Insiders say cutting-edge graphics are too costly for AAA games
Insiders say cutting-edge graphics are too costly for AAA games
The ongoing industry crisis may finally teach that more graphics do not equal more sales.
All the best games I've played recently are deliberately low poly models, low res textures, and 100% focused on JUST satisfying gamefeel and fun gameplay mechanics.
Fuck graphical fidelity and fuck "AAA" studios for wasting our time and money on it.
I WANT SHORTER GAMES WITH WORSE GRAPHICS MADE BY PEOPLE WHO ARE PAID MORE TO WORK LESS AND I'M NOT KIDDING
BUT HOW DO WE FORCE PEOPLE TO BUY OUR NEW CONSOLES?
To be honest I haven’t read the article, but I think it’s crazy that we always want prettier games when you still have visual glitches like cars disappearing in your rearview mirror, buildings and textures appearing late, screen tearing when you make your POV spin.
I don’t really need way better graphics, but I’d need these things gone as they take me out of my game way more than no raytracing or a slight fps drop.
I think these things would be easy to solve if we didn’t always get better graphics.
Object permanence in a game still has yet to blow my mind. Dwarf fortress does it pretty well (abandoning a mine to ruin only to revisit the walls you etched aeons ago as an adventurer), and minecraft of course, but any game with decent graphics seem to just abandon this altogether. You're just visiting that world, you're not making any change
Even for games that have the most minimum required, it's an issue. Modern games can't populate the maps anymore because of the system requirements to do that while also having "pretty graphics".
Well I meant more something like you driving a car fast in an open world and having objects appearing in front of you because everything isn’t loaded yet.
Or landscape disappearing from your rear view mirror in racing games in order to save some memory.
These things wouldn’t cost anything to solve if we gave up some graphical fidelity.
Oh these fuckers.
So now the horribly expensive games with micro transactions isn't enough for them? Well of course.
Nothing is ever enough for them.
Fucking are we gonna have to do a violent armed socialist revolution just to checks notes keep having graphics in games we have to pay an arm and a leg for?
What cutting edge graphics? The blurry as smudge that is TAA in all the modern games? Fuck off. What's expensive is the actual slop that is modern games
I can only really think of two games that really justify enormous development costs, and that's Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.
If your game isn't pushing things to that level of expectation, you really need to rethink what you're doing with that budget.
What about destructible environment, physics, attention to details?
All what I see nowadays are mediocre products in flashy packaging. Consumers seem to prioritize aesthetics over quality; if a game is colorful and visually appealing, it often sells well. Whats up with freedom of jumping on that crate, blowing up that wall, shooting up the props etc.
At times, it feels as though I am confined within an enclosure, where the visuals and sounds serve merely to distract me from this realization.
the broader genre of single-player action games has mostly diminished to Soulslikes and gacha games a la Genshin Impact
I call bullshit. There are all kinds of awesome, successful, action games that don't fit this mold. This whole piece reads like it was placed by a high level exec that's preparing to lay off a bunch of graphic artists and devs.
Art > graphics, but this article sucks.
bruh Im out here still playing Beyond Oasis. Just make a good fucking game and I'll play it for 30 years. I dont think people making games actually listen to people playing games.
Animal Well was the best game I played this year and it was made by one dude who built his own engine.
Balatro is a close second with the best soundtrack. The Dev bought it on Fiverr.
9 times out of 10, I won't see your brand new AAA title for several years after release. While there are occasional exceptions, I don't really buy at launch. Your cutting edge graphics mean nothing to me without story, characters, and writing. If you invest in looks without substance, I will never waste my time with you.
add me to the crowd where graphics is not a major thing. its great ad can make one game preferable to another but im all about character customization both in look and abilities.
I mean, how are they supposed to pay the execs millions of dollars if they have to pay the developers to make the game do the thing?
Damn, nobody in here is excited for the future of graphics? Guess I'll be the outlier.
I'm looking forward to ray tracing being commonly available. Having actual reflections in game really improves that subconscious immersion and even could open up strategy in some cases. Imagine using a mirror the see someone coming around the corner.
Every time I walk into a bathroom and the mirror is just some generic gray texture it pulls me out.
Realistic lighting, textures, and character models are also pretty great. I want to see the pores on the protagonist's face.
That said, obviously the game needs to be fun more than have good graphics, but man do I love the immersion of high quality visuals.
Deus Ex had mirrors, dude. Duke 3D had them, even.
I think at a high enough level, the likes of raytracing could actually reduce costs for the developers.
We seem a long way from that though.
Imagine using a mirror the see someone coming around the corner.
I don’t need a mirror to see someone coming from behind me in Super Mario Bros. Sometimes it is a matter of perspective, point of view and camera angle.
raytracing is insanely expensive. If you saw what current cards can render in real time, you would see a very very noisy, incomplete image that looks like shit. Without ai denoising and a lot of temporal shit (which only looks good in screenshots). It is very very very far from being able to render an actual frame with decent performance.
I am. I love great graphics and more offten than not play at 40fps 4k native max settings than 60gpd and reduct graphics. I mostly play single player or co op games though so I'm I'm the minority. Thing is cheating the graphics dragon is an expencive hobby which game industry is trying g to cheat and fake with AI and upscaling. I'm all 4 best graphics, what i am not for is fake graphics tricks and unoptimized pules of AAA garbage with a fancy package.
Look when full path tracing becomes playable easily on a 60 series mainstream level card, I’d be all for devs spending their time on it. Until then what’s the point? I have a 4080 and not a single path tracing game runs in playable framerate/resolution
That why I said I'm looking forward to it.
According too the article, you’re a vocal gamer in your 40’s or 50’s.
Or someone with disposable income.
Graphics are not everything, for me it's game-play first. I'm playing Carrier Command 2 now for a month straight and it has mediocre pixel and low-poly graphics, but the immersion is fantastic. It's a time sink and I forget when I should quit playing it. Hyper realistic graphics have their audience, but now they're at the point where a little improvement in graphics has diminishing returns, hence the high cost.
I used to play carrier command back in the day. It had low poly graphics, but it was great for the time. I used to love flying a Manta to escort a walrus to hit a long distance target. Did you play the original? How does it compare?
Great, new game to try. Love me some quality time sinks.
Fully agree on graphics- I want to enjoy a game, graphics are only a component of that, and its not necessarily hyper realistic.
Art design will always trump straight up graphical wizbangs anyway. There’s a reason Tears of the Kingdom is gorgeous and impressive over here running on a potato versus a lot of games that need more horsepower to run.
The latest game where I thought "damn this looks good" was Sifu. I get like 200fps on my half-potato (5500XT), and that's at ultra quality, definitely "let's turn on vsync to get rid of the fan noise" territory. The reason it looks good is good lightening choices, fluid animation, as well as well-decorated levels. As you can see the textures and geometry are often very simple -- a red fire hose box in a a hallway is just a red box. No fine detail at all, and that's sufficient: It's enough detail so that things don't feel empty, your brain isn't thinking "there should be more here", a whole uncanny valley of its own as the brain gets kinda queasy if there's nothing that it can ignore, but not enough detail as to be cluttering, that is, detract from the readability of the graphics.
Good style and execution will always win out over realism.
And yes it's a 30G game, high-res textures and not kitbashing the levels tends to do that. Also, storing stuff uncompressed the download size is 20G.
(And btw whoever made that video is a good player deliberately playing like ass. You can tell by how they're taking ages to get through the level, the pitiful score, but still not dying or really taking much damage at all).
TOTK looks and runs like crap. Also the world feels bland and empty compared to most other open world RPG's. At least a little effort from Nintendo would go a long way, but especially climbing some mountains with crappy textures and jagged edges looks eerily similar to a lot of PS2 games I still play.
I agree with you. TOTK (and other open world games) on the Switch is an unpleasant experience. The hardware just isn’t capable of it
I do however think the developers did put some effort into attempting to mitigate the underperforming hardware - hence the seeming emptiness of the world. It just wasn’t enough. There are games that run well on the Switch - Metroid Prime Remastered is incredible, for example, but we must ask why: the answer is that that game’s world consists of a large number of small rooms, basically the polar opposite of an open world design.
Art style trumps graphical fidelity, but you do need a decent baseline capability to be able to pull it off.
Also, if you enjoyed TOTK don’t let me ruin your fun - it’s a subjective thing. Just don’t tell me there’s objectively no problems with it, because there clearly are
Graphics in my opinion peaked at around 2015. I still boot up games from that time and I think they’re not that different from today’s titles
So true. A couple years ago, I upgraded from an RX 480 to an RTX 3070. I was excited for ray tracing and so much more. It was very underwhelming.
The amount of effort for such imperceptible improvements is insane.
Also insane is how shit modern games run without multi thousand dollar hardware, even if you turn down settings, but then it also looks like ass in addition to running like shit.
Yup. I got the Mad Max game or $3 at a steam sale and it's graphics and gameplay is just right.
I recently tried Star Wars Battlefront from 2015 on my PC and holy crap it looks good.
Some of the game industry followed the movie format: make a visual masterpiece with barely a plot or purpose.
Unlike the movie crowd, gamers usually want more depth and fun. Personally, I've been grabbing indie games with simple/pixel graphics and great gameplay.
I remember when Gears came out - it was made as a playable movie, and they did it well because it had a story line with characters we were invested in. Character deaths sucked, it was engaging, and it was unpredictable but comfortable.
Nothing wrong with the movie format, but you've got to tell the story.
Yep, offering more advanced graphics has always been a factor in gaming. But not the only one. I will never understand how much money a big company can spend, while ignoring the importance of writing, voice acting, and telling an impactful story.
I've put like 1000 hours each into Stardew Valley and Rimworld. Not a single ray traced, no advanced boob physics, just good fun.
I recently got Necesse and Oxygen not included. Each one has the potential for many many game hours.
That's because games require some engagement/ investment. Even if avatar has a mid plot you can still turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle. But you're not going to put mental effort into learning a boss with shitty mechanics to "save the land" you barely care about.
They apparently are aiming for photorealism these days. That's much harder than good anime graphics or good "dreamy painting" graphics. Also kinda harmful, even people without special conditions don't feel too good after looking at such graphics.
Then stop making games with cutting edge graphics. I just want to play it on a steamdeck anyway.
The problem is all the AAA publishers just keep increasing budgets to keep up. This creates a situation where games are so expensive they can't take risks, so they just follow a formula and are boring and generic. That's how we've gotten to where we are now. AAA games are failing because their budgets are too large. They need to make more smaller, interesting and unique games rather than one massive budget game.
I have essentially fully turned away from AAA personally. Thinking about it, I can't actually tell you the last one I played. Indie games are where all the good stuff is.
Same! Maybe builders gate 3 but they kind of straddle the line between aaa and indie.
For real. I'm just having a blast playing Hades right now.
This is a totally reasonable request yup.
Shooters with beard hair that waves in the wind but gunplay that sucks and broken physics.
Nailed it. Here I am playing Celeste on Pico-8 and loving it. Gameplay matters before graphics. This is why Nintendo has a loyal following despite their litigious ways.
But also graphics doesn't necessarily mean crazy 3d graphics, pick any game by supergiant and it's gorgeous with beautiful music and fun gameplay.
Know what you're willing to invest in and make design choices to reflect that.
And hardware that's GENERATIONS behind.
Like, we found acceptable, beautiful levels of graphics years ago.
We’re not the ones saying “make it look even better.” They are the ones that seem to be whipping themselves into some frenzy and saying “we can’t keep doing this!”
So fuckin stop.
I'm fine with graphics from 20 years ago, i just need it to run 4k 120fps with no stutters. GTA SA (the original) is totally fine for me visually with a few mods to allow high res, widescreen and high fps fix.
recent games are graphically too intensive for my gpu even on lowest settings, and i paid fucking 800€ for it a few years ago!
If appearances are so important for their game, they can make it an interactive movie with everything pre-rendered. Works well for crap without actual player influence on the events.
Or - a hint - there are such esteemed genres as classical quest and visual novella, very much alive in the indie world.
Art style fuelled by pure intent and vision trumps photorealism any day of the week.
Heavily biased here, but just look at Warframe. It is undeniably one of the best looking games out there because it has a voice of its own, and it still runs just fine on decade-old hardware. Same with most pixel/voxel graphics games.
We really don't need to see a billion open pores per square centimeter of facial skin as long as the gameplay's solid, the story's good, and the characters are well-written. Add a touch of art style as I've mentioned before, and you're golden.
Plus I'd rather have a functional game than a pretty one any day of the week. The current trend of rushing big budget/high-tech games to market then finishing them over a couple of years is really getting on my nerves - looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077, Darktide, Baldur's Gate 3 (hate me all you want, but that game was a technical mess at launch), Rogue Trader, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, Space Marine 2, (insert ~75% of big budget games released since 2018 here).
I just bought 2077 and No Man's Sky with some Christmas money. They were $25 each. If they screw up the launch, that just means it'll be in the bargain bin quicker for us patient gamers.
I haven't tried Cyberpunk yet, but NMS is very solid for $25. I don't think I'd ever have paid full price for it though.
That's the silver lining, but it still doesn't excuse the practice in my eyes... It's like someone selling you a house advertised as fully complete, then spending another year or two finishing up the interiors and the plumbing, while you're living there... Or a Cybertruck...
Hell BG3 still feels like a technical mess.
It looks good enough, but runs like shit on the Deck. And I'm not sure why, it's not like there is a ton of render distance or detail needed.
Heh, I started considering if I should edit in a rant about BG3 in my initial comment and you've graciously provided the window I needed, thank you!:))
I don't know what they did, either, I mean Rogue Trader used to run better while in Beta, and it wasn't even supposed to run on the Deck as it was... Hell, even my PC starts trying to lift off during most of Act III...
Plus, and I may get nuked for this, the game is incomplete as well. Yes, first and foremost Justice for Karlach and Minthara, the most endearing and the most emotionally complex characters in recent memory respectively (try a Good romance with Minthara and get whiplash going from total domination, blood and carnage to the healthiest concept of a romantic relationship in the entire game, that needed sooo much more exploration!), who both got severely shafted content-wise.
But even beyond that, the bits they cut out near the end can really be felt as rushed amputations rather than anything planned... At least, that's how they feel to me. Credit where it's due, Act I and II, and most of Act III are pretty much RPG perfection, but it hurts so much seeing it fumble right as the crescendo boils to an end...
Uhm, googling warframe screenshot (to avoid promo material), i'd count Warframe as a more fotorealistic game, aside frome the weird humanoid figures. I mean, look at this:
"AER memories of old" (currently 90% sale) is what i count as own, simple, art style.
Or maybe Satisfactory, that's good enough in realism, playable on my Cezanne Vega 8 iGPU.
There's a vaguely cartoon or fun look to the game but I'm having trouble thinking of good examples. Things have the right proportions but it's stylized just enough.
The Plains of Eidolon (your screenshot) is the first open world area, and looks more plain compared to Venus and the cambion drift. Most of the game is made of stylized tiles stitched into levels. It's more obvious as you see all the syandanas and weird frames and the individual factions.
Aah, but they're tricking you through really good lighting and scene composition;) Everything in this game has its own distinctive twist, like a realistic cartoon. Plus DE are aces at painting a scene!
Granted, their modeling and texture work is damned near witchcraft, I still don't understand how they manage to cram so much detail into a 3D model...
And thank you for the recs! I've already played a bit of Satisfactory and it is very satisfactory (sorry...)! Also bought AER because it looks gorgeous!
Honestly, Warframe should be what every corpo gaming company is trying to emulate. There's a so much content, amazing game play, stupidly complex story, the monetization doesn't harm the playerbase or limit the game, and the devs not only care, but actively play the game themselves.
They've got a dozen different genres of game crammed in there now, don't want first person shooter? You can play space battle, kiju hunter, street fighter, fishing sim, cabalela's big game hunter, tony hawk pro skater 2, interior design sim, and more without ever opening a different game. I keep trying to play something else and keep going back because it's both a fun and exciting game, and playing different game modes reward you with things that help your other game modes. Imagine if spending an hour shooting things in CoD and fishing in animal crossing rewarded you with better magic in Skyrim.
Frankly, corpo companies spend millions to have this kind of walled garden system and warframe managed to do it on a budget and to the player's benefit instead of harm. It's what gaming needs to strive to be.
DE truly are impressive in how utterly not greedy they are. Not to mention that, as you've said, Warframe really seems to be a passion project for them and it shows in every single detail - especially the Warframes themselves, every model is a display-worthy sculpture, I swear!
And, yeah, they are perfectly attuned to the community, actively participate not only within said community, but also mobilise people toward helping other noble causes (see the explosive success they've had with fundraising for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation)!
And I totally understand what you mean about the almost paralysing amount of choices on offer in the game itself, I have 2.5k hours in it, playing relatively regularly for 5 years now, and they thoroughly hooked me in with their last batches of updates! Again! I have to consciously make myself play other games every now and again just so that I won't burn myself out!
Art style ages much better too
Agreed. I have a concrete example in mind for this: while it's clear that GSC are still acing the Ukrainian Fallout style, I feel STALKER 2 lost a lot of the series' personality by switching to Unreal... The grit's no longer there, and that grit was a defining element of their atmosphere. I still feel a lot more tension in the first three than in this last one, because I'm sucked into their mindset right from the menu.
Edit: I think S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 is still a good game (technical issues notwithstanding), it's just... lost some charm along the way.
Not to mention the extra strain on the environment and a person's wallet.
True! One of my favourite games is Cultist Simulator, I literally get stuck standing for hours in my kitchen exploring the library and trying not to die on my phone... That game just stinks of vision, love it!
I'm mad about Space Marine 2. It could have been so good but instead, after losing my progress a bunch of times, I don't really play it at all. I understand dudes are still losing progress even? And the matchmaking is still broken? What the heck are those devs doing?
I don't know, either... They have such a solid core with the gameplay and the world building/art style, but seem to be headed in the wrong direction in terms of ongoing development.
And, yeah, the multiplayer UX is questionable, to say the least...
That's hilarious because cutting edge graphics is all they have left
Games reached real enough like 2016, and they were so optimized I can run them on a GTX 1050, now they look 5% better but need a 2k GPU, thx I'll keep playing Titanfall 2
Gaming really peaked with TF2. It’s been downhill ever since.
For me "real enough" would be KotORII:TSL . Or maybe HP5 game.
I mean, what does "real enough" in games matter when you know characters are nothing like real?
Hardware to run them is getting too costly for consumers. I think there is a solution everyone can be happy with somewhere.
Indie devs have been there forever. Can't compete on the AAA features? Compensate with interesting art and smart tech.
At this point, to me, "AAA" features means it's full of microtransactions, predatory marketing, and lootbox gambling.
And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint... but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.
There is. The Switch cannot push graphics like the PS5 Pro, but is still one of the best selling consoles in history. Most Nintendo produced games are graphically basic, but so well stylized and optimized that nobody cares! They are good fun games.
PC master race is in shambles!
Watch them start selling ray tracing as dlc 😂
Honestly, that’s not a bad idea. Some of us can’t run RT anyway so why not charge extra for developing it?
The steamdeck is my most powerful gpu, so if it can’t run there then it can’t run in my home.
They'll still charge the same for the base game without it, don't think otherwise.
that's fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it'll run fine even without upscaling.
I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…
Neee more micro transactions and loots boxes?
So tired of these corpo parasites opions being injected to my socials feeds.
STFU and make good games, maybe I will start buying them again
[…], particularly when end users tend to despise particularly greedy live service business models.
Have you considered making your business models … not particularly greedy?
If the company is publicly traded, it is obligated to be most particularly greedy.
Insiders, outsiders, everyone knows at this point.
You can’t make these insanely open world games with hyper realistic graphics on a reasonable budget or in a reasonable amount of time. Games take too long and cost too much to make. Too many eggs in the basket.
I remember being struck playing TLOU2 by just how damn long it is. I would’ve been happy with half the playtime and paid the same price.
Sounds more like a tooling issue. The tech exists, the hardware can run it but the tools don't exist to make it feasible in a reasonable timeframe/with a reasonably sized dev team. Corners are being cut on optimization or relying on hardware brute forcing it.
They pushed this on us so they can make us buy new video cards every other year.
Is this article from a decade ago when the Nintendo Wii proved that graphics don't mean shit if the gameplay sucks?
Do we need cutting-edge tables, cutting-edge water pipes, cutting-edge paintings, cutting-edge windows, cutting-edge power generators even?
That kind of competition really is unhealthy.
If not for this bullshit, we'd have a better choice of personal computer hardware and operating systems. We wouldn't have a lot of what they call enshittification.
What I don't understand is where the wide masses of normies got all this progress-signaling? I first sat behind a PC as a kid, it was DOS, someone showed me how to navigate directories, but I don't remember any specifics. Then Windows 98 at home. Then we got a new PC and there was Windows 2000 on it. I didn't like any Windows after it, but XP was fine.
That was me, like, being 9? I understood a bit more about computers than the average normie since then.
So - why did that me never have this progress-signaling, idea that buying something "cutting-edge" they don't understand somehow makes sense, but the whole crowd of people not knowing what a transistor is would apparently care so much for progress and cutting-edge?
I just don't understand. What do people knowing nothing about certain industry would get from caring about its development?