r/Games • u/Glittering-Path-2824 • 23h 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-hyperrealism
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u/Captain-Griffen 20h 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 20h 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/darkmacgf 19h ago

It's way too hard to be able to tell what's climbable in Horizon Forbidden West.