The question is whether “realism” was ever a good target. The best games are not the most realistic ones.
So many retro games are replayable and fun to this day, but I struggle to return to games whose art style relied on being “cutting edge realistic” 20 years ago.
I dunno, Crysis looks pretty great on modern hardware and its 18 years old.
Also, CRYSIS IS 18 WHERE DID THE TIME GO?
There’s a joke in there somewhere about Crysis being the age of consent but I just can’t land it right now.
Probably because I’m old enough to remember it’s release.
I guess the joke can’t run Crysis
Yeah, but it was about 15 years ahead of it’s time.
STALKER is good, though I played a lot of Anomaly mostly, and I’m not sure that STALKER was ever known for bleeding edge graphics
Stalker gamma is free if anyone wanted to try it out. I ended up buying the OG games cause I liked it so much.
The 2nd one is good, but I would advise people to wait until they implement more promised features before they buy it.
I just finished STALKER 2. It’s a fucking mess and was unplayably broken for half a month at one point for me, and I fucking love it. It took me 80 hours of mostly focusing on advancing the story to reach the end, and I feel like I only saw maybe 30% of what’s out there. I can already tell that this is going to be my new Skyrim, tooling around with 500 hours in the game and still finding new situations. I’m SO FUCKING PUMPED for anomaly 2-- a lot of the same modders that worked on anomaly are already putting out modpacks for Stalker 2.
Factorio and Balatro
Like cgi and other visual effects, realism has some applications that can massively improve the experience in some games. Just like how lighting has a massive impact, or sound design, etc.
Chasing it at the expense of game play or art design is a negative though.
Idk, I’d say that pursuing realism is worthy, but you get diminishing returns pretty quick when all the advances are strictly in one (or I guess two, with audio) sense. Graphical improvements massively improved the experience of the game moving from NES or Gameboy to SNES and again to PS1 and N64. I’d say that the most impressive leap, imo, was PS1/N64 to PS2/XBox/GameCube. After that, I’d say we got 3/4 of the return from improvements to the PS3 generation, 1/2 the improvement to PS4 gen, 1/5 the improvement to PS5, and 1/8 the improvement when we move on to PS5 Pro. I’d guess if you plotted out the value add, with the perceived value on the Y and the time series or compute ability or texture density or whatever on the x, it’d probably look a bit like a square root curve.
I do think that there’s an (understandably, don’t get me wrong) untapped frontier in gaming realism in that games don’t really engage your sense of touch or any of the subsets thereof. The first step in this direction is probably vibrating controllers, and I find that it definitely does make the game feel more immersive. Likewise, few games engage your proprioception (that is, your knowledge of your body position in space), though there’ve been attempts to engage it via the Switch, Wii, and VR. There’s, of course, enormous technical barriers, but I think there’s very clearly a good reason why a brain interface is sort of thought of as the holy grail of gaming.
Having a direct brain interface game, that’s realistic enough to overcome the Uncanny Valley, would destroy peoples lives. People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They’d end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one. Shit, give me a universe wherein I can double-jump, fly, or communicate with animals, and I’d have a hard time returning to this version.
We could probably get close with a haptic feedback suit, a mechanism that allows you to run/jump in any direction, and a VR headset, but there would always be something tethering you to reality. But a direct brain to machine interaction would have none of that, it would essentially be hijacking our own electrical neural network to run simulations. Much like Humans trying to play Doom on literally everything. It would be as amazing as it was destructive, finally realizing the warnings from so many parents before its time: “that thing’ll fry your brain.”
Tbf, it’s kinda bullshit that we can’t double jump IRL. Double jumping just feels right, like it’s something we should be able to do.
Yeah, no, it’d likely be really awful for us. I mean, can you imagine what porn would be like on that? That’s a fermi paradox solution right there. I could see the tech having a lot of really great applications, too, like training simulations for example, but the video game use case is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.
People would, inevitably, prefer their virtual environment to the real one. They’d end up wasting away, plugged into some machine. It would lend serious credence to the idea of a simulated universe, and reduce the human experience by replacing it with an improved one.
Have you considered making the real world better?
Nah, that would cut into profits.
A Link to the Past > Ocarina of Time
Fight me
I’ve been playing the zelda games in order since the new one was announced on the switch and I’m stuck on OoT (zelda 2 was a pain as well).
I don’t have much free time.
I agree generally, but I have to offer a counterpoint with Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I only just got back into it after bouncing off in 2019, and I wish I hadn’t stopped playing. I have a decent-ish PC and it still blows my entire mind when I go roaming around the countryside.
Like Picard said above, in due time this too will look aged, but even 7 years on, it looks and plays incredible even at less-than-highest settings. IMHO the most visually impressive game ever created (disclaimer: I haven’t seen or played Horizon). Can’t wait to play KC:D 2!
It’s the right choice for some games and not for others. Just like cinematography, there’s different styles and creators need to pick which works best for what they’re trying to convey. Would HZD look better styled like Hi-Fi Rush? I don’t really think so. GOW? That one I could definitely see working more stylized.
We should be looking at more particles, more dynamic lighting, effects, realism is forsure a goal just not in the way you think, pixar movies have realistic lighting and shadows but arent “realistic”
After I started messing with cycles on blender I went back to wanting more “realistic” graphics, its better for stylized games too
But yeah I want the focus to shift towards procedural generation (I like how houdini and unreal approach it right now), more physics based interactions, elemental interactions, realtime fire, smoke, fluid, etc. Destruction is the biggest dissapointment, was really hoping for a fps that let me spend hours bulldozing and blowing up the map.
Destruction is the biggest dissapointment, was really hoping for a fps that let me spend hours bulldozing and blowing up the map.
Ever heard of The Finals?
finals is included in my dissapointment
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Couldn’t disagree more. Immersion comes from the details, not the fidelity. I was told to expect this incredibly immersive experience form RDR2 and then I got:
- carving up animals is frequently wonky
- gun cleaning is just autopilot wiping the exterior of a gun
- shaving might as well be done off-screen
- you transport things on your horse without tying them down
Yeah that didn’t do it for me.
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I had way more fun in GTA 3 than GTA 5. RDR2 isn’t a success because the horse has realistic balls.
To put another nail in the coffin, ARMA’s latest incarnation isn’t the most realistic shooter ever made. No amount of wavy grass and moon phases can beat realistic weapon handling in the fps sim space. (And no ARMA’s weapon handling is not realistic, it’s what a bunch of keyboard warriors decided was realistic because it made them feel superior.) Hilariously the most realistic shooter was a recruiting game made by the US Army with half the graphics.
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Yeah but you said it was a pre-requisite and that’s just false.
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I see, and yeah graphics can help a lot. But how much do we actually need? At what point is the gain not enough to justify forcing everyone to buy another generation of GPUs?
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This is what a remaster used to look like.
Pretty sick if you ask me
I agree whole heartedly
It was a remake not a remaster. The hit boxes weren’t the same.
The difference is academic and doesn’t affect my point.
Technically an original source code was adopted to SNES, even including some (most?) glitches, so I’d say it’s more like a port or remaster than remake, even though graphics and audio were remade.
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Eventually we hit a limit to how round we could make car tires.
Rush on the N64 had octagonal tires and real damage! I still play it every year or so.
Oh it’s a bit of a running joke that every time there’s a new Forza or Gran Turismo, they brag about how round the tires are and how wet the pavement looks.
Let’s compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.
Generational leaps then:
Good lord.
EDIT: That isn’t even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.
Good. Lord.
Yeah no. You went from console to portable.
We’ve had absolutely huge leaps in graphical ability. Denying that we’re getting diminishing returns now is just ridiculous.
We’re still getting huge leaps. It simply doesn’t translate into massively improved graphics. What those leaps do result in, however, is major performance gains.
I have played Horizon Zero Dawn, its remaster, and Forbidden West. I am reminded how much better Forbidden West looks and runs on PS5 compared to either version of Zero Dawn. The differences are absolutely there, it’s just not as spectacular as the jump from 2D to 3D.
The post comes off like a criticism of hardware not getting better enough faster enough. Wait until we can create dirt, sand, water or snow simulations in real time, instead of having to fake the look of physics. Imagine real simulations of wind and heat.
And then there’s gaussian splatting, which absolutely is a huge leap. Forget trees practically being arrangements of PNGs–what if each and every leaf and branch had volume? What if leaves actually fell off?
Then there’s efficiency. What if you could run Monster Hunter Wilds at max graphics, on battery, for hours? The first gen M1 Max MacBook Pro can comfortably run Baldur’s Gate III. Reducing power draw would have immense benefits on top of graphical improvements.
Combined with better and better storage and VR/AR, there is still plenty of room for tech to grow. Saying “diminishing returns” is like saying that fire burns you when you touch it.
What those leaps do result in, however, is major performance gains.
Which many devs will make sure you never feel them by “optimizing” the game for only the most bleeding edge hardware
Then there’s efficiency. What if you could run Monster Hunter Wilds at max graphics, on battery, for hours? The first gen M1 Max MacBook Pro can comfortably run Baldur’s Gate III. Reducing power draw would have immense benefits on top of graphical improvements.
See, if the games were made with a performance first mindset, that’d be possible already. Not to dunk on performance gains, but there’s a saying that every time hardware gets faster, programmers make their code slower. I mean, you can totally play emulated SNES games with minimal impact compared to leaving the computer idling.
Saying “diminishing returns” is like saying that fire burns you when you touch it.
Unless chip fabrication can figure a way to make transistors “stack” on top of one another, effectively making 3D chips, they’ll continue to be “flat” sheets that can only increase core count horizontally. Single core frequency peaked in early 2000s, from then on it’s been about adding more cores. Even the gains from a RTX 5090 vs a RTX 4090 aren’t that big. Now compare with the gains from a GTX 980 vs a GTX 1080
I am reminded how much better Forbidden West looks and runs on PS5 compared to either version of Zero Dawn.
Really? I’ve played both on PS5 and didn’t notice any real difference in performance or graphics. I did notice that the PC Version of Forbidden West has vastly higher minimum requirements though. Which is the opposite of performance gains.
Who the fuck cares if leaves are actually falling off or spawning in above your screen to fall?
And BG3 has notoriously low minimums, it is the exception, not the standard.
If you want to see every dimple on the ass of a horse then that’s fine, build your expensive computer and leave the rest of us alone. Modern Next Gen Graphics aren’t adding anything to a game.
I’m assuming you’re playing on a bad TV. I have a 4k120 HDR OLED panel, and the difference is night and day.
I also prefer to enjoy new things, instead of not enjoying new things. It gives me a positive energy that disgruntled gamers seem to be missing.
I’m playing on a normal TV because I’m not made of money.
So you’re claiming new hardware isn’t perceivably better, despite not using a display which is actually capable of displaying said improvements. I use such a display. I have good vision. The quality improvement is extremely obvious. Just because not everyone has a high end display doesn’t mean that new hardware is pointless, and that everyone else has to settle for the same quality as the lowest common denominator.
My best hardware used to be Intel on-board graphics. I still enjoyed games, instead of incessantly complaining how stagnant the gaming industry is because my hardware isn’t magically able to put out more pixels.
The PS5 is a good console. Modern GPUs are better than older ones. Games look better than they did five or ten years ago. Those are cold, hard, unobjectionable facts. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it.
I do like it.
The fact that the Game Boy Advance looks that much better than the Super Nintendo despite being a handheld, battery powered device is insane
Is it that much better? The colours just look more saturated to me
There’s noticably more detail, especially along the coastline. Also, the more saturated colors improve contrast
The GBA just has reworked art. The SNES could easily do the same thing.
Because most GBA games were meant to be desaturated due to the terrible screen
It is baffling to me that people hate cross gen games so much. Like, how awful for PS4 owners that don’t have to buy a new console to enjoy the game, and how awful for PS5 owners that the game runs at the same fidelity at over 60FPS, or significantly higher fidelity at the same frame rate.
They should have made the PS4 version the only one. Better yet, we should never make consoles again because they can’t make you comprehend four dimensions to be new enough.
The point isn’t about cross generation games. It’s about graphics not actually getting better anymore unless you turn your computer into a space heater rated for Antarctica.
It’s a pointless point. Complain about power draw. Push ARM.
ARM isn’t going to magically make GPUs need less brute force energy in badly optimized games.
…So push ARM. By optimising games.
EDIT: This statement is like saying “Focusing on ARM won’t fix efficiency because we aren’t focusing on ARM”.
What game is the first one
Final Fantasy 4 (2 on USA)
I mean, how much more photorealistic can you get? Regardless, the same game would look very different in 4K (real, not what consoles do) vs 1080p.
The lighting in that image is far, far from photorealistic. Light transport is hard.
That’s true but realistic lightning still wouldn’t make anywhere near the same amount of difference that the other example shows.
Don’t get me started on Horizon: Forbidden West. It was a beautiful game. It also had every gameplay problem the first one did, and added several more to boot. The last half of the game was fucking tedious, and I basically finished it out of spite.
Awww.
I enjoyed the heck out of the first one, especially the story. Haven’t gotten around to picking up the 2nd so that’s a bummer to read.
I’d say it’s still worth playing, but the story is way more predictable, and they made some things more grindy to upgrade than they were in the first one. Also they added robots that are even more of a slog to fight through.
Those giant turtles are bullshit and just not fun.
If it helps, I loved both.
Very much same. I wish the Burning Shores expansion was a bit longer. It’s kinda hard to call it a must-play DLC, but it’s got some big stuff in terms of Aloy’s character development.
I enjoyed learning the backstory of the first one, but I was very disinterested in the story, as in, what is currently happening.
If You liked the stealth aspects of the first game then there is no point in starting the second. The stealth is gone. It’s also more difficult. The equipment is much more complicated.
I loved both. Different strokes…
I agree. I loved the first game, considered it one of my favourites. Couldn’t wait for the sequel. I was so disappointed, I abandoned it after a couple of hours.
This is true of literally any technology. There are so many things that can be improved in the early stages that progress seems very fast. Over time, the industry finds most of the optimal ways of doing things and starts hitting diminishing returns on research & development.
The only way to break out of this cycle is to discover a paradigm shift that changes the overall structure of the industry and forces a rethinking of existing solutions.
The automobile is a very mature technology and is thus a great example of these trends. Cars have achieved optimal design and slowed to incremental progress multiple times, only to have the cycle broken by paradigm shifts. The most recent one is electrification.
Okay then why are they arbitrarily requiring new GPUs? It’s not just about the diminishing returns of “next gen graphics”.
That’s exactly why. Diminishing returns means exponentially more processing power for minimal visual improvement.
I think my real question is what point do we stop trying until researchers make another breakthrough?
Researchers can’t make a breakthrough if they don’t try ^^
AAA game designers don’t need to be the researchers.
That’s what game engines are for
Great, let the game engine people go wild. We don’t need to try and build the next Far Cry with all of their beta tech though.
path tracing is a paradigm shift, a completely different way of showing a scene to that normally done, it’s just a slow and expensive one (that has existed for many years but only started to become possible in real time recently due to advancing gpu hardware)
Yes, usually the improvement is minimal. That is because games are designed around rasterization and have path tracing as an afterthought. The quality of path tracing still isn’t great because a bunch of tricks are currently needed to make it run faster.
You could say the same about EVs actually, they have existed since like the 1920s but only are becoming useful for actual driving because of advancing battery technology.
Then let the tech mature more so it’s actually analogous with modern EVs and not EVs 30 years ago.
Yea, it’s doing that. RT is getting cheaper, and PT is not really used outside of things like cyberpunk “rt overdrive” which are basically just for show.
Except it’s being forced on us and we have to buy more and more powerful GPUs just to handle the minimums. And the new stuff isn’t stable anyways. So we get the ability to see the peach fuzz on a character’s face if we have a water-cooled $5,000 spaceship. But the guy rocking solid GPU tech from 2 years ago has to deal with stuttering and crashes.
This is insane, and we shouldn’t be buying into this.
It’s not really about detail, it’s about basic lighting especially in dynamic situations
(Sometimes it is used to provide more detail in shadows I guess, but that is also usually a pretty big visual improvement)
I think there’s currently a single popular game where rt is required? And I honestly doubt a card old enough to not support ray tracing would be fast enough for any alternate minimum setting it would have had instead. Maybe the people with 1080 ti-s are missing out, but there’s not that many of them honestly. I haven’t played that game and don’t know all that much about it, it might be a pointless requirement for all I know.
Nowadays budget cards support rt, even integrated gpus do (at probably unusable levels of speed, but still)
I don’t think every game needs rt or that rt should be required, but it’s currently the only way to get the best graphics, and it has the potential to completely change what is possible with the visual style of games in the future.
Edit: also the vast majority of new solid gpus started supporting rt 6 years ago, with the 20 series from nvidia
That’s my point though, the minimums are jacked up well beyond where they need to be in order to cram new tech in and get 1 percent better graphics even without RT. There’s not been any significant upgrade to graphics in the last 5 years, but try playing a 2025 AAA with a 2020 graphics card. It might work, but it’s certainly not supported and some games are actually locking out old GPUs.
If you think about it, the gaming GPUs have been in a state of crisis for over half a decade. First shortages because everybody used them to mine bitcoins, then the covid chip shortages happened and now AI is killing cheaper GPUs. Therefore many people are stuck with older hardware, SteamDecks, consoles and haven’t upgrades their systems and those highly flammable $1000+ GPUs will not lead to everyone upgrading their PCs. So games are using older GPUs as target
Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.
Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.
Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.
One of the reasons I skipped the other consoles but got a GameCube was because all the first party stuff was buttery smooth. Meanwhile trying to play shit like MechAssault on Xbox was painful.
I never had trouble with MechAssault, because the fun far outweighed infrequent performance drops.
I am a big proponent of 60fps minimum, but I make an exception for consoles from the 5th and 6th generations. The amount of technical leap and improvement, both in graphics technology and in gameplay innovation, far outweighs any performance dips as a cost of such improvement. 7th generation is on a game by game basis, and personally 8th generation (Xbox One, Switch, and PS4) is where it became completely unacceptable to run even just a single frame below 60fps. There is no reason that target could not have been met by then, definitely now. Switch was especially disappointing with this, since Nintendo made basically a 2015 mid-range smartphone but then they tried to make games for a real game console, with performance massively suffering as a result. 11fps, docked, in Breath of the Wild’s Korok Forest or Age of Calamity (anyehwere in the game, take your pick,) is totally unacceptable, even if it only happened one time ever rather than consistently.
I’m usually tolerant of frame drops, especially when they make hard games easier (like on the N64), but I agree it has gotten much worse on recent consoles. Looking at you, Control on PS4 (seems like it should just have been a PS5 game with all the frame drops; even just unpausing freezes the game for multiple seconds).
when i was a smol i thought i needed to buy the memory expansion pack whenever OoT fps tanked.
I don’t mind the graphics that much, what really pisses me off is the lack of optimization and heavy reliance on frame gen.
The problem as I see it is that there is an upper limit on how good any game can look graphically. You can’t make a game that looks more realistic than literal reality, so any improvement is going to just approach that limit. (Barring direct brain interfacing that gives better info than the optical nerve)
Before, we started from a point that was so far removed from reality than practically anything would be an improvement. Like say “reality” is 10,000. Early games started at 10, then when we switched to 3D it was 1,000. That an enormous relative improvement, even if it’s far from the max. But now your improvements are going from 8,000 to 8,500 and while it’s still a big absolute improvement, it’s relatively minor – and you’re never going to get a perfect 10,000 so the amount you can improve by gets smaller and smaller.
All that to say, the days of huge graphical leaps are over, but the marketing for video games acts like that’s not the case. Hence all the buzzwords around new tech without much to show for it.
Graphics are only part of it, with the power that is there I am disappointed in the low quality put to rrlease. I loved Jedi survivor, a brilliant game but it was terribly optimised. I booted it today and had nothing but those assest loading flashes as walls and structures in my immediate vicinity and eyeline flashed white into existence.
Good games arent solely reliant om graphics but christ if they dont waste what they have. Programmers used to push everything to the max, now they get away with pushing beta releases to print.
Well you can get to a perfect 10k hypothetically, you can have more geometric/texture/lighting detail than the eye could process. From a technical perspective.
Of course you have the technical capabilities, and that’s part of the equation. The other part is the human effort to create the environments. Now the tech sometimes makes it easier on the artist (for example, better light modeling in the engine at run time means less effort to bake lighting in, and ability for author to basically “etc…” to more detail, by smoothing or some machine learning extrapolations). Despite this, more detail does mean more man hours to try to make the most of that, and this has caused massive cost increases as models got more detailed and more models and environments became feasible. The level of artwork that goes into the whole have of pacman is less than a single model in a modern game.
The improvement levels are the same amount they used to be. It’s just that adding 100mhz to a 100mhz processor doubles your performance, adding 100mhz to a modern processor adds little in comparison as a for instance.
Well, that’s what Moore’s Law was for. The processing power does increase massively over each generation. It’s just that at this point better graphics are less noticeable. There is not much difference to the eye between 100.000 and a million or more polygons.
We’ve basically reached the top. Graphics fidelity is just down to what the artists do with it.
I disagree ( that we have reached the top).
Go watch a high budget animated movie (think Pixar or Disney) and come back when real time rendered graphics look like that.
Yea games look good, but real time rendering is still not as good as pre rendered (and likely will never be). Modern games are rife with clipping, and fakery.
If you watch the horizon forbidden West intro scene (as an example), and look at the details, how hair falls on characters shoulders, how clothing moves in relation to bodies, etc, and compare it to something like inside out 2, it’s a world of difference.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
If we can pre render it, then in theory it’s only a matter of time before we can real time render it.
Not really, because pre renders are often optimized to only look good from one side. If you try to make a 3D model out of it and render that in real time in the game world, it might look ugly or weird from another angle.
Any given frame is just looking at something from one side though, this is the case for video games as well and it’s part of the reason why real time rendering is so much slower. It’s an art and game direction challenge to make things look good however you want to not a technical limitation (in the sense of, you can make a video game look like a Pixar movie does today, it’s just going to render at days per frame instead of frames per second)
There isn’t really a conceptual difference between rendering a frame with the intent to save it and later play it back, and rendering a frame with the intent to display it as soon as it’s ready and dispose of it.
Toy story 1 took days to render a single frame, now it could be rendered on a single home GPU at 24 fps no problem, which would be real time rendering.
To clarify my first paragraph. The challenge is not that it is impossible to render a video game with movie like graphics it’s that the level of effort is higher because you don’t have the optimizations, and so art direction needs to account for that.
As far as considering unexpected behaviors, that is technically only a concern in psuedo-nondeterministic environments (e.g. dynamic physics rendering) where the complexity and amount of potential outcomes is very high and hard to account for. This is a related issue but not really the same one, and it is effectively solved with more horsepower, the same as rendering.
I think the point you were making is that potentially, artistic choices that are deliberately made can’t always be done in real time, which I could agree with. Something like ‘oh this characters hair looks weird the way it falls, let’s try it again and tweak this or that.’ That is awarded by the benefit of trial and error, and can only be replicated real time by more robust physics systems.
Ultimately the medium is different, and while they are both technically deterministic, something like a game has potential for unwanted side effects. However, psuedo-nondeterminism isn’t a prerequisite for a game. The example that comes to mind are real time rendered cutscenes. They aren’t fundamentally different from a movie in that regard, and most oddities in them are the result of bugs in the rendering engine rather than technical impossibilities. Similar bugs exist in 3d animation software, it’s just that Hollywood movies have the budget and attention to detail to fix them, or the luxury to try again.
I’ll end with, if we have the Pixar server farm sufficient hardware, there is nothing that says they couldn’t render Luca or whatever in real time or even faster than real time.
I don’t understand why developers and publishers aren’t prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
yeah but the right hand pic has twenty billion more triangles that are compressed down and upscaled with AI so the engine programmers dont have to design tools to optimise art assets.
It just works™
And they’re shocked that no one bought the PS5 pro for 800 dollars
There’s no better generational leap than Monster Hunter Wilds, which looks like a PS2 game on its lowest settings and still chugs at 24fps on my PC.
Could’ve done your research before buying. Companies aren’t held to standards bc people are uninformed buyers.
Never said I bought it. Why would I buy a 70€ game without running the benchmark tool first?
I just still find it ridiculous that it looks and runs like ass when MH World looks and runs way better on the same PC. Makes me wonder what’s really behind whatever ‘technological advancements’ have been put into Wilds. It’s like it’s an actual scam to make people buy new hardware with no actual benefit.
