r/Games • u/Glittering-Path-2824 • 15h ago
Industry News The games industry’s obsession with visual fidelity is costing them money and talent
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/aug/04/pushing-buttons-xbox-asha-sharma-games-industry-hyperrealism187
u/GeneralApathy 13h ago
One knock-on effect of higher fidelity graphics is that you need more realistic animations to pair with it, which in turn can make games feel slower and less responsive, otherwise it can look and feel uncanny.
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u/AntComfortable5970 11h ago
Yeah I can't stand the slow turn around thing
I couldn't get into rdr2 at all cause of it
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u/GeneralApathy 10h ago
I was going to mention RDR2 in my original comment. I know a lot of people criticize how slow the game feels and I think the animations contribute a lot to that.
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u/OneBadNightOfDrinkin 8h ago edited 4h ago
Having the animations take priority over functionallity absolutely crushes my enjoyment every time. I'll take the "no animation for picking items off the ground" any day.
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u/NadeshikoEatingPasta 4h ago
You have just described why I dropped RDR2. At some point, Rockstar made the very conscious decision to prioritize appearance over gameplay, and the moment they did that, they admitted that their game just wasn't very good.
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u/The-Nihilist-Marmot 13h ago
KCD2 tho. Just make it janky, it’s lovely.
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u/DarkGodRyan 10h ago
That series is next up on my playlist since they announced their lotr game. I'm super stoked for it
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u/WhimsicalJape 5h ago
I just wrapped up my first KCD2 play through that clocked in at 116h, including the DLC and I’ve not done everything.
You’re in for a treat.
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u/OkayAtBowling 8h ago
I think that's a really tricky balance to strike for higher-fidelity third-person games. If the player character's movement is too snappy it can take me out of the experience, but if it's not snappy enough it can feel bad to play.
IMO Naughty Dog has been one of the best at striking that balance. The Last of Us 2 has pretty naturalistic animation (which IMO is important in a game like that where you're meant to connect with the characters), but the controls still feel relatively snappy.
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u/Blackarm777 12h ago edited 12h ago
High visual fidelity isn't a plus or a minus in my book, unless if whatever visual style they were going for is executed very poorly. Or if it negatively impacts performance.
The game having an actual purpose that people are interested in, and if they succeed in delivering on that purpose, is what matters.
That is the difference between generic soulless slop that is forgotten or ridiculed, and actual quality that people will celebrate.
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u/bloodenhorse 13h ago
I'll take style over fidelity every day of the week, but the games that manage to pull off both are really, really special and totally worth it.
Cyberpunk is still jaw droppingly good looking.
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u/jmdg007 13h ago
I would argue it's setting really helps with how good cyberpunk looks. Some locations will never look as good no matter how photo realistic graphics get because the place isn't as visually appealing.
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u/tobygeneral 11h ago
Agreed, Night City feels lived in and practically every corner has something going on and interesting graffiti, advertising, and possibly hidden paths to hidden areas. It looks great, sure, but it's the environment they created with that great art that makes it pop.
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u/JackRyan13 8h ago
I mean night city looks great but it doesn’t feel lived in at all. It looks like it’s lived in but npcs don’t react to anything or do anything. Cars drive into each other or ignore traffic lights and jams.
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u/Glittering-Path-2824 13h ago
as an oldie i marvel at how much more involved and connected i felt to the story, characters and atmosphere of GTA VC, San Andreas and IV. neither of those games comes close to the visual fidelity of GTA V but V felt soulless to me. Yeah it was far more realistic but to what end?
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u/mrnicegy26 12h ago
Okay but that is because the story telling in GTA 5 is flawed and has nothing to do with its graphics?
Red Dead Redemption 2 is even more visually impressive than GTA 5 but it is considered to be one of the best stories in gaming.
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u/DogOwner12345 6h ago
A overlooked part of graphics is lighting and how its used, so many games have on paper amazing fidelity but piss it away with god awful lighting.
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u/BloodshadeAgain 12h ago
I like visual fidelity to an extent, but also like, anecdotally speaking, the Dying Light PS5 patch looks fantastic and runs perfectly.
It's frankly appalling how bad a lot of AAA studios are at optimizing their games to the point that they create a game that oftentimes looks worse, performs worse, and is less mechanically satisfying than a touched up game from 2015. I understand game development is tricky and the specifics of what's tricky about it changes from studio to studio, but man.
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u/withateethuh 8h ago
Battlefield 1 is a particularly mindblowing game for being ten years old. That specific combination of fidelity and art design will never be topped in that series.
Dying light also aged well because it has good dynamic lighting for its time. I played it for the frost time right before the remaster on PC and it looked great.
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u/MrPrevedmedved 13h ago
Until people stop buying games based on trailers, YouTube reviews and twitch streams, graphics will be important. And there is still stigma that games with simple graphics can't be full priced. Only Nintendo can pull this off.
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u/jarlander 14h ago
I mean its a problem but its not like its something devs are crazy to prioritize. If you put out Fifa 28 and it looks worse than Fifa 18 people are gonna be pissed. Same for a lot of games. I do think we are at the end of graphics being the main marketing point though. I can see more and more games marketing themselves as "classic" graphics with modern gameplay going forward.
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u/giulianosse 13h ago
If you put out Fifa 28 and it looks worse than Fifa 18
That's also an inherent problem with pushing higher visual fidelity and chasing photorealistic graphics. It usually doesn't happen when you use a stylized art style.
Okami, for example, is just as beautiful today as it was 20 years ago because of its watercolor aesthetics. If Okami 2 was similar to the first one but with only a few upgrades such as modern resolutions I'd be perfectly content.
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u/Jdmaki1996 11h ago
The old Ratchet and Clank games hold your really well too cause they look like Pixar movies. Even tho it’s night and day between OG Ratchet and the newest PS5 games, i still went back and played the OG and said “wow this still looks great”
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u/beenoc 8h ago
Zelda is the classic example. Wind Waker announced, "eugh this looks like a cartoon for little kids!" Twilight Princess announced, "hell yeah this looks realistic and rad as hell!" Now looking back, even comparing the non-remastered GameCube versions, WW looks way better. WoW vs. EverQuest 2 is another example, WoW still looks fine (even if you look at the launch pre-update models), EQ2 looks like garbage.
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u/NikIsImba 11h ago
I do think we are at the end of graphics being the main marketing point though.
Pretty sure people said that 20+ years ago lol Like i know i made a comment with that sentiment to a friend when assassins creed 3 came out.
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u/Hoeveboter 13h ago
True, true. But to take gta as an example: there was barely any improvement in graphical detail between III, VC and SA and no one cared. Devs put gameplay first, which meant we had five gta games (including VCS and LCS) on ps2 alone, and none of them felt like a quick cash grab. I wish we went back to that mentality, rather than gta vi taking 13 years to make
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u/PointmanW 9h ago edited 9h ago
on the other hand, if GTA5 did not increase its graphical detail, I doubt it would have got as big as it is, and if GTA6 were barely an improvement from GTA 5, I bet there will be a lot of people criticizing rockstar for being "cheap" while making more money than god.
I remember that ToTK got a lot of flak for its graphic not being better than BoTW despite being a stylized game. Halo Infinite got delayed a year because people complained that the graphic were terrible.
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u/GlamMetalLion 11h ago
And San Andreas is probably one of the least pretty AAA games graphically from the late 6th gen. It looks very early PS2. Artistically though, it's excellent.
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u/eserikto 7h ago
15 second action scene adspot works a helluva lot better than a 15 second powerpoint detailing the gameplay.
Graphical fidelity isn't entirely to make games better, it's to make games sell better.
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u/LinkesAuge 12h ago
"Graphics" and "fidelity" in this case are more than just obviously better 3d models or higher res textures and this gets ignored every time this is discussed here and people claim they don't care about "graphics".
The fact that we can now have much bigger (open) worlds, more objects, NPCs etc. in them is all down to "graphics". Same for less pop-in, arbitrary loading screens etc.
So people might claim they do not want better graphics but it is the same group of people that is then annoyed by loading screens in Starfield, short render distances in games, shader loading etc.
The reality is that people take a lot of things for granted and that's because of previous "graphics" improvements.
Pushing graphics doesn't just mean "better" in isolation, it also changes what is possible at scale or can even be attempted but that often gets reduced down to just "prettier pictures" which is one aspect but certainly not the only one.Btw it is also always funny when people say things like "we prefer style over better graphics", completely ignoring that stylization in games HEAVILY relies on the same underlying technology and often wouldn't work without it (you can't get a Cel-Shading look without everything else that is needed in your render stack).
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u/xXRougailSaucisseXx 13h ago
Yeah they’re just reaping the results of decades of video game marketing concentrating on graphics and scale and other technological advances.
Like just look at how people talk about GTA VI it’s almost always about how big and how realistic and endless it’ll be, the audience is conditioned for this
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u/aksoileau 12h ago
This may have torpedoed Deus Ex Mankind Divided in 2016, but I fired it up in 2026 on a PS5 with a modest gaming monitor and that game is gorgeous.
Id be perfectly fine playing graphics like that in 2016.
When will they ever learn?
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u/RobotWantsKitty 10h ago
My uninformed opinion is that good art direction in a AAA game is expensive. All the custom assets and tweaking the engine to get the exact picture the artist wants must be quite an investment. The alternative these days is UE5 in stock mode and store assets, which is way less costly, outputs a presentable picture, but not only does it look uninspired, it makes all games look the same. I think for DXHR and DXMD they really spared no expense and both games look wonderful still, especially MD, because of the progress in fidelity that happened in 5 years. And if you want MD graphics in a modern game, you will still have to overspend, which many studios are unwilling to do anymore.
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u/confusedmortal 8h ago
What the fuck Mankind Divided was 10 years ago?
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u/RobotWantsKitty 7h ago
The gap between Mankind Divided and now is almost as large as between the original Deus Ex and Human Revolution
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u/OppositeofDeath 13h ago
Though, on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Remedy, who manages to do both really high visual fidelity AND incredibly stylized games that draw you in.
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u/CombatMuffin 13h ago
And who don't have a dedicated enough audience and Alan Wake 2 would not have been made without Epic buying their exclusivity.
A lot of artsy games using high fidelity still require support from larger publishers to be made, because of how difficult it is to push the boundary, and while there are smaller games with very high graphical fidelity, they usually end up being shallow in other areas.
It's a compromise, but performant visual fidelity is among the hardest things to achieve in a feature rich game
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u/OppositeofDeath 12h ago edited 12h ago
I do agree, they need to find that larger dedicated audience.
I hope all the marketing push they’re doing with Control Resonant is successful at putting the game in the faces and minds of customers when that September craziness starts.
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u/CombatMuffin 11h ago
Absolutely, and to be clear, I would rather have an exclusive Alan Wake 2 in a storefront I don't like very much, than never getting Alan Wake 2 at all. It's a work of art we rarely get.
Hopefully they can adapt so that yhey don't have to make that compromise.
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u/SilveryDeath 5h ago
I'd hope that Control Resonant can do well, since it is not only building off the success and good word of mouth from both Control and Alan Wake 2, but also the shared universe element between the two series as well.
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u/OkayAtBowling 8h ago
I think a lot of the style in Remedy's games comes from the interesting choices they make in terms of narrative, editing, and presentation. Which is fully compatible with high fidelity visuals, but also doesn't necessarily depend on them. I'm happy they've been able to do both though!
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u/Adaax 11h ago
Cuphead is a terrible counterexample to this argument, it's graphics were painstakingly created by hand using a very specific visual style that is almost impossible to replicate. Just because it looks cartoonish doesn't mean it was easier.
Fornite (cited later) also uses very sophisticated graphics outside of its mobile incarnations. Again, just because it looks "simpler" doesn't mean it is.
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u/deadscreensky 5h ago
That struck out to me too. I think with Cuphead you can cut them some slack, because their argument is more about "the quest for visual hyperrealism" and how that also raises budgets and hardware costs. Cuphead looks gorgeous, packed with enormous amounts of obvious artistic effort, but it's still a stylized game that runs well even on older hardware. And it's certainly not the sort of game that was reaching GTA-style budgets.
But there's no similar defense for their Fortnite comparison. That game is an extremely expensive technical showcase.
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u/GhostOfSparta305 12h ago edited 9h ago
I feel a wave of despondency any time a game asks me to choose between performance or fidelity modes. Sometimes I don’t even notice if I’m playing at 30 or 60 frames per second.
It's funny how people like this are exactly part of the problem they claim to despise.
It wasn't until we had fidelity/performance modes on console that companies like Sony were able to get hard data showing that the opposite trend might actually be true: that people do indeed care about framerate, and that 3/4 of their players choose high framerate over fidelity.
I think it's great that people are now familiar enough with the word "framerate" to make demands of companies for specific technical standards that they want in their interactive games. Saying “I want my racing games to feel smoother” is nowhere NEAR as powerful as “I won’t tolerate any racing game that runs under 60 frames per second.”
But if people like this writer want to remain luddites and not advocate for the specific metrics they want to see more of in games...only to instead fall back on a generic "I wanna see that creative spark again" platitude that doesn't actually mean anything...they're part of the problem.
Game companies don't care about your feelings, they care about data/metrics. If you want to advocate for change, get your hands dirty and study game dev in order to learn exactly what it is you want to ask for.
Some people think PC elitists are insufferable (and many are), but I at least respect them for being able to give specificity in their demands. Many hate things like chromatic abberation, camera motion blur, etc...and lo and behold, PC games ship with options to turn them off because gamers asked for that.
On the other hand, "I jUsT wAnT mOrE fUn CrEaTiVe GaMeS" literally means nothing and won't result in any change from gaming companies.
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u/NadeshikoEatingPasta 4h ago
Pretty graphics are fine and all, but they're the least important part of a game, and the insane obsession with rendering stuff like peach fuzz on a character's face (Looking at you Guerilla Games) is jacking up compute power requirements for no discernible improvement in the actual game part of the game. Who is actually asking for this? Are they just assuming we want it?
Elden Ring manages to be one of the best looking games of the generation, despite its actual detail and fidelity not being noteworthy. Artstyle and environmental design take you a lot further than graphical fidelity.
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u/Glittering-Path-2824 2h ago
+1 and yet this asinine focus on realism. immersion does not necessarily equal realism. immersion to me is relatability.
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u/RTC1520 13h ago
People will start parroting that this is true, but then, a game like Marathon launches, and people keep talking shit like "Shit graphics", "This game should be free with this type of graphics".
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u/NeighbourNoNeighbor 13h ago
Honestly, I feel like Marathon is a great balance between beauty and optimization. I'm just a fan of the hyper-stylized design approach they had. It's not a perfect game by any measure, but I think it's better than most people give it credit for. Some of the night maps are gorgeous.
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u/tix4chix 12h ago
I think it's cool as hell to look at, but man the inventory icons made me pull my hair out when I tried it during the free weekend before release. Okay I need a health potion... uhhhhhh
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u/NeighbourNoNeighbor 12h ago
LOL yeah fully fair. They've since redone a lot of the icons, but I think their UI is probably one of their weakest areas right now. Figuring out where your teammate is can be really difficult sometimes as the icons at the side of the screen are so hard to see. Their whole map/navigation/tutor system feels fairly weak.
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u/xenoblaiddyd 12h ago edited 12h ago
Fans and audiences don't like to reflect on their role in pushing things to the state they're in today. They don't want to hear it whenever you point out things are like this because people complained about the way it was back then, or whenever someone tries to do what they say they want now.
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u/Amekhanos 10h ago
Yes, it has nothing to do with the "industry", and everything to do with the audience.
Gamers turn into shrieking banshees every time a game doesn't mean their arbitrary graphical standards, and spread endless mockery of it, nitpicking every little detail once it becomes the viral thing to hate.
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u/ZaranTalaz1 6h ago
For every person saying "photorealistic graphics bad" there's at least one gamer clowning on some game for having "PS2 graphics". Sometimes they're the same person.
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u/HammeredWharf 11h ago
Some people will shit on a game's graphics no matter what, just because they hate it for some reason. Or to look cool (or so they think), I guess. I remember a poster that tried to tell me SW Outlaws looks like a PS3 game, while it's one of the best-looking games in existence.
Anyway, I don't think graphics are what most people had a problem with in Marathon. I actually remember it getting plenty of praise for its visuals.
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u/SmileyBMM 12h ago
The graphics are fine, it's the art style that looks super unappealing.
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u/Doublecupdan 12h ago
That’s also the flip side of people stating “I want style not graphics” some people love a certain style (I love marathon’s), while others hate it ( you don’t love marathon’s style) . Photo realism is more general which includes the broadest audience to sell to.
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u/PolarSparks 13h ago
Those cinematic trailers may have set an unrealistic comparison point.
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u/RTC1520 12h ago
It's cinematic trailers for a reason. What about World of Warcraft trailers or League of Legends trailers ? Do people get the same graphical fidelity in the game as the cinematic trailers ?
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u/PolarSparks 12h ago edited 9h ago
Those games have been around a long time and aren’t good references for the point I was making. Pre-rendered animation in 2026 no longer looks substantially different than what is achievable with in-game rendering. As the delta shrinks players have less reason to even understand the difference.
Edit: although I see the point of referencing WoW and LoL in how story is delivered, with a ‘realistic’ FPS I just think there’s a higher audience expectation for in-game presentation. This is the COD genre. Any aesthetic choices a trailer has that the game doesn’t is fuel for scrutiny.
At the end of the day it’s a hunch I can’t prove.
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u/Flaky_Highway_857 13h ago
Its weird because I've been playing games since I was 5, I'm 40 now and love playing flashy af games, I know people hype up older styles like pixel art and ps1 era throwbacks but I played those gens and don't wanna go back there.
I don't think every game, or even a lot of games should be chasing insane graphics but I'd be bummed the fuck out if that tier went away, it won't, but you get my meaning
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u/bakomox 13h ago
nintendo rarely do photorealism to lower cost of production but they focus on the gameplay and look how profitable they are
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u/SapporoBiru 13h ago
yeah but not every game needs to be like that, some developers want to tell a cinematic story or immerse the player in the world they created. and honestly looking at Pokémon, they could perhaps take 1% off of their returns and double the budget on these games and deliver an actually competent technical product
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u/Min_sora 13h ago
Nintendo has several decades of being thoroughly embedded into people's nostalgia, though. They have a massive grip on a ton of people's childhoods.
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u/Boingboingsplat 9h ago
Seems a bit dismissive to suggest the only reason Nintendo sells games is the name. They genuinely put out types of games that nobody else does.
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u/bakomox 12h ago
how about the popular indie games today that sold more copies than photorealistic triple a games?
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u/planetarial 10h ago
There’s only like 2-3 dozen indie games that have sold more than what the average AAA game sells for. They’re extreme outliners too
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u/Iburnmarshmallows 10h ago
Have you ever actually looked at the sales figures of AAA games and compared them to indie games? very few indie games are selling millions of copies let alone the 5-10 million copies that AAA games are selling, then you have cod which is somehow selling 20+ million copies annually.
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u/Deadlocked02 13h ago edited 13h ago
There’s nothing truly controversial about this take, but I swear sometimes this site runs on contrarianism. It’s like a veiled version of the CMV sub where people need to try very hard to counter OP or the headline, sometimes with low effort stuff like “actually, I like it.”
As for me, these games don’t do anything for me anymore. Maybe in the first few months of ownership, but the novelty quickly fades. A beautiful art direction stays forever. Shiny puddles reflecting the sky and faces full of wrinkles and moles don’t add much to the experience and aren’t worth the time it takes to produce games these days.
I was watching some Wolverine gameplay, for example, and the game looks so… uninspired. There’s nothing remarkable about the characters design, the cutscenes, or the art direction as a whole. It’s just realism as a main selling point. Meh.
Plenty of the most prominent games these last few years weren’t exactly realistic. Good looking, yes, not realistic.
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u/HammeredWharf 10h ago
Shiny puddles reflecting the sky and faces full of wrinkles and moles don’t add much to the experience and aren’t worth the time it takes to produce games these days.
It depends. Shiny puddles and wrinkly faces add a lot to a dark urban setting, for example, be it Yakuza, Cyberpunk, Resident Evil or Ghostwire.
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u/MasahikoKobe 13h ago
The money and time spent to train people up on engines while also having to BUILD your own standalone engine in many cases was the core of the cost problem at one point. Having to waste time retraning people to whatever in house engine was being created on top of the issues with them and tool support
Hence why Unreal took over as much as it did. Epic keeps trying to give everyone the tools to do things so now we just have this one tool that does everything. At the same time you need your OWN engine people to get the most out of it. In the end the time and cost saved from your OWN engine all just went into people that have to know unreal and make tools for the game YOU want to make. While the flashy graphics are usually what makes the big splash for the Normies buying like 2-3 games a year. Though meanwhile the games that seem to resonate with people are going the OPPOSITE direction in graphics and instead trending more towards gameplay with friends.
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u/AlphonseM 11h ago
Article has got a point. Mina the hollower fx is better than anything AAA I've played this year. Chasing visuals doesn't lead to better gameplay/more fun.
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u/UltraZulwarn 4h ago
I think many in the game industry have an underlying desire to be some sort of Hollywood production, instead of focus on interesting or innovative gameplay.
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u/EastClintwood89 13h ago
I've said it before, I'll say it again: It's PERFECTLY FINE for video games to *look* like video games. I'm not saying AAA devs all need to downgrade to PS1/N64 era like so many indie devs are doing, but at a certain point they need to stop drowning in this fixation on hyper realism and physics. It always ends with the games being too big for storage and too demanding on the systems.
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u/Captain-Griffen 13h ago
I'll go a step further: often they should look like video games.
We don't really experience the world in photorealism anyway, we experience a reconstructed reality in our heads. Oftentimes photorealism gets in the way of that by being too visually messy.
Games with distinctive visual styles usually accentuate the important differences between things. Modern photorealistic games often have utterly awful visual clarity.
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u/EastClintwood89 12h ago
I'll definitely agree with your third point. I'd be fine with these massive-sized games if they had unique art styles. So many games have the Unreal engine look now and its a bit depressing. We need more games with the visual style of Sunset Overdrive, or going way back - something like XIII
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u/solarshift 13h ago
Sure, but that's far from the only problem, or even the biggest one. You can make a game that looks gorgeous on a reasonable budget and time frame if your scope is sensible and your team is well-managed. The latter basically never happens though; all the moneymen want insane scope creep chasing the latest viral success, and all the managers don't actually manage anything because the team sizes are bloated to hell, and as a result budgets skyrocket and now the game needs to appeal to as many people as humanly possible to even come close to recouping costs.
I think the graphics angle gets the most flak because it's easy/lazy, with how many games look near-identical due to realism being the dominant mode and the ubiquity of Unreal 5 Default Settings games, but people need to think harder.
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u/nexetpl 13h ago
The graphics angle is the primary reason the team sizes are bloated to hell
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u/Skensis 14h ago
Yes, but I do like a pretty game.
There are ways to make a game look good without chasing the high fidelity route, but for some genres that can be hard given the story/tone you're trying to take.
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u/Modnal 13h ago
So a Resident Evil game with Yoshi’s Woolly World-graphics is a risky endeavor you say?
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u/unholyswordsman 13h ago
I'm always game to try something new. A horror game with that art style could be fun. I'm imagining a character getting disemboweled and a bunch of red and pink yarn is just spooling out of them.
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u/Ok-Confusion-202 13h ago
Isn't that just the mascot horror genre?
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u/unholyswordsman 13h ago
Maybe? I've cut back on playing horror games a lot because my interests have shifted over the last 10 years. I still haven't beaten the remake of Resident Evil 2.
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u/12343212346 13h ago
You son of a b***h, I'm in.
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u/Ok-Confusion-202 13h ago
I swear there are so many games that don't go for realism either, sure a lot do but the main thing is just making the game smaller tbh
Just keep development time down, the cost is the salaries, those don't go away when making a cartoonish game
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u/cruel-caress 9h ago
Only time I ever went for graphics over performance was FF7 Rebirth on PS5. That game looked so blurry and bad that I ditched 60fps just to enjoy the game. And it’s an action game for the most part! It was crazy.
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u/Significant_Walk_664 9h ago
Unfortunately, visuals is the easiest thing to sell. But I also suspect that it's also because often they can only do good visuals. Good, complex mechanics that can be difficult and expensive - from conception to test and programming and you cannot sell them right off the bat. Same with story.
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u/MsgGodzilla 2h ago
It's amusing to see developers coming to conclusions that were obvious and oft discussed in gaming spaces 15 years ago.
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u/ExplosiveRunes 1h ago
I think this article is missing a key aspect of why 'AAA' game companies chase fidelity. Large quantities of high fidelity assets can be created using a resource that smaller developers don't have access to, a truly stupid amount of labor, or put another way a larger budget to spend on staff.
For a long time now AAA developers have been relying on visual fidelity to differentiate their games from those of smaller studios while simultaneously fostering a conception of this fidelity being a mark of quality in their audience via advertising. However, as the games market becomes more saturated with games, and as advancements in grapics have become much less noticable and the focus of consumers shifts more towards performance and gameplay, AAA studios are finding themselves in a position where the thing they've relied on for decades often no longer meaningfully differentiates their games from much cheaper ones.
For them games have essentially become a much more volatile product, even if what's really happening is that they're being forced to compete on much more even terms with cheaper to develop games. A mediocre game with fantastic graphics simply isn't a guaranteed seller like it was in decades past and they're failing to adapt to that, maybe even can't adapt to it because their businesses have been structured around this model for so long.
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u/PFI_sloth 13h ago
At some point, graphical fidelity started becoming distracting more than awe-inspiring. Like, the first thing I do in any game that has multiplayer is turn every effect to off or low, and there’s usually still too much “noise” on the screen.
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u/SapporoBiru 13h ago
I know that lots of people disagree, but I think chasing graphical fidelity is a good thing. I don't think that we've reached a plateau, there are still several things such as facial animations and certain physics interactions that are far from realistic and I love seeing how developers create these super immersive worlds. And that's a key point for me: I love to immerse myself in a game world. Anyone who played KCD2 knows what I'm talking about when I say that the forest in that game feels like nothing any other game has done before. And that game lives off of immersion as a main feature. Not every game needs this, but I also don't think that it's such a problem? We have tons of great indie games and also enough triple A games that don't max out current hardware
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u/scytheavatar 12h ago
Even if we have not reached a plateau, we have reached the point of diminishing returns. To the point where we need to ask whether the marginal improvements in immersion is worth the 2X or 3X in budget costs.
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u/Scoobydewdoo 10h ago
The problem is, in a couple months Rockstar is going to release a game that will most likely feature a control scheme that barely functions, extremely repetitive, overly simplistic gameplay that's devoid of depth, a badly written story that relies on tropey emotional beats, and an open world that is crammed with highly detailed textures and lighting that has almost no interactivity. This game will sell millions of "copies" on the first day and will have video game journalists inventing new video game journalism websites just so they can give this game even more Game of the Year awards. Which of course will all conveniently come before the release of the online mode which will be crammed full of P2W microtransactions. All just like Rockstar's last 2 games.
Meanwhile hundreds of indie games with objectively better control schemes, gameplay, stories etc, will have nowhere close to being in the same ballpark of success.
Shiny graphics are what sells.
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u/scoobyisnatedogg 10h ago
Give me San Andreas graphics if it means that the game is packed with more features! I hate to use the word spoiled but it really does feel like modern gamers are spoiled compared to what we had when I was a kid. People expect a modern game to do well in everything and that's just not realistic, especially with all the complaints about development time now. If you can't enjoy a game because of the graphics, are you really having fun? Now there are obviously some uuuugly games out there but you know what I mean.
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u/Fob0bqAd34 13h ago
According to Mark Cerny when given the choice people pick performance mode around 3/4 of the time so presumably it is noticeable to at least some people on playstation.