In before HL 1 & 2 remaster disappointments. Or just absolutely nothing happening, just like all the previous copium rumors. I think I stopped caring back with the recorded soundtrack rumors, which already feel like an eternity ago at this point.
I dropped out with Origins, which was kind of painful because I really hate not finishing a series (Mass Effect in this case). But that of course was just the last straw after all the bullshit EA pulled and all the studios & franchises they destroyed over the decades. I don't even think they could ever redeem themselves at this point, not that they even make any effort to do so anyway. EA is just a rotten company and the epitome of all that is wrong within the gaming industry.
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.
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.
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.
It's not telling me a secret, it's telling me that I'm doing something wrong and that I need to use CRT shaders, which are both wrong presumptions made to make me click on the video to find out why. Whether to use a CRT filter or other things like scanlines is completely subjective and up to a users preferences. There's nothing wrong with sharp pixels over blurry pixels.
Cloud based gaming servers are simply flexible game servers that have multiple international locations with dynamic load distributions instead of old fixed location game servers. There's literally nothing wrong with that over the old and less flexible method because this gives you servers that are closer to your personal location, which means less ping, and them being able to scale means it is less likely of them just crapping themselves under heavier load, because they can scale up dynamically when needed.
I think I just did automatons back then because that's where the rewards were but it was a completely overwhelming number of enemies spawning in non-stop. Combined with the sort of time limit I just did not enjoy that experience at all. Maybe you can kinda get better and grind through it I feel I'd rather waste my time and money on something that's balanced around singleplayer, even if just optionally.