Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular
I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers
I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.
Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.
How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in
The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)
I just played Dragon Age Veilguard, and I’m now playing Dragon Age Origins, which was released 15 years ago. The difference in graphics and animation are startling. And it has a big effect on my enjoyment of the game. Origins is considered by many to be the best in the series, and I can see that they poured a ton into story options and such. But it doesn’t feel nearly as good as playing Veilguard.
Amazing graphics might not make or break a game, but the minimum level of what’s acceptable is always rising. Couple that with higher resolutions and other hardware advances, and art budgets are going to keep going up.
Agreed; Veilguard has pretty okay graphics. Not great, but acceptable - the high mark for me is BG3. But moving back to the earlier entries, they may have had stories that felt more ‘real’ (e.g., the setting felt more internally consistent) and gave more options, but the graphics and gameplay haven’t aged well.
Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas hasn’t aged so well. It was a great game, but it looks pretty rough now, unless you load it down with hi-res mods.
I don’t demand photorealism, but I’d like better visuals than PS3-level graphics.
It's not that I don't like realistic graphics. But I'm not gonna pay 100 bucks per game + micro transactions and / or live service shenanigans to get it. Nowadays it's not even that hard to have good looking games, thanks to all the work that went into modern engines. Obviously cutting edge graphics still need talented artists who create all the textures and high poly models but at some point the graphical fidelity gained becomes minuscule, compared to the effort put into it (and the performance it eats, since this bleeds into the absurd GPU topic too).
There's also plenty of creative stylization options that can be explored that aren't your typical WoW cartoon look that everyone goes for nowadays. Hell, I still love pixel art games too and they're often considered to be on the bottom end of the graphical quality (which I'd heavily disagree with, but that's also another topic).
What gamers want are good games that don't feel like they get constantly milked or prioritize graphics over gameplay or story.
I agree 100%. I’d love a AAA game that uses the studio’s clout not for cutting edge graphics but a stellar, polished story and gameplay. The story doesn’t even need to be DEEP, just solid.
I always wonder how some big ass studio announcing a title that uses (high quality) 2D or 2.5D graphics would go. Like, pump it full of many hours of great gameplay and gut and / or heart wrenching story, with lovely & beautiful art, in 2025+. No online account requirements, no Denuvo, no micro or macro transactions, just a solid buy to play title that's a blast to get immersed in.
The problem is that suits would not dare to even try this, just like they don't dare to try anything else that's not your standard formula customer milking. And that's how you get the 20iest iteration of generic graphic bliss with hundreds or even thousands of bucks to spend on macro transactions and other pain the ass bullshit.
Innovation for the big companies is dead, which is why I focus so much on Indie studios and smaller developers now. At least there's still some honest passion behind those games.
Eh. I want hyper realistic graphics, but I also want a solid story and good gameplay mechanics. If hyper realistic graphics took a backseat to story and mechanics I’d be just as annoyed as a focus on hyper realistic graphics over story and mechanics.
Edit: Generally speaking, of course. There’s quite a few modern games with non-realistic graphics I enjoy, but I’m always waiting for that next hyper realistic game to push the boundaries.
And I don‘t think games have to look that good either… I‘m currently playing MGSV and that game‘s 8 years old, runs at 60 fps on the Deck, and looks amazing. It feels like hundreds of millions are being burned on deminishing returns nowadays…
It’s bullshit accounting, they’re not spending it on the devs or the games, they’re spending it on advertising and the c levels Paydays. There are a ton of really good looking games, that had what would be considered shoestring budgets, but these companies bitching about it aren’t actually in it for the games anymore, its just for the money.
36mil for KC:D one of the prettiest games of the time…which includes marketing.
The cost of some of these “AAAA” titles is a complete joke.
Another one, before THQ took over, metro 2033, 10-20 million estimate, and while it’s aged a bit, when it first was released it had a good bit of eye candy for a horror game.
Another one would be the first stalker, it’s not what we would consider it today, visual candy, but it’s also over a decade old now, but it was a pretty game when it came out. Cost 5mil to make
Another one:
Crysis 22mil, and if you remember it was one of the benchmarks for the longest times…can it run crysis.
Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we’re stretching the definition of shoestring. I’ll bet KC:D’s sequel spent far more, for one. I’m with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.
34 mil is nothing when you start looking at the cost of some of these other games, even Skyrim was over 100 million. Like GTA5, with marketing, was like 250 million. Just insanely expensive, and I guarantee you the devs are not pulling in a mil or two a year.
It’s true, and I’d certainly like to see some of these studios try to target making many games at that budget than a single game at ten times that every 7 or 8 years, but even these “cheaper” games you listed still take a long time to make, and I think that’s the problem to be solved. Games came out at a really rapid clip 20-25 years ago, where you’d often get 3 games in a series 3 years in a row. We can argue about the relative quality of those games compared to what people make now and how much crunch was involved, but if the typical game is taking more than 3 years to make, that still says to me that maybe their ambitions got out of hand. The time involved in making a game is what balloons a lot of these budgets, and whereas you could sell 3 full-priced games 3 years in a row back in the day, now you’re selling 1 every 6 years, and you need to sell way, way more of them to make the math work out.
Games had a lot less in them as well though, but even then games still took time. OoT, one of the biggest RPGs, released in 98, two 1/2 years of dev time. Games still required time, maybe less, but they also had less in them.
I’d make that trade, easily. More often I find games these days are too long to their own detriment than that they felt like they ought to be that long. Your mileage may vary on a game by game basis, but in general, that’s how it’s been lately.
When I say less, I mean as in assets and things to do. Side quests alone in a lot of games these days are damn near as many hours as the main story is.
You know the budget is spent almost entirely on the art when you actually pay attention to the credits and you see names for like 250 artists, but only 3-5 programmers.
Yeah, that frustrates me a lot, too. They almost had it right, that they need to go beyond realism to make truly good-looking games. But in practice, they say that only to show you the most boring-ass graphics known to humanity. I don’t need your pebbles to cast shadows. I can walk outside and find a pebble that casts shadows in a minute tops. Make the pebbles cast light instead, that could look cool. Or make them cast a basketball game. That’s at least something, I haven’t seen yet.
I like the way you think. The logic of video games and what they display don’t have to be limited by anything in the real world. They can invent entirely new forms of perception even (like that Devil Daggers sequel that lets you see behind yourself using colour overlays).
The big problem for these AAA studios is that this is their unique selling point. Hyper-realistic graphics and sprawling game worlds. If they stop doing these, they’re hardly different to the games from five years ago (which you can still buy and cheaply at that). And they’re hardly different from indie titles. They would enter quite the competitive market.
I do agree that we’re at somewhat of a breaking point. The production costs grow to absurd levels. The graphical advances are marginal. And not many gamers can afford the newest hardware to play these titles. But I don’t think, there’s an easy exit strategy for these AAA studios…
You can select the text that’s over that background to make reading easier. Most of the article is below it, so you should be fine after a couple taps of Page Down.
Or use Firefox reader view, which cleans it right up. :)
Story goes somewhere below Replay value, and controls go to number one. Gameplay and controls are pretty much interchangable unless you want a cinema simulator.
Add sound design as number two above music as number three and then the list is done.
All the time i spent playing Dota, Starcraft, battlefield and smash melee says nope.
Sure, if your metric is hours of gameplay per dollar spent. But that’s no way to rate a video game if you ask me.
For instance I would rate The Talos Principle or Disco Elysium as much better games than, say, World of Warcraft, despite the fact that I played wow much more than the former two. But the story of those two games are just far more interesting and the games have left a much more impactful, lasting impression on me even though I don’t play them any more.
How hard is it for them to realize this? Graphics are a nice to have, they’re great, but they do not hold up an entire game. Star wars outlaws looked great, but the story was boring. If they took just a fraction of the money they spent on realism to give to writers and then let the writers do their job freely without getting in their way they could make some truly great games.
It’s hard for them to realize because good graphics used to effectively sell lots of copies of games. If they spent their graphics budget on writers, they’d have spent way too much on writing.
Yep, it’s a byproduct of the “bit wars” in the gaming culture of the '80s and '90s where each successive console generation had much more of a visual grqphical upgrade without sacrificing too much in other technical aspects like framerate/performance. Nowadays if you want that kind of upgrade you’re better off making a big investment in a beefy gaming rig because consoles have a realistic price point to consider, and even then we’re getting to a point of diminishing returns when it comes to the real noticeable graphical differences. Even back in the '80s/'90s the most powerful consoles of the time (such as the Neo Geo) were prohibitively expensive for most people. Either way, the most lauded games of the past few years have been the ones that put the biggest focus on aspects like engaging gameplay and/or immersive story and setting. One of the strongest candidates for this year’s Game of the Year could probably run on a potato and was basically poker with some interesting twists: essentially the opposite of a big studio AAA game. Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60, and indie hits such as the aforementioned Balatro are showing then that you can make games look and play great without all the super realistic graphics or immense budget if you have that solid gameplay, story/setting and art style. Call of Duty Black Ops 48393 with the only real “innovation” being more realistic sun glare on your rifle is just asking for failure.
Baldur’s Gate 3 showed studios that gamers are looking for an actual complete game for their $60
This language always misses me. Every game I buy is complete. Adding an expansion to it later doesn’t make it less complete, and it’s not like BG3 wasn’t without major bugs.
I think we landed in a situation where some people don't understand the different between graphical style and graphical quality. You can have high quality graphics that are still very simplistic. The important part is that they serve their purpose for the title you're making. Obviously some games benefit from more realistic graphics, like TLoU Part 2 depicted in the thumbnail & briefly mentioned. The graphics help convey a lot of what the game tries to tell you. You can see the brutality of the world they are forced to live in through the realistic depiction of gore. But you can also see the raw emotion, the trauma on the character's faces, which tells you how the reality of this world truly looks like. But there's plenty of games with VERY simplistic graphic styles that are still high quality. CrossCode was one of the surprise hits for me a couple years ago and became one of my favorite RPGs, probably only topped by the old SNES title Terranigma. They both have simple yet beautiful graphics that serve them just as well as the realistic graphics of TLoU. Especially the suits / publishers will make this mistake since they are very detached from the actual gaming community and just look at numbers instead, getting trapped in various fallacies and then wonder why things don't go as well as they calculated.
Sure you can, just do like “reviewers/players gush about ‘riveting plot’ and ‘characters that feel real’ and ‘a truly compelling story’” or whatever it is.
Look, I’m gonna be real with you, the pool of writers who are exceptionally good at specifically writing for games is really damn small.
Everyone is trained on novels and movies, and so many games try to hamfist in a three-act arc because they haven’t figured out that this is an entirely different medium and needs its own set of rules for how art plays out.
Traditional filmmaking ideas includes stuff like the direction a character is moving on the screen impacting what the scene “means.” Stuff like that is basically impossible to cultivate in, say, a first or third-person game where you can’t be sure what direction characters will be seen moving. Thus, games need their own narrative rules.
I think the first person to really crack those rules was Yoko Taro, that guy knows how to write for a game specifically.
I don’t think any amount of money could’ve saved the writing for Outlaws. People should not expect great writing from studios like Ubisoft. Not to say that Ubisoft doesn’t have great talent, but it’s a “too many cooks” situation there.
There are a number of theories why gamers have turned their backs on realism. One hypothesis is that players got tired of seeing the same artistic style in major releases.
Whoosh.
We learned all the way back in the Team Fortress 2 and Psychonauts days that hyper-realistic graphics will always age poorly, whereas stylized art always ages well. (Psychonauts aged so well that its 16-year-later sequel kept and refined the style, which went from limitations of hardware to straight up muppets)
There’s a reason Overwatch followed the stylized art path that TF2 had already tread, because the art style will age well as technology progresses.
Anyway, I thought this phenomena was well known. Working within the limitations of the technology you have available can be pushed towards brilliant design. It’s like when Twitter first appeared, I had comedy-writing friends who used the limitation of 140 characters as a tool for writing tighter comedy, forcing them to work within a 140 character limitation for a joke.
Working within your limitations can actually make your art better, which just complements the fact that stylized art lasts longer before it looks ugly.
Others speculate that cinematic graphics require so much time and money to develop that gameplay suffers, leaving customers with a hollow experience.
Also, as others have pointed out, it’s capitalism and the desire for endless shareholder value increase year after year.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example. A technical achievement that is stunningly beautiful where they had to cut tons of planned content (like wall-running) because they simply couldn’t get it working before investors were demanding that the game be put out. As people saw with the Phantom Liberty, given enough time, Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a masterpiece on release, but the investors simply didn’t give CD Project Red enough time before they cut the purse strings and said “we want our money back… now.” It’s a choice to release too early.
…but on the other hand it’s also a choice to release too late after languishing in development hell a la Duke Nukem Forever.
I honestly feel like this with Genshin Impact. It looks absolutely breathtaking and in 20 years it will still be beautiful. It runs on a damn potato. I personally like the lighting in a lot of scenes way better than the lighting in some titles that have path tracing.
I have always liked art styles in games better than realism.
In what world does Genshin runs well on a potato? Unless you have a different definition of potato than me. My Galaxy S10e can barely play the game, and it’s not even slow enough to be called a potato
Haha, opposite experience for me! I don't play it but know some people that do, and I only ever heard about them playing it on their PCs, so it was their comment that made me realize it was also available on phones :P
Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is exactly the kind of product that is going to keep driving the realistic approach. It’s four years later now and the game’s visuals are still state-of-the-art in many areas. Even after earning as much backlash on release as any game in recent memory, it was a massively profitable project in the end.
This is why Sony, Microsoft, and the big third parties like Ubisoft keep taking shots in this realm.
Borderlands 1 and 2 still look great in comparison to a lot of games that came out around the same time. The stylized cel-shaded textures help hide the lower-poly environments and really make the world stand out. Most games at the time were trying to go for a “realistic” look that just resulted in bland brown and gray environments that look terrible.
Shout out to Borderlands 1, one of the last game to have some of the best comedy delivered by text, instead of audio.
I actually am in the minority of preferring 1 over 2 because 2 is just so fucking loud. Handsome Jack in my fucking ear for hours on end, refusing to shut the fuck up and let me play the game.
I much much much preferred the quiet reading of Borderlands 1.
This article’s reasoning is faith based. The cornerstone assumption is that industry profits and layoffs obey the preferences of the market.
To those who follow the industry, this is demonstrably false. What follows is the lack of awareness on full display:
and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
It is hard for me to take seriously a hand-wringing industry that makes more money than most entertainment industries. Capitalism is the primary cause of articles like this. Investors simply demand moar each year, otherwise it is somehow a sign of stagnation or poor performance.
AAA studios could be different, but they choose to play the same game as every other sector. Small studios and independents suffer much more because of the downstream effects of the greedy AAAs establishing market norms.
We need unionization, folks. Broad unionization across sectors to fight against ownership/investor greed. It won’t solve everything but it will certainly stem the worst of it.
nytimes.com
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