I don’t know what you’re talking about, old games were just as fucking janky on release, and most of them took years of modders fixing all those issues for them to get better.
Fallout 1 & 2 - janky on release
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 - janky on release
Morrowind - janky on release
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Chernobyl - janky on release
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 - janky on release
All of these were capable of being installed and “just playing” them on release. There were countless bugs and janky behavior and that’s normal and we’re now spoiled by day 1 patches. STALKER 2 has been out a month and has had three major patches for bug fixes. STALKER Call of Chernobyl probably could have used the same but in 2007 the infrastructure to push quick updates just wasn’t there yet. Steam had only released by Valve in late 2003, roughly three and a half years earlier.
Nope, because I don’t give one shit about those kinds of games. Nintendo and indie games have never cared about graphics and performance. I haven’t owned a PlayStation since the PS2, and I’ve never owned an Xbox. Crazy how if your only console is a Nintendo then you never really care about that stuff. I do have a gaming pc but still play mostly indie games.
A Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom aren’t the prettiest games but they have two very big deals about them.
Stylization. Games with a specific art style tend to age better than ones with ultra realistic art styles. Team Fortress 2 aged better than a lot of things because it leaned into the Pixar-cartoony style. ABotW and TotK both have their own unique style that will age incredibly well.
Instead of the focus being graphics, the gameplay is the core loop. Tears of the Kingdom especially deserves accolades for how well the entire system of combining weapons and items just works. Who cares about the graphics, the crazy shit you do in the game isn’t causing the game to crash or fall to pieces. The game expected this, it was built to handle this, and this is proof that it was way more important to the developers than the graphics.
In the battle of KPI vs Mixed Methods, objective vs subjective, some prefer objective…
I’m not a PC gamer, perhaps the people who play PC games invested a lot in their rig and expect a studio experience. So they review it and other people realize they are not getting the best experience.
Nintendo Switch users with NSO might not realize that the software emulation used to run those games suffers from latency, and they will enjoy themselves until someone they trust brings it up and sends them down the rabbit hole.
I’m currently grinding a game that looks like it was made in 2015 and had a few bugs. I don’t care because it is what I want to play.
Graphics have never been a priority for me, they’re more like an inevitable side effect of technology advancing. Luckily there is no shortage of good old games, and a lot of smaller studios are making amazing titles with older art styles / less demanding specs.
I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn't really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).
I feel like I might get a ton of downvotes for this, but I kind of disagree. Maybe when it comes to things like texture detail, we certainly don’t need every single hair on Roach modeled with full physics or anything.
That’s only a subset of what constitutes graphics in a game though. I think that while it is computationally expensive, the improvements in lighting that we’re seeing contribute to making graphics more realistic and do matter.
I get that people meme on Ray Tracing and the whole RTX On thing, but lighting techniques like Path Tracing, Global Illumination, and Dynamic Illumination are just as much a generational shift as physics was in HL2. Output resolution and texture resolution got pushed to a point where any further gains are marginal improvements at best. Physics is getting to that point, although there’s still room for improvement. Look at how well the finals handles destruction physics, or the ballistics models used in Arma 3. Lighting is the next thing being refined, and it has a ways to go. I’d bet that in 10 years full, real time, dynamic, ray traced lighting will be taken for granted, and we’ll be arguing whether there’s any value or added realism benefit to increasing the number of individual rays cast by each light source, or how many bounces they take. I’d also not be surprised if people were memeing about RTX Sound On at that point and saying that game audio peaked with HRTF or Spatial Audio.
Good buys… Cities:Skylines is great, but need some DLC for a good game experience… Vanilla version of game is poor in content. Europa Universalis IV is a good game. You have a game for many hours and many DLC too…
Nothing happened. It is the same as always. There was no time, when graphics (and audio) weren’t the hottest shit to talk about. We did that in the 90s in ads, game magazines and in the schoolyard. And the people before us did the same. The buzzwords back then were different but that’s all.
Maybe stop watching youtubers, if that annoys you? Idk.
Well, my thoughts on this are pretty ‘basic.’ I buy games that I enjoy. I think that <5% of my games purchased in the last two years are games that have been released within a year of when I buy them.
There are more than enough games that are amazing from the past 30 years to keep me occupied for the next 10, and not a single one of them stresses my 12 year old computer. Plus, while I can understand the complaints about Steam being the massive titan that it is, I am quite happy with them and their Linux gaming enabling work. I really do just install games and play them.
Ignore all the that, it’s marketing. A lot of cool indies that have better story and mechanics than AAA games, you just have to look beyond your usual places
To be faaaaaaaaaaaiiiiir, a lot of that was tied up in the switch from overhead isometric view to first-person view.
Fallout 1/2 didn’t focus on graphics, they were in many ways point-and-click adventures. A lot of things you had to hover over for “flavor text” and every once in a while something only four pixels wide exists that you need to notice.
So the gameplay actually actively eschewed graphics in favor of things like flavor text and reading.
Further, the switch to first person broke the SPECIAL system, because how to you even manage a gun skill in a first person shooter without it feeling absurd? It made sense in isometric, even if it was often frustrating to miss an enemy when you had a 79% chance to shoot them in the balls. Putting that in a first person when you mag dump into someone standing right in front of you and half your shots feels a lot less realistic, and can quickly become frustrating in a more fast-paced first-person-shooter environment. The SPECIAL system feels absolutely slapped on as an afterthought in Fallout 3.
Also, the writing in Fallout 3 was that shitty Bethesda writing. The writing was just subpar compared to the prior two installments. Especially the fucking stupid ass end of the game.
I’d say a lot of those complaints were driven more by the perspective switch than anything else.
It’s hype for marketing. Our society is based on consumption and over spending. The GPU and CPU manufactures want us to keep spending money to have the latest and greatest.
I’m enjoying the hell out of Gearbits. It’s an indie mech shooter with Gundam aesthetics and fast-paced action like Armored Core for a base price of only $10.
To me it sounds more like the social media algorithms put you into the “gaming tech” corner so that’s all you see. Indie gaming is huge and not at all about graphics. Look at the currently popular games on Steam and a ton of them are technologically very basic.
Even new games can be run on midrange hardware if you don’t crank up the settings.
People want big numbers and companies watch to sell the latest stuff. No one gives a platform for advocating low budgets, cheaper hardware and patient gaming.
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