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This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee takes a look at why chasing realistic graphics all the time is hurting AAA games.
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You only have to look at what humanity (the game, not the people) and TotK has just done to see that god ideas come from not having good graphics
Didn’t that “lighting system” at the beginning become Forspoken somehow?
As a 3d artist I agree with this statement, with photogrametry becoming easier
Rimworld is notorious in the community for making even powerful PCs beg for mercy when you start getting 50+ colonists in a base, because of how much processing power it takes to run all the AIs powering each one. It's a game that absolutley gets better the more processing power you throw at it, yet graphically, it looks like an episode of SouthPark that was thrown together in 20 minutes to meet deadline.
I'm about to watch this video. But I just wanted to start my comment by writing, my reaction upon seeing this thumbnail was, 'Finally someone else other than me is saying it, maybe now people will listen'. I do photo realistic 3D renders for a living, and I'm sick of the obsession with photorealism in games at the cost of literally every other aspect of the gaming experience.
OK now having watched the video, I have absolutely nothing to add other than, Yahtzee, your desired water game does exist, it's called Hydrophobia: Prophecy, and it came out over 10 years ago, and it looked fine then and it looks fine now, further underlying the pointlessness of this constant pursuit for more and more realistic graphics/faster hardware.
Really good looking people models does kinda mean absolutely nothing when those models either know exactly where the player is 100% of the time making a B line for their position, stand still until 1 detects the player and all of them make a B line for their position, or stand there posing because the area hasn't finished loading yet.
From where I stand, graphics are the excuse. What is really killing both AAA games and the industry is that they really dont give about games at all. They're just a medium to sell us bland, boring pseudostories that can be easily broken into extra DLC since they are incomplete in nature, and more importantly, SAFE, because challenging thoughts or ideas might be waaaay too dangerous for our society.
Generally agree with the sentiment but imo there's no point getting bogged down with "will these visuals still be impressive in 20 years?". If you go for great graphics and one day it's outdated, so be it. For better or for worse I think it's perfectly fine for something to be of its time. Those first uncharted games are basically worthless to us now in 2023 and yet people have the fondest memories of them.
There was a point when it certainly. mattered, but these days, when it is very complex, very. expensive and difficult to manage, I'd rather take a fun inventive games, rather than well blockbuster visual fidelity explosion we have today.
ahem
Hitchcock
Everybody loves Red Facton Guerilla and Teardown. More of them please.
Coming from the strategy genre side of things, I was way more impressed by the sheer mad amount of custimization options something like Stellaris or Age of Wonders 4 have, or the way Amplitude or Paradox games keep track of all the tiny modifiers and hundreds of AI nations and factions, then I was at something like, say, Civ 6's fully rendered leader cutscenes (which most people click away from annoyance at the repetition, turn off entirely because they cause the game to chug, and which have already started to age poorely to boot!).
Age of Empires and Total War torpedoed their core gameplay by making every unit in latter installments a brown blob of realistically rendered armour and animations, where the earlier games had cartoony graphics that made units distinguishable at a glance and pop out of the screen, which is really important when you need to precisely click on them in a whirling melee! And the new "realistic" animations actively made the game worse to boot, beyond making the games slow to render, as we now have bullshit like tracking projectiles where first the games had individually rendered arrows and physics based arcing artillery and made units actually collide instead of phasing into eachother when charging.
I agree with everything. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go buy two 4080's and run them SLI so these Rays can trace just a little bit better.
I like how all his ideas minus the audio one would take even more time than graphics already do
I totally agree on this and more. I'm in gaming since the mid nineties and we were always struggling to get the latest hardware to play the games we loved. Now im sitting here with a powerful PC with the latest components and nothing to actually play that uses that raw power. Fuck me, i've been replaying Shadowrun for the last week or so just to enjoy gaming again.
Dwarf Fortress is a great example of a game that takes gameplay and scale over graphics to the extreme.
meanwhile on the switch nintendo just busy making great games like zelda
Another way that increased processing power could be put to good use would be improving enemy AI, as much like water and physics, it hasn't seen much improvement since the days of Half Life, and in some ways has deteriorated, as seen most recently with Redfall.
Wonder if this is just a sneaky way to preview his Tears of the Kingdom review
I think it would be really interesting to see someone approach video games the way A24 approaches movies, with a focus on making a lot of movies and empowering directors with a clear creative vision.
if it bother you so much go play your vintage mod and indie game, better yet, pay indie studio your youtube monetisation money to make those stupid game ideas you suggested
So it seems that idea 1 is actually just Serious Sam 4, I always found it baffling when people said Serious Sam 4 looked like a last-gen game when it literally rendered 100'000 enemies on screen, I don't want to know what it would take to render that with 4k textures and 3000 poly models.
Games never had to look better than HL2
Full Physics for Water is absolutely insane. The amount of computing required for Fluid simulations isn't in the range of a 4090 it's in the range of a fucking room sized super computer.
I still maintain that games like Red Faction Guerilla and Just Cause 2 could have been a real turning point in gaming; the ability to traverse anywhere in a fully rendered map with one loading screen and entirely destructible environments would be absolutely fucking incredible with the kind of power we have now.
Instead I get to have a mediocre time watching Cal Kestis' beard bristle in real time while the game shits itself into a hard crash.
Personally I love noita's approach to this. Where, the game is very impressive, but looks very low quality at a first glance. It is, afterall, quite pixelated, something you'd find on metroid or castlevania times…that is, until you realize that every pixel on screen is individually animated, with each having their own physics and interactions. Where in another game itd be "cool icy terrain" here you go "ok, there is this much soil, this much rock, this much ice, I should be able to make the ice crack apart if I hit here with this spell, oh this monster's bullet turns into acid, which will melt through that steel, but I should be vary because if I hit that pressurized tank its going to release a whole bunchof deepfreeze vapour which can do a lot of damage, and itll be annoying because Ill have to wait for it to clear before proceeding. Oh wait, that light source can be shot to make it fall and release an electric charge which might kill off the enemy before it notices me because it is standing on metal. And then its blood should melt the area and let me descend!"