I Want Better Games With Worse Graphics And I'm Not Kidding - Aftermath

Thing is, looking at some games, Horizon and Elden Ring being a prime examples, we can have both great games with great graphics.

You don't really want better games with worse graphics, you want better games that don't use great graphics as an excuse to bad gameplay.

Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it's nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.

I'd easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I'd still bet the difference wouldn't be that noticeable for 4K either.

And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid "open worlds", and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.

I hate that "realistic" graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it's consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.

I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.

I want better games with better graphics. The two are not mutually exclusive, games like Elden Ring prove it is possible to have both.

The problem this writer had with CoD wasn't even really the game. Its the same problem plaguing nearly all entertainment media at the moment: the writing just sucks. Its bad. Bad writing will make even a game with great gameplay turn sour.

I want shorter games, on average. 10-20 hour completion times would be right up my alley.

Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn't be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it's supposed to look like.

This is how that "Doom 3 on a floppy disk" game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn't look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.

You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that's how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don't hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.

Currently enjoying a several weeks-long run in Rimworld. Potato graphics go really far is the gameplay design is solid.

So... Battle bit?

As a game dev who's making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.

I'd love to upvote this more than once. What's the point of all those super high quality graphics if the core gameplay hasn't advanced in the slightest 🙄

I just want games where the devs get to release the game they wanted to make without the studio enshittification microtransactions, always-online single player and so on tagged on to it.

I personally want more physics simulations. I always loved 2D falling sand games where everything reacted with each other and after a long time not having games with those mechanics i found noita and i can't stop playing it. As much for the game loop then for the game's falling sand engine.

Super flashy modern graphics are the RGB keyboard of gaming.

!patientgamers would agree and so do I

Yeah graphics are nice to have, but sometimes I want to game on a small and light laptop like I don't need revolutionary HD high quality all the time

I mean we could have both, but most Studios nowadays just buy the entire prop store and put everything into graphics because they can sell with that...

Obligatory: Starsector

Also Rimworld, Project Zomboid, Prison Architect, Factorio.... basically if you like sandbox games, there's a ton out there.

Depends on the genere. I think a very immersive game like Metro Exodus benefits a lot from its graphics and wouldn't work quite as well without them.

I thought this right before I tried to play the really old pokemons again. And very quickly went back to new pokemons.

Personally I'd prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That's not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.

Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there's a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.

I’ve got pretty similar thoughts. I wasn’t into gaming all that much up until relatively recently when I built my first gaming PC at the beginning of pandemic. Thanks to that, I’m not only on market for bleeding edge AAA titles, but also discovering 3 dacades worth of PC games. My observation is that games got worse over time. They’re also a lot more expensive to make because it all must be visually impressive, which usually ends up with poor performance and bugs, requiring high-end hardware for the game to run somehow. Quite often games are broken and unoptimized on launch, they have that generic formula, watch cinematic, hold a button, watch some more, here’s your little tutorial fight, now more cutscene and a crappy puzzle. It really makes me feel, if game developers were more limited by hardware constraint and unable to feed legions of normie players to flashy graphics, they wouldn’t have other way to makes games attractive other than with better mechanics and level design.

Meanwhile Nintendo continues to release bangers for their ancient potato console.

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The problem with that is the back catalogue of games that developers have to compete with. There already are better games with worse graphics, the big studios aren't going to risk competing in that crowded market that already has its crowned victors.

Honestly can't blame Activision for putting shit campaigns into CoD. Since Modern Warfare the focus has been almost entirely on the multiplayer side of things. I suspect most players don't even touch it now. They sell millions regardless.

Infinity Ward's original MW and MW2 are the only ones worth playing. Titanfall 2 as well, since it's the same people.

There's room for both things. Call of duty sells a bazillion copies, and while I have zero interest in that kind of game, I don't hate that it exists.

Then just browser itch.io for games

After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout.. But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn't enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I've fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course.. (Perhapsh I should join the mage's college in Winterhold)

Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It's the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.

Modern Quality of Life settings, novel features, styled to look seamless with itself, optimal usage of resources so the experience is only about the content and not the settings.

Dusk runs buttery smooth on any modern, low end hardware. I'll take that over textures or models popping in when ever they feel like.

Just make guns and bombs work in MSFS.

I mean Abiotic Factor just released to early access and that one looks like a GoldSRC game.

Northern Journey and Crystal Project are the games you want then.

Basically Gray Zone. Great game, but even on my i9-12900K, 3080Ti, 128GB DDR5 I have to play it on low settings. Like I'd be happy if they just ratcheted down the graphics quality because the gameplay is great.

Games were better when graphics were secondary

You want a Dreamcast, a PS2 or a SNES.

I think graphics capped out around the 8th generation of consoles with the Xbox One (Sunset Overdrive holds up insanely well) and now everything that isn't VR is just overkill