I will never understand the obsession around graphics. JUST MAKE IT FUN.
Here’s the reason AAA devs are obsessed with graphics:
It’s the only thing that differentiates them from indie devs.
Once you realize that indie devs can do anything and everything that a AAA game can do, except for creating tons of high detail 3D models, levels, and textures, you begin to see the AAA studio’s dilemma. If they don’t hire all those artists, level designers, and animators then they’re forced to compete with indie devs on gameplay, story, and features — none of which they can do!
Why is that? Because there are millions of indie game devs out there who are willing to spend many years of their lives trying out ideas that have close to zero chance of being successful and all the gamers out there are happy to pick that one in a million game which actually succeeds! For a AAA studio to step into that arena would be absolutely foolish.
It’s the same reason big corporations dominate book publishing but they don’t even bother trying to write books themselves.
I will never understand the obsession around computer-crashingly good graphics. They push your temps to the max and computer components don’t start throttling themselves until the temps are a little too high so that your shit will stop working sooner so you have to buy a new gpu sooner. Why can’t they let us control the thermal throttling temp, huh? Fuck that 99 degree celsius shit. “99c is acceptable temps for laptops and gpus” my ass.
Pixel art isn’t a necessarily a positive selling point to me but if the game is good and the graphics are good enough to be able to tell what’s going on without having to get high on drugs first, then its fine by me. Ps2 or xbox 360 era 3d graphics are the sweet spot though. I’m glad they finally added actual graphics to Dwarf Fortress, it’s actually playable now. If the msdos installation process has better graphics then a game then that’s pushing things little too far imho.
Seriously, way too many games are just generic garbage that advertise only on “look how realistic my game is, you’re not a true gamer if the games you play don’t make your computer sound like a jet engine!”
Graphics can be part of the fun. What’s so difficult to understand?
Graphics and jiggly physics.
If it’s just the tits, it’s not physics; it’s fetish.
It’s the ass as well.
don’t forget the dick and balls, I don’t
And the most fun graphics are stylized graphics!
Good graphics are fine, but not at the expense of creativity and fun.
It looks so marketing driven.
We are in decades of video games. Look at very old game and assess how “ugly” they are by today’s standard while at their time they were “the best graphics ever seen in history!” or something.
And so, the big question: we were having fun with games decades ago already. If graphics were part of the fun, your brain should explode under the immensely higher level of fun you have on modern games vs 20y old games. And… well…nope. Same as before, just higher expectations.
Are you perhaps retarded? Do you not understand that expectations change with current technology? Daily life must be immensely difficult for you
very well said. I think the last time i got excited about graphics was when Final Fantasy X came out lol. then they kept getting more realistic but never actually became real, they stayed video games. even VR. so… maybe graphics aren’t what we need to keep working on
EDIT: *aren’t, not are, FUCK. I’m saying no matter how much graphics improve, it’s still just a video game, good or bad
Games going for that uncanny valley aesthetic and not being nearly as efficient. I don’t want a 1000W PSU just to run my graphics card.
Of course, I don’t want my game to look like utter dogshit, and graphics can be apart of the fun, but my biggest concerns with games are how they play and what the story/characters is like (if it’s that type of game).
There can be times that I can appreciate more realistic looking games, but honestly it’s boring to see so many games try the same style over and over again, especially when it isn’t executed well. And if worrying about graphics causes my game to be an unoptimized game with a lackluster story, then I’d rather people just stick with a less detailed style to preserve the the fun (imo) part of games, which is literally everything else.
REbirth sure does look better than Fortnite, and REbirth sure does need a ton less of GPU and CPU.
It looks like dog shit, what the fuck are you talking about
That’s remastered…
I noticed that too, but I do think that the anon is talking about the remaster since he’s also talking about Windows 98 and the remaster was out in 2002 while the original game was out in 1996. I know fuck all about the production of the remake, but maybe windows 98 was all they had available to them and maybe they did draw all the textures themselves for it. It’d have to look into that, though.
Normal maps are pretty easy to make, they’re just time-intensive.
Anon is not entirely wrong though… we have become pretty lazy regarding optimizing software.
It’s not laziness, it’s bottom line and chasing the dollar. Management doesn’t give a shit about optimization, just MVP (minimum viable product). Speaking as a developer, the mindset of ‘we will fix it after deployment’ is fucking everywhere.
It’s also diminiahing results of investment. The more realistic you want to go, the more work you have to put in. Also more realism will mean certain other things will look even more jarring, so you’re having a much higher standard for bugfixes.
Well yes, obviously it’s a balancing act when making things look good, but optimization is about making what is there run well, not look better.
Except in 99.9% of cases nothing gets fixed after deployment either. That’s just an excuse not to admit that from the get-go.
Yyyyyuyup
Companies don’t want to invest in creating their own engine anymore, so now we get unoptimized unreal engine games now.
That’s not the problem. But why spend time and money to optimize your assets if the gamers will buy better hardware instead and you can even strike a deal with a big vendor.
If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.
The advantage of making your own engine is that you can specialize for your specific gameplay.
If your game is something that needs it, definitely go for it.
Something like Noita comes to mind
From Software and Hideo Kojima would disagree. The highest form of passion for your game is to create an engine that gives it the exact gameplay formula you want it to have.
Of course corporate greedfucks cannot understand this, they only care about how many villas and yachts the profits will get them.
I disagree here, making an engine you’d sell must be top notch in every aspect (or close to), an in-house engine only needs to get the job done for your game. Probably two orders of magnitude in needed workforce, depending on your needs ofc.
Very very few actual profitable companies roll their own engines.
Supercell has their own, but it’s because they started before there was anything available.
Indie games make their own engines but it’s more of a hobby or passion project, not something that can employ two dozen people to develop it.
It’s not really that great of a business.
Epic is estimated to have made $275M revenue on Unreal engine in 2023, vs $4.7B on Fortnite
Unity made $614M revenue on engine & tools in 2024, in ads and monetization they made $1.2B
These are stable industry standard engines, if you start work on your challenging engine today it’ll take years to develop, gain game-developers interest and trust. And still you’re competing with giants that use their engines as loss-leaders.
Then you only get a big geneal use thing like Unity again.
you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don’t want to pay people to optimize engine
its harder to hire new devs if engine is built in house, because no one outside the company understands how to use said engine unless its open for the public to use. thats the biggest drawback of in house engines (other than the increased develepment life cycle to develop one)
its why for example, many 3rd party ports/remasters of old games use unity for example.
Using an inhouse engine makes sense only if you can retain a lot of talent. or have several projects that use it as a base.
Or your engine can do something that’s hard to do with Godot, Unity or Unreal
Which is increasingly unlikely.
This is only a problem if you want unsustainable growth/enshittification and to treat your devs like shit with bad pay and endless crunch time.
Kojima is an example of giving dev too much freedom that its basically further putting you into the red had he been strung along for the ride during metal gear solid 5’s development and the money spent optimizing fox engine. Theres a fine line between endless crunch time/micromanaging, and letting your devs do work. Take another company like capcom as japanese company dev retention is high. RE Engine is used over several games now. and people agree it performs like shit for open world games.
to put up a few examples, The upcoming Metroid prime 4 is an example when a company gives devs too much freedom. The original japanese studio didn’t know what hte fuck they were doing, so Nintendo pulled them off hte project, and gave their project to retro, who was working on the “Project harmony” game, which looked very bad, to the point that nintendo was fed up with the hands off approach and Kensuke Tanabe reinserted himself back as director to get prime’s development back into production getting Prime 4 out later this year.
Part of the reason for the huge microsoft layoff that happened a few days ago is mainly because of microsofts more handsoff approach they gave their developers. they gave ninja theory 5 years to develop Hellblade 2 (which is a relatively long time). They gave Compulsion games 5+ years to develop South of midnight. neither game remotely probably paid of their development cost, in juxtaposition to a studio like Obsidian, who has in the same time frame, released 5 different games, some arguably more expansive than the previous 2 studios games, due to being well managed.
and I’m not really pointing fingers here, but keep in mind, its not solely due to unsustainable growth/enshittification and treating devs like shit and endless crunch time causing this problem. It’s mainly lack of better people/resource management because there are countless numbers of studios who get significantly more time than they should on a project with not much to show for it.
Is it though? I mean big companies most probably tweak whatever engine they use too, and the whole game is closed source, so company specific stuff is obiqutous to say the least.
Good points otherwise IMO.
yes, but tweaking whatever engine they have, still uses a lot of the underlying engines code, which more freemarket devs will use. There’s a huge reason why a lot of the companies who build engines in house are in japan, because labor laws in japan makes it so developer retention is usually very high.
Kojima and fox engine is an example of a well designed and optimized engine, but konami didn’t like it because of how much millions kojima spent developing both it and MGS5 hence the bad blood between them
That’s the HD remaster that came out like 10 years ago. They most certainly did not make that on windows 98.
It also helps that the game uses locked perspective scenes.
Not just that, but prerendered backgrounds, too.
All games could look like this if they got 48 hours to render each frame and their entire realtime render budget went to three character models, total and nothing else.
I mean, I dispute that games don’t look better than that in the first place, too. Grainy embedded screenshot aside, the RE1 remake definitely doesn’t look any better, even with all that, than the newer remakes.
Just to nitpick, the HD remaster is a remaster of the 2002 remake, so it’s a bit older than 10 years.
Yeah, but its still using rebuilt HD assets which make it look way better than the original game its based off of.
…which is a half-assed port of the GameCube remake.
If you get it, expecting it to be the same kind of remake as Resident Evil 2, prepare to be extremely disappointed.
Am I stupid? Don’t a lot games look like this in real time rendered graphics nowadays? What’s anon talking about.
Only if you like smudges due to upscaling and TAA.
Yeah seriously, anyone can make beautiful prerendered graphics that look good running on any game system released in the past ~20 years (which is what RE1 uses). Doing in realtime is the hard part.
Anon, as usual, don’t know what they’re talking about
MOAR TAA!!!
Surely a master of unlocking would know
I blame REmake for my impossibly high standards of what a remake should be
Re-makes are not the same as re-masters are not the same as re-releases.
I know, but look me in the eye and tell me REmake 3 is as good as REmake 1. You can’t even tell me it’s as good as RE3
And REmake 2 doesn’t feel like a redo of RE2 but a completely separate game with RE2’s story. So I felt a little robbed
Full disclosure: I’ve only played a little bit of REmake 2 and none of the originals or REmake 3. I have a friend who has, and he says that REmake 3 was a pretty big letdown.
REmake 3 might have been acceptable if it was a bonus feature of REmake 2 and not its own game. As its own game it is insulting
All screens were squares til like nearly 2010. Heck I have an early Nvidia GPU laptop around here somewhere with the most ridiculous looking 1:1 screen from like '08-ish.
Still peak gaming was MW3, CS, BF2-1942-2142. Back in the day, those were so good people ran successful brick and mortar businesses called internet cafés just for the masses to play those things or some oddie to hold w for hours ““playing”” WoW. Gaming sucks so bad it can’t sustain a real brick and mortar business culture any more.
The golden era of cafés here was a bit earlier than that. Late Quake 3, early CS. The MMO I remember people playing by the hour to play was Ultima Online, not WoW.
Still, those were fun and don’t get as much nostalgia as arcades, for some reason.
If you wanted to offer the same “we’ll run these on decent hardware you probably don’t have today” each seat would be like 5 grand to build and you’d need to somehow power 20-30 1000W machines running all day, so that’s a bit of a challenge when everybody has high speed internet. It was easier to do that when people either didn’t have Internet at all or were on dial-up modems that couldn’t sustain playable games at all. The hardware you couldn’t afford then was networking, which was cheap to set up and maintain for LAN by comparison.
People around me had mixed motivations in this later era as you called it. My buddies and I used cafés as a time management tool. Any of us could have built a gaming rig but we would have been on it way too much. Cafés were a destination and way to partition off gaming in our lives.
Really? Paying someone else a bunch of money to play by the hour seems like a weird way to manage your time. Plus, I knew several people who had a real problem with spending money in cafés.
I mean, it’s not gambling because you weren’t getting any money back at any point, but if you were leaving your Ultima Online character mining while you went to class, spending money on running a computer when you weren’t even looking at it… well, I’m gonna say there are better ways to keep yourself from problematic gaming.
The way I remember it (at least where I’m from), cafés were a way for broke college students living in dorms or shared apartments with no Internet to get into online gaming, and sometimes for kids to have a bit of an arcade experience in PCs better than their crappy laptops.
In some cases it got pretty wholesome, where groups of friends would just hang out in the one place that kept running the game they liked. There was this one basement grungy spot in town that started running Quake 1 and just… never stop. Those guys could railgun you mid-flight from a bouncepad on a ball mouse and we all decided it was better to leave them to it.
All the cafés were a long way away from where I lived so yeah we went there like going to the movies or bowling and it followed a similar event like dynamic. It was an optional thing to do but not some default or daily thing.
Square? 4:3
Comparatively, side by side it looks square to me
MorroWind 3?
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Games are hard, anon.
Devs have no say on where the budget flows and the owning corporation doesn’t care about your passion for the project.
Fortnite ranked in billions of dollars, when it looks ass good its time to wrap up to get it shipped. You can patch bugs and balancing later but we need a trailer out asap for preoders.
Also back when graphics where actually good and optimized: gameplay still > graphics
