I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…
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).
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.
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…
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.
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.
Cyberpunk is 4 years old or more, afaik it never got more than 50% discount, too much for me
I’ve been enjoying NMS. Could be a while before I form an opinion on CP2077.
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…
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!
I’m really hoping that, with 4 vehicles now and the knave racing in duviri, that we’ll get a conclave racing game mode at some point.
Oh, Conclave definitely needs less killing and more sports! I think Lunaro could be great if they’d rework it a bit. And actual races sound like they could be a blast, yes!
Heck, Tennolympics! Why not! Go all in!:))
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!
Industry Crysis you say?
Can the industry run Crysis?
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True. We’re only just getting doom to run on a minifridge.
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.
Then stop making games with cutting edge graphics. I just want to play it on a steamdeck anyway.
This is a totally reasonable request yup.
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.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Risk of Rain, Dungeon of the Endless. I can play DRG Survivor at 80% scale without triggering the fan.
Whereas BG3 turns on the fans for the title screen.
Hades is great.
For real. I’m just having a blast playing Hades right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
According too the article, you’re a vocal gamer in your 40’s or 50’s.
Or someone with disposable income.
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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.
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
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.
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.
It did. Not sure why they said that. And I agree with you 100%. In fact, the success of Minecraft and Roblox alone should show that sometimes paying attention to the graphics is not necessarily what a developer should be doing.
There is room for AAA games with mindblowing graphics, but there should also be room for AAA games where they focus on other features over worrying about how amazing the graphics are.
Fuck cutting-edge graphics
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.
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, …)
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.
That’s hilarious because cutting edge graphics is all they have left
Anno 1800 looks great, better than all the previous titles and is definitely a plus
