12mo ago

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

aftermath.site

187 comments

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.
- He wants the resources being spent on graphics to be redirected to engineers and game designers. There is a reasonable top end budget to put towards any given game, so it is at least mostly 0 sum.
  
  Bethesta has the worst of both worlds.
  
  Big budget of cash; small budget of time and talent.
  
  They take like 10 years to release a game
  They have plenty of time, just not the talent or vision to do anything good with it. Their stories are extremely bare bones, the bugs are prolific, and the power creep is more a power slide straight into godhood by level 15 because of the short main quests.
  
  10 years not enough time for their level of skill. ;)
  
  It doesn't. You can do so much more in an isometric world than a 3D one. Modern games are more about the game engine than the game itself.
  Spruce up some old school MUDs, imo. Make the original Legend of Zelda, but massively upgraded for what you can do with today's tech. (Similar to Bastion, I suppose.) There's a lot of room for a triple A game similar to Albion Online.
  
  yeah also small team or even open source achievable.
  
  That's not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It's also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.
  Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It's practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that's invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it'll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.
  Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn't care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there's nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.
  
  Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level.
  What an absolutely batshit insane thing to say.
  
  bro just have an AI do it
  its just like, pixels or whatever
  /s
  
  Actually, would the masses care at all about ai art that is finished by a human to make it work? For something like Fortnite?
  
  So, the big problem right now with AI art is that there's no real way to modify it without basically completely redoing it.
  You can alter the prompts, but due to the intentionally chaotic nature of the models, what you'll get out is a completely different image. You can't just be like "I want her head tilted a little more to the left, and give her a bigger smile, but keep everything else the same." When you're working on professional art, generally what happens is the artist presents you with each version, from rough sketches to finished line art, to rough paint work, and you request changes as you go. There's a collaboration as you guide them towards the result you want. But with AI you're just shotgunning outputs and hoping that one of them lands close enough. That's fine for your bedroom wall, but not for a professional environment.
  And if you want to have a human artist go in and make those changes to the finished image, they have to contend with the fact that they only have a finished image, not any of the layers from sketch through to brush work to lighting and so on. So they're basically stuck trying to seamlessly paint over the existing image. That's harder than it sounds.
  Can artists use AI as a tool? Absolutely. Generate like 50 versions of a scene, use them as references. Or ask it for a sketch, then paint over that in your style. You can correct mistakes and make adjustments along the way. But the idea that humans can just "touch up" AI art to fix the mistakes doesn't really work.
  
  Ok but if possible would the masses care if it was ai generated is my point.
  I would confidently assume that folks are researching having generative ai actually conducting the tasks of wireframing, skinning, landscaping, skyboxing, WFC tile generation etc
  It's not happening now, but absolutely will.
  But again my point is most folks will not give a shit as long as they can unlock newer better glitter shit
  
  You're offering a hypothetical where AI art can actually reproduce all of the capabilities of human art. Not just broad aesthetics, but emotion, intentionality, subtext, use of imagery, understanding of the human soul...
  Is that ever going to be truly possible? Maybe if we create real, true AI. Something that's actually sentient.
  But putting that aside, if we accept your premise, then sure, I doubt anyone would care. Then again, once an AI is able to create truly human art, what would be the difference between an AI and a human?
  AI is fucking cool. The idea of living in a fully automated post scarcity future where advanced learning machines take away all of the need for manual or intellectual labour sounds amazing. But the goal should be to make a world where humans are freed from drudgery and given more time to create and appreciate art and beauty. Instead we're creating a world where humans toil away our lives while searching for brief sparks of joy in mass produced, corporate owned art that barely qualifies as art. Seems kind of fucked to me.
  Instead of asking how far we can go in terms of automating away our ability to create beautiful things, shouldn't we be asking how far we can go in terms of automating away the barriers to people creating beautiful things?
  
  Im Not. Im saying when ai can create Fortnite quality skins and frames, then what. Will people care.
  I don't care about the tech, the art or the emotion.
  
  Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you're severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they're assembly line workers isn't going to result in a compelling world.
  
  The studios who do this mostly aren't looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.
  
  In either case communication is the limiting factor and that scales with quadratic complexity with larger groups (everyone has to be on the same page with everyone else).
  
  You can hire writers instead of visual artists.
  
  Valheim
  
  Tell me you're uncreative without telling me you're uncreative.
- The author has completely missed the MAIN reason the campaign was good in 2009 and isn't, now.