The graphics are too expensive for AAA games? AAA means they are throwing the highest category budget for developing a game. And they ONLY invest in graphics, discarding the rest like a proper story (if any), decent characters, bug fixing, balancing, etc. Now they create junk only 1% of players with a 4090 can run somewhay decently on medium settings with 30fps average and loads of framedrops.
Wow guys, amazing, thanks I guess, this costed me 80 euros. Can’t you tone down the graphics by at least 60% and focus on the “game” part of the game instead?
There are plenty of titles that do just that you can buy instead you know.
Oh I do, I’m skipping all AAA games. I illegally download them out of curiosity, but often delete them after 30min of playtime. But it still gets me angry because it basically is a major scam. Luring in loads of people with cool looking videos, then to deliver a bug simulator with most content locked behind more purchases (DLC’s, loot boxes, subscriptions), completely unbalanced and abandoned after the fist sale period because fixing the bugs and balance doesn’t provide more income so might as well quit and start a new scam. And then the audacity to complain people should not expect Baldur’s Gate 3 to be a standard to compare other games to. Maybe do see it as a standard and try to create a properly working product with actual decent content worth it’s money?
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
I WANT SHORTER GAMES
Can I have my cake and eat it too? I want games with a short critical path, but satisfying ways to spend more time with it if it’s fun.
So like interesting NG+ stuff, boss rush modes, different builds, whatever.
built in randomizers please
Actually, on that point, I love it when a game becomes a platform for continuous content. Minecraft is a bit trite as an example but it fits: You buy it once, and you can beat it in a couple hours if you really want to, but you can extract as much enjoyment out of it as your imagination will allow, and the developers are constantly adding more stuff to do (although not all of what’s added feels great all the time…)
Absolutely on the shorter games. I just do not have time for 30 to 40 hour games anymore. 8 to 10 hours is the sweet spot for me. After that I get bored and the game feels like a drag.
Imo it feels like the content is not very fresh compared to when you played that first rpg/open world/etc. It just does not feel like these aaa studios are innovating anymore- I’m looking for compelling stories and tight gameplay loops but they’re feeding us rehashed side quests fillers and eye candy. Anyone feel like they’re just playing borderlands sequels where you’re constantly forced into a meaningless quest to do somebody’s bidding?
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I am soooo fucking sick to death of everything needing to be ‘open world’ (for some reason) that I could puke. Sure, some games may benefit from - or hell, even be downright enriched in some manner by - their use, but outside of a few, notable exceptions (Elden Ring and RDR1/2, in particular, spring to mind, for example) when I see a studio touting their “new and improved, expansive, X times bigger, blahblahblah” open world, all I can think is two things:
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There will almost certainly be no more than five types (and likely significantly less, tbh) of copy/paste activity I’ll be expected to engage in shotgunned haphazardly across the map. The studios that go ‘above and beyond’ MIGHT attempt to switch things up a bit by slightly altering building or adversary layouts in places, but that’s usually a ‘best case scenario’ kinda thing, and you’ll probably be fortunate to end up with some sort of palette swap. How compelling, eh?
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I’m going to be subjected to either a veritable fuckton of bland, faceless NPC’s with an equally bland line or two of ‘dialogue’ that is ultimately meaningless or a flimsy pretext to go over there somewhere for… reasons… or a handful or so of them that are inexplicably absolutely VITAL to (or otherwise the impetus behind) everything that is plot - which they have a flimsy pretext for, natch.
Look, I played WoW back in the day already. If I really desperately wanted to waste dozens of hours of my time delivering imaginary packages to forgettable people, or being sent in search of someone who is the only one who can help stop BBEG/the apocalypse/whatever - and will totally help, but need a favor first… Ugh - then I’d go back to the good ol’ WoW treadmill. I left that shit behind because I was sick of it all just feeling like checkmarks someone had to tick off somewhere to appease the C-Suite douchenozzles that don’t understand why we can’t add in a battlepass. (Those are SOOO hot right now!)
Tbh I don’t think you’re in the minority. By far there are so very few truly well done open worlds, but how many of them were anything like mass effect which tied the stories together and had actual ramifications? The time investment is so not worth running around their lifeless worlds accomplishing nothing; I really dislike open world games
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BUT HOW DO WE FORCE PEOPLE TO BUY OUR NEW CONSOLES?
That’s the fun part: you don’t! :D
That is to say, they tried. And now there are basically no fucking games on whatever they’re calling the latest X-turd, and barely anything worth note on the PS5.
You would think if anyone had any brains they wouldn’t want you to have to buy new consoles all the time. Aside from Nintendo, the hardware is usually a loss leader for the other major players and they make all their money on the licensing costs on the software, i.e. game sales, whereas they lose money every time a console ships out the door. Especially nowadays when the distribution is mostly digital and costs them practically nothing vs. the bad old days when they had to press discs and print labels and shit. Machine sales themselves have never been profitable at least for the first several years each system is out for the last several console generations.
It would be more profitable for Sony and Microsoft to keep you on the same console generation forever – with the inevitable falling cost of manufacturing the things, to boot – keeping it at the same MSRP and simply selling you more and more games for it.
Plus it would make their console sales numbers look really badass… eventually. “The Microsoft Xbox X One X S XS Series OneX S is the best selling video game console in history, selling 1.2 billion units over its 45 year life cycle, and counting!”
I guess that’s why they’re hoping that cloud gaming takes off, so that people “rent” consoles instead of owning anything
I don’t really think it should be “worse” or specifically low-poly. There is a balance that can be struck and I feel that accepting the lowest quality possible is an excuse for developers to put in as little work as possible while still charging us as much as possible.
you can make the most beautiful cake and its worth nothing if there is just sawdust inside
Yup, first and foremost, figure out your gameplay loops.
Get that right and you can pretty it all up later.
Maybe they’d do better if they tried selling games instead of games as a service and stores with a game attached.
People still love cult movies and other classics from 100 to 50 years ago, with handcrafted or minimal budget special effects, no CGI. It’s because it’s an entire art form and it can’t just be reduced solely to aesthetic appeal. That kind of approach is just a result of the commodification of art. You want to reduce a successful work of art to some quantifiable metric besides popularity/sales, so that you can create repeatable processes around producing it and selling it, and optimize them for cost, but art defies quantification. Even just basic “enjoyable gameplay” defies that.
This guy MBAs.
That should have come across as critical of the commodification.
It did. Not sure why they said that. And I agree with you 100%. In fact, the success of Minecraft and Roblox alone should show that sometimes paying attention to the graphics is not necessarily what a developer should be doing.
There is room for AAA games with mindblowing graphics, but there should also be room for AAA games where they focus on other features over worrying about how amazing the graphics are.
People care about graphics.
But they care about other things more
So the graphics need to be in service to something.Imo the problem is that studios have become risk adverse because their budget is so big, so they pick an already popular IP, choose a marketable aspect of that IP, and spend that fortune turning the dial of that aspect up to 11.
Like X but bigger map
Like Y but more playable characters
Like Z but better graphics
Etc
But none of the time actually innovating any new player experience.And players are finally getting fed up with playing the same handful of AAA game experiences again and again with different titles.
Graphics just happens to be the marketable attribute they like to crank most often
What they need to do is throw some spaghetti at the wall, see what’s fun, then throw their hundreds of millions of dollars behind THAT.
The NYT article doesn’t mention that new AAA console games often cost $70. I have not bought a brand new game in years because I just can’t justify that cost. I have such a huge backlog between PS4 and PC, that there is just no reason to buy new games
I am betting, adjusted for inflation, that would not be especially higher than a new NES game.
It might even be cheaper.
That’s definitely true. Didn’t think about inflation. I still think $70 is a lot more than the many other ways to play, including inexpensive older games, Steam sales, Epic/Amazon giveaways, etc, all of which have “good enough” graphics for me
Yeah I’m always surprised when people are complaining about the cost to buy (not to produce) a game nowadays.
Where I live, games are way cheaper than they used to be during the Playstation 1 Era and it’s now really easy to buy used games online.
Of course if you buy every season pass or special skin for they used to game, it ends up more expensive.
I thought we had all reached consensus that style is more important than realism. And you can do style without mega hardware.
On the other hand, the fidelity in bg3 I think added something to it. I don’t think it would have been the same experience if they were simple sprites like the original games. Is it worth all the hardware? Maybe.
Fidelity has value but gets diminishing returns the harder it gets.
BG3 wasn’t nearly as far as they’re trying to push though. For example it was beautiful on the normal PS5, as were the Horizon Zero Dawn games. And yet somehow that’s not far enough for them.
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
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.
Also, interactivity. Both games you mentioned have unparalleled interactivity when compared with the triple A space.
Not saying it’s necessary, but at a certain level of fidelity/realism it starts to look really weird when the world doesn’t meaningfully react to your actions.
Star Citizen is putting a lot of effort into this, and it looks like they’re getting good results.
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”.
You can hide glitches from videos and screenshots, but you can’t hide the graphics.
Glitches are something people notice after they spend their money, which is why corporations don’t care about them as much.
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.
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
TAA, motion blur, depth of field. Why do “technologies” to turn a good looking game into a trash looking game even exist?
Yeah and we are going to see more of that in the future since everyone and their mom are switching to UE5.
Space Marine 2 is sharp AF BTW. Also not Unreal Engine, but the Swarm Engine, BTW.
The texture detail in that game is crazy, even though you normally don’t see most of it because it’s too small.
It also has a really fun gameplay loop, that I haven’t felt in a while. Good shit.
Imho, graphics don’t make the game. There are people here still playing doom and portal. Even games like Terraria aren’t too demanding. You don’t need amazing graphics.
Or any graphics for dwarf fortress and nethack (other rouguelikes also apply)
Yeah, been playing Enter the Gungeon and it’s amazing as well
There have been massive diminishing returns on graphical quality vs. hardware and developer requirements since the PS3 era.
I will always put an emphasis on art style and gameplay over trend-chasing and what takes the most computing power.
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.
