Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good
Then don't, i doubt people get sad when they realize they don't have to buy another overpriced gpu to run the game they anticipated the most.
A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.
Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that's achievable plays into what the design may be, although it's not a direct correlation.
I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That's probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.
My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don't look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.
Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.
I don't need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character's face. I don't need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won't notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or "play" sections that may as well be cutscenes.
I don't want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.
I have a computer from 2017. It's also a Mac. I can't play recent games and I think I've just gotten more and more turned off by the whole emphasis on better graphics and the need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on either a console or a really good graphics card for a PC has just turned me off of mainstream gaming completely.
Mostly I just go play games I played when I was a kid these days. 1980s graphics and yet I have yet to get tired of many of them...
Gifted my kids, both of them already young adults, one of those retro gaming sticks. An absolute bang/for/buck wonder, full of retro emulators and ROMs. Christmas Day, at grandmas was a retro fest, with even grandma playing. Pac man, frogger, space invaders, galaga, donkey Kong, early console games…. Retro gaming has amazing games, where gameplay and concepts had to make do with the limited resources.
My son has a Steam deck, but he had a blast with the rest.
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 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.
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.
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 nice to see gaming covered in NYT at all. The article generally rings hollow to me. I'm not an industry expert, but:
- It's easy to be profitable when you're just making a sandbox and your players make the games, but at that point are you a game developer? (Roblox)
- High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can't afford gaming with good graphics
- AAA developers aren't optimizing games as well as they used to, so only high end hardware would even run them
- AAA is more focused on loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes, and cinematics all wrapped up in great visuals. That's at the expense of innovative gameplay and interesting stories. Making the graphics worse won't get execs to greenlight better games, just uglier ones. And they'll still be $70.
- Even when games are huge successes and profitable, studios are getting bought and shut down (EA, Microsoft, Sony?), so it's hard to say the corps are hurting.
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.
GSC in my opinion ruined stalker 2 in the chase for "next gen" graphics. And modern graphics are now so dependent on upscaling and frame gen, sad to see but trailers sell.
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.
Overall good article with some inaccuracies but the answer to the articles question is to me an easy no. The whole industry won't recover because its an industry. It follows the rules of capitalism and its a constant race to the worse and while good games by good people happen on the side, they happen in spite of the system. Everything else is working as expected and will continue until you pay per minute to stream games you rent with intermittent forced ads and paid level unlocks.
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...
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.
