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.
As a game dev who’s making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
As inflation continues to outpace wages, surely more people will start preferring this. $1000 for a gpu is a joke. If I ever develop an indie game my target system is going to be like, a 1.6ghz core i3 and garden variety basic opengl capable graphics card.
There are constant high end GPU shortages, $1,000 is too cheap.
idk, maybe we need to figure out how to get by with basic laptop opengl graphics. An Intel HD 4000 would have been a groundbreaking graphics card in 2005 but today you can barely run a unity project with one. More serious effort needs to go into optimization and efficiency I think and if that means everything has to have 2005 era graphics (which aren’t even that bad) then that’s what has to be done.
Making your own game engine an using open source 3d engine then filling in the rest is too much work for most indie devs but as enshitification continues this will eventually stop being the case. Tux kart was made this way and it can run on a potato.
No one wants to play potato games. And this is evident by the shortage of high end GPUs. People want better graphics and people have the money for GPUs. If you check Steam stats, then the top 15 cards are all 3060, 4060, 3070, 4070, and 3080. Steam has 132m active monthly users and 2% of their users have 3080 cards. That’s over 2.6m people with a high end card.
There are only 0.2% of Intel HD 4000 users. When you combine all the mid and high end GPU users it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no point making games for Intel HD 4000.
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.
Game development got more expensive because people want more complex games. No one wants to play a shooter with loading screens, everyone wants to play an open world game. Even if you tone down the graphics, such development will still be a lot more expensive.
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
Art Style > Graphics. Kingdom Hearts (2002) looks wildly better GTA: San Andreas (2004) and Fallout 3 (2008).
Fallout 3 looks like dog shit man. It has since day 1. It’s one of my favorite games and I have 100% on it, but it has never looked good.
Every bethesda game looks like dogshit.
Fo76 looks amazing on max settings and nvidia upscaling. It still has ugly elements but overall I made so many screenshots the only other game I made this many screenshots is modded Skyrim.
I will link one later actually to demonstrate it
Idk, I’m playing FO76 on ultra on 4K right now and it looks like shit. Not much different than Skyrim. Compare it to something like Forza Horizon 5 and it’s not even funny how bad FO76 looks like.
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 🙄
AAA studios
Best I can do is predatory monetization and half-baked dlc. Also, now the Eula prohibit you from making unflattering comparisons to that one game Larian made
