in 2D too. however modern games like COD and GOW has their own place.
TIL you can play Pokémon Firered on a phone.
Oh man, you are gonna love emulators.
“Function over form” is a mantra I live by. This is reflected in the software I use/make, as well as the games I play.
What software do you make?
Nothing noteworthy. Mostly just utility stuff that I use myself, or work related stuff. A typical example is a self-test script that I wrote in perl because I’m lazy, and somehow it became a company standard and made it’s way into written procedures - It just checks various services and misc network stuff, and let’s you know if there’s something obviously wrong happening.
I feel like people who talk about graphics fundamentally misunderstand what they themselves crave.
People want things that are nice to look at. Some artstyles require more computation than others, but ultimately all of gaming is art, and all of art is a conjuring trick, much like Cinema, how something is accomplished or how “believable” it looks is secondary to how invested you are in what you are consuming, yanno?
I do however have personal opinions, and my personal opinion is that gaming peaked during the PS2/GameCube/Xbox years. Hardware was just about good enough that pretty much anything developers wanted to make, they could achieve. Nothing looked like real life, sure, but it looked good enough. And the more detail you are throwing at the screen, the more expensive it is to make. So back then we had a lot of mid-budget games. That had resources not available to modern Indie studios to do ambitious things, but were also not these insane investments that had to please every executive under the sun and monetise everything in order to break even.
The perfect balance between niceness and feasibility.
You wouldn’t be wrong about games peaking in the PS2 years, in fact the PS3 specifically made itself backward compatible with the PS1 and not the PS2 because it would’ve given the PS2 an unwanted W in how utterly overshadowing it was.
PS3 had backwards compatibility with PS2 for the first couple of hardware revisions, it was removed later.
The move to “HD” when the PS3/360 were dominant was the death knell of hundreds of mid-sized studios, and gaming never really recovered from it.
You are not alone. I do have a lower threshold that is above 8 bit, but I want enough of a difference from real life that I don’t constantly think I’m watching a real person through the eyes of a drone.
I think there are possibilities for games that are 8bit, depending on what the game style is. Some simple games and side scrollers wouldn’t need to be much higher that that.
So something like Wind Waker?
I care about the art on an individual level and as a whole when compared to how it adds to the game. Applying a strict criteria of detail and other metrics is pointless when games are meant to be works of art and passion. Its too subjective to judge it. Like judging Salt & Sanctuary solely on its Dishwasher inspired art would be a misstep. The SRT ads to the bleakness of the world while also maintaining the studio’s style
I remember when Wind Waker first came out, the graphics were something everyone complained about, and now two decades later, everyone misses that style of visual representation.
Personally, I’ve never been particularly wowed by good graphics. I’m perfectly happy to play a game with crunchy graphics from decades ago if the gameplay is fun, or a modern indie title with low poly or pixel art graphics. There are plenty of great games out there where the graphics are nothing special.
Do you use an emulator or do you do it the old fashioned way?
Both, but mainly I play PC games bought on Steam, not emulated console games.
I care – all else held equal, I’d rather have snazzier graphics – but I feel like there’s pretty strongly diminishing returns.
And because resources are finite, all else isn’t held equal. You’re giving up time spent working on gameplay or whatever to stick fancier graphic assets in.
Some of my favorite games don’t have much by way of graphics.
I do kind of wish that I could get upscaled versions of a number of games that I enjoy with low-resolution pixel graphics, though – I’d like “high-resolution DLC” to be a thing for successful games like that. Think Caves of Qud or something like that. IIRC Cave Story did that, along with a handful of other games. Would like to have higher-res versions of Balatro. Same for Noita, though there I guess the resolution hooks into the game mechanics, so have to be careful how to deal with that.
I’ve also seen some games with untextured polygons that have worked out pretty well. Star Fox for the Super Nintendo and Avara and Flying Nightmares for the classic Mac came from an era when texturing wasn’t always possible. Carrier Command 2 is much newer, and uses only limited texturing.
Minecraft went a long way with very technically-limited graphics.
There are a lot of good roguelikes that just use text.
Same. Most of the games I like are enjoyable due to the game mechanics. I can attest a Pokémon game for example could even be HTML (the old, old Pokémon MMORPG’s were like this) and still be enjoyable, since it’s at heart about strategy (hence why the TCG exists).
And because resources are finite, all else isn’t held equal. You’re giving up time spent working on gameplay or whatever to stick fancier graphic assets in.
That’s not how game design works. The people who work on the gameplay and level design and dialog are not the same people who work on the graphics. Sure, making the game prettier takes more time, but it has no effect on how long the rest of the game takes to be built. And lower-quality assets can be used in the interim for things like scripting animations, with higher quality assets swapped in later.
You could hire more game devs if that money wasn’t spent on excessive prettiness.
And keep in mind, there’s as much cost in an organization for management overhead, if not more.
Sure, the same people can’t work on the different aspects, but budget for more designers who spend longer making more detailed graphics could be spent on other departments that do affect gameplay.
Balatro is a perfect example of a game that I don’t think would benefit at all from better graphics. It’s the gameplay that matters.
