Gaming

I don't understand why developers and publishers aren't prioritizing spectacle games with simple graphics like TABS, mount and blade, or similar. Use modern processing power to just throw tons of shit on screen, make it totally chaotic and confusing. Huge battles are super entertaining.

I don't mind the graphics that much, what really pisses me off is the lack of optimization and heavy reliance on frame gen.

There's no better generational leap than Monster Hunter Wilds, which looks like a PS2 game on its lowest settings and still chugs at 24fps on my PC.

To be fair there isn't just graphics.

Something like Zelda Twilight princess HHD to Zelda Breath of the wild was a huge leap in just gameplay. (And also in graphics but that's not my point)

I feel like we won't be able to see the difference until a couple of years, like CGI in old movies.

I would argue that late SNES era games look far better than their early 3d era follow ups

They said we'd never have consumer tech that could white clip in real time but look at us now.

Games did teach me about diminishing returns though

This is what a remaster used to look like.

I mean, how much more photorealistic can you get? Regardless, the same game would look very different in 4K (real, not what consoles do) vs 1080p.

Let's compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.

Generational leaps then:

Good lord.

EDIT: That isn't even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.

Good. Lord.

The question is whether "realism" was ever a good target. The best games are not the most realistic ones.

This is true of literally any technology. There are so many things that can be improved in the early stages that progress seems very fast. Over time, the industry finds most of the optimal ways of doing things and starts hitting diminishing returns on research & development.

The only way to break out of this cycle is to discover a paradigm shift that changes the overall structure of the industry and forces a rethinking of existing solutions.

The automobile is a very mature technology and is thus a great example of these trends. Cars have achieved optimal design and slowed to incremental progress multiple times, only to have the cycle broken by paradigm shifts. The most recent one is electrification.

Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.

The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.

Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.

Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.

Kind of like smartphones. They all kind of blew up into this rectangular slab, and...

Nothing. It's all the same shit. I'm using a OnePlus 6T from 2018, and I think I'll have it easily for another 3 years. Things eventually just stagnate.