this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Did games get any better though when the graphics got better? I remember being so hyped seeing PS3 game footage pre-2006, then after a few years it was like "oh shit, we have to go back!"
Some did and some didn't. I'm pretty salty as the FF7 remake because, to me, it feels like it's missing the heart of the original game. And the chocobo shit which I loved. I just wish they'd stop cheapening things when they remade them ffs. They just make them look nice and it feels like they put no other effort into it. Which is idiotic because they already have the whole game mapped out. Just remake it how it fucking was goddammit >:(
Meanwhile, BG3, the new Spiderman games, and the new Zelda games were (to me) fantastic. The perfect mixes of gorgeous graphics and actually solid gameplay that felt like they had some love and soul put into them.
So it's a mixed bag and at the end of the day pretty graphics can't trick people into liking games that should have been better. We complain about Skyrim being ported all over the damn place but at least they don't drop half the original content every time. That's such a sad low bar but there it is.
PS2 graphics were pretty on point. Upscale to a modern resolution, many of them still look decent now.
Xbox 360 era we got a lot of normal maps added (so models looked a lot more complex than they were).
PS4 added physically based rendering (ability to make parts of models look shiny without needing to separate them).
And the new shit is ray tracing, which PS5 isn't really powerful enough to do, but honestly neither are most affordable PCs. We get nicer lighting at least, but we'll still be on the old render paths for a while yet.
You still get improvements over time, but nothing is really going to compare to PS1 to PS2.
Games have gotten prettier, no argument, but I still feel like we're playing the same games we were playing 20 years ago just with slight QOL improvements.
Yeah, I feel like everything we have now could have been done on the PS3 and Xbox 360. At least gameplay wise. Before that they were quite limited in terms of RAM. The big open world games probably couldn't have been done prior to that gen. Stuff like Assassin's Creed 2 or Far Cry 3 wouldn't have been possible at all on PS2, I feel.
The closest they had was GTA SA which had huge nearly empty areas to hide the loading of the main city areas.
I'm just going to butt in and say that Far Cry 3 is the most ridiculously perfectly optimised game I've ever played. I managed to get it running on internal graphics of an old laptop in 800x600 resolution with potato settings and it was genuinely still enjoyable. I think I played through it halfway like that before I got my pc back.
I saw some arguments over the last few years. It seems that the gaming industry focused so hard on good graphics that they forgot how to make the rest of the games. Honestly some faithful re-releases with updated graphics of ancient 8 and 16 bit games, would probably sell fairly well.
Sure if you consider the industry to only be AAA size games
AAA titles have always tried to be on the cutting edge of new graphics. Indies obviously are an exception to the "new games bad" rule.
Right but indie, A, and AA are just as much part of the industry as AAA
In your opinion, what is an example of an A or AA title?
I messed up a little indie and A are basically the same thing. An example for things that are AA are smaller publishers and developers that still have a decent monetary backing like Devolver Digital, Warhorse studios, Obsidian (moreso when they were contracting out to larger developers like Bethesda but also with their own titles),Bohemia Interactive, platinum games (who make Nier). Essentially lower budget, generally less marketing, smaller but still decent team sizes between 50 and 100 people is considered to be AA. Whereas larger companies like rockstar, blizzard, Activision etc are AAA because they have that huge monetary backing of investors, many teams and sub companies that divvy up the work on multiple large scale projects at a time.