I want it all. Good graphics, good audio design, good music, good story, good gameplay. There aren’t many games that do everything right, but as a dude in his 40’s I don’t have that much time to play games either. There are enough games that tick all boxes to fill the limited time I do have.
Good graphics are relative to the era and hardware available. With my lack of interest in following GPU trends, especially their price trends, the retro revival shooters have been very kind to me. Dusk, Ion Fury and Amid Evil are all art in their design even if they don’t overheat your card.
Kind of depends on what genres you’re interested in. For my taste (single player, story driven) most good games are PlayStation exclusive, at least on release. Sony absolutely has that market cornered.
On the one hand, they were fun back in the day. On the other, who the fuck is supposed to intuitively figure out that I need a plate of spaghetti to give the bouncer? He didn’t say he was hungry, there was no indication that he wanted food to let me pass, it was totally random in far too many cases.
When playing a game, graphics are put on the back burner for me because I care more about things like mechanics, gameplay, and music.
I could be playing the absolute most beautiful looking game in existence, but if your music sounds like it came from a 1st grade music class or your mechanics and gameplay play like an edutainment game aimed at babies, I’m dropping your game quicker than my brothers friend losing his hair in highschool.
I'm going to be put on a cross but I disagree. Its a balancing scale, one shouldn't ignore all other aspects because they favor one, its fine to prioritize one over the others but there shouldn't be a huge gap between them especially in the AAA field. Dwarf Fortress is a perfect example. It is one of the most mechanically deep games around and I think its wonderful at what it does but it is almost unplayable for most people until fairly recently because most people don't like Ascii. Hell even something like Aurora 4x is very mechanically deep but looks like a glorified spreadsheet, everyone has their breaking point and unfortunately for me Ascii is that out. I think many people throw away graphics since the AAA likes to glorify it too much but I think for a soulslike game, graphics need to be the 2nd most focused aspect because I consider animation quality a big part of graphic budget and I'm sorry a soulslike where there aren't good animations is a very bad soulslike. Predictability and reaction are a huge part of that subgenre.
Edit: Everyone has their own values on what they are looking for in a game and its specific subgenre, the recent debates about Cities skyline 2 shows this where people are some reason fine with a game like that being targeted for 30 fps. While sure its playable, I think we are in a modern era of gaming and 60 feels it should be the standard everyone shoots for.
The issue is people just deciding things based on gut feeling. DF might be ASCII, but that doesn’t mean it has to look like to does out of the box. There are tons of packs that change the characters (as in letters and symbols) into tiles. The old ASCII graphics with a replacer pack don’t look that different from the modern tiles. The biggest difference is the tiles can display more information. Dwarves can show their clothing, skin color, beards, etc now, where before it would just be a default dwarf picture.
A lot of people who think graphics are that important never actually gave games a try that didn’t look like what they expect/want. They may have loved them if they got over the looks. That is the biggest hurdle, that some people think looking nice effects how good the game is to play, which just isn’t the case.
I mean the big part of why I want the steam version is the mouse control (also waiting for adventurer mode, which is something I did actually play with original ascii DF with tilesets later down the road), yes yes I know its slower but when you are learning a new game sometimes its just easier to take it slow like that. Yes typically ascii games do have tilesets with them at least the ones I know of CDDA, DF, and ADOM, its just people want things to be "good" out of the box. They don't want to faff about for 2 or 3 hours to get the "optimal" experience.
Have you seen Aurora 4x? It is probably one of the deepest 4x space games on the market to this day. The problem is it looks like a spreadsheet and I'm sorry but when people are focused on gameplay only style games, one of the things that get dropped off by the wayside is the user experience and the UX. It is fucking efficient as fuck once you have it down but when you are trying to learn the system, its a bit of a cliff to overcome and if you don't have a ton of time to game that can be quite the burden on someone. Seriously for newcomers it can seem a bit counterintuitive that capslock/shift dramatically change what actions you can take (talking from personal experience was very thrown off by capslock actually have an effect on what you are doing since shift + key is pretty normal for rts/stuff).
For DF, the classic version does have some mouse controls with DF hack. Just download the Lazy Noob Starter Pack (I think that’s the name) and you’ll be started in less than 10m with a character pack and plug-ins.
Yes, I’ve played Aurora4x. It’s a wild game. I think the worst thing isn’t just that it looks like a spreadsheet, it’s that it is just spreadsheets with a game using it as inputs. It also doesn’t tell you anything about how things function or what to do to get anything done. It’s similar to DF in some of those ways, except DF you can still play some without fully understanding it. A4X really requires a pretty good grasp of most components of the game before you can even start.
Slow downs aren’t nearly as much of an issue as microstutters. Jedi Survivor has stutters that exist regardless of the graphical options or power of your build.
I share that most of my games are locked at 45fps, 78fps if it’s a competitive shooter. You brain notices inconsistent frame rates, just turn off your fps counter and get used to it.
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