I have some great memories playing dwarf fortress. It was a lot of effort but the payoff was fantastic. I don’t know if I can bring myself to spent that much energy on a game again.
Shoutout to Caves of Qud, because it wasn’t mentioned yet. I’ve been looking for a game that comes close to ZAngband which I played in the 90s. COQ has a tileset, so it’s not ASCII and I didn’t like the looks at first but it’s fun when you see how deep it is. Complex character creation, quests, factions, ‘bosses’… I think the world map is not randomly generated, the rest is afaik (ruins, multi-levelled lairs, most villages…).
I know exactly how every beat of this conversation is going to go, but I’m still here for it.
I’ve been hearing how games are too focused on graphics since the late 1980s.
That time you remember games being all about fun? People then were complaining about how chasing visuals over gameplay was ruining games.
I know because I was there and I was complaining.
Graphics are fun and cool. I like graphics.
It all started going downhill when Nethack added color support in 1989: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/NetHack_3.0.4#Significant_changes
Design = graphics.
Or maybe Design(graphics).
Graphics ARE design. Barring very few exceptions, games communicate themselves visually. What the graphics look like, how they are laid out and how they convey the rules are absolutely fundamental parts of the experience-as-designed on every game, regardless of how technically complex the visuals turn out to be.
These arguments always bum me out a little, because they start from the premise that, say the people at, say, Yacht Club care less about or put less effort into what their games look like than larger devs using photorreal visuals, which should not survive looking at a single frame of their work.
Same word, different meanings. It may not be the technically correct definition of the word, but typically when people talk about “good graphics,” they’re talking about photorealism. In MrMobius’s comment, “graphics” = high resolution, photorealism, the kind of thing the comic we’re commenting under is talking about, and “design” = art direction, aesthetic.
ETA: That said, higher resolution can make already strong art direction even better. I think a large part of what makes Clair Obscur look so pretty is the juxtaposition of the surreal elements with the photorealistic graphics. Esquie sticks out to me in particular, because he looks so physically real, and also so alien.
I’m not trained in media criticism, so I’m sure someone else can phrase that better than I can
ETA more: Also, games that are designed to look as real as possible also take a lot of effort and talent. Just because Bodycam doesn’t look like a comic book or a surreal painting doesn’t mean it doesn’t have strong art direction. It cannot be easy to make a game that looks so indistinguishable from actual body cam footage.
Design = graphics.
Or maybe Design(graphics).
I would say design ⊃ graphics.
Graphics are cool! I just also think the story, mechanics, and game difficulty balance should have an equal amount of consideration, which seems poorly lacking in a lot of modern AAA games. A mile wide and an inch deep is a saying for a reason.
The real point where this argument falls apart is that modern AAA games almost exclusively use TAA, which ruins graphics. I’m so sick of shadows blurring and everything looking terrible and people saying it’s next level.
This is very weird and I am pretty sure it can be traced to some influencer ranting about something somewhere and I genuinely don’t have the energy to go trace it back.
I’ve stopped acknowledging the term AAA because I’m increasingly convinced nobody knows what they mean when they use it beyond “games that look expensive and I don’t like”.
I also don’t think there’s that many developers that don’t give “story, mechanics and game difficulty balance” an equal amount of consideration, mostly because those things are typically handled by entirely different people in any production that is bigger than a skeleton crew. It’s not like designers in big studios are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the rendering engineers to finish the peach fuzz on people’s cheeks.
The way people perceive opportunity cost in collaborative media is always weird to me.
It’s not like designers in big studios are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the rendering engineers to finish the peach fuzz on people’s cheeks.
This is true to an extent, but the visual fidelity of a game also determines how much work it is to author assets and (more importantly) the interactions between those assets.
If I want to make a new enemy in DOOM I have to make a series of 128x128 sprites that show 2-3 frames of walking animation from a few different angles, then add some simple programming for its abilities and AI and I’m done.
If I want to do the same thing in a game with high visual fidelity I have to make a 3D model, rig it and make animations, worry about inverse kinemetics, and make a bunch of textures and shaders to go on the model. And for anything extra I want the AI to do, or any extra gameplay element I want it to interact with, I have to worry about most of that stuff all over again.
For example, let’s say I want to add a gun that freezes enemies to both types of games. In the case of the DOOM-like game I can make a semitransparent ice texture and overlay it on all the sprites I’ve already made to make new textures, although I could probably get away with just tinting them blue. Then I have to change the enemy code to make their AI and animations freeze when hit with freeze gun and swap out their sprites to the frozen textures.
If I want to do that in a high visual fidelity game I have to think of how I’m going to cover the character in ice in the first place if I want the ice to be a 3D model. Sure I can freeze their animations pretty easily, but if they can be in any pose (including a pose generated by inverse kinemetics) when they get frozen I’m going to have to write a system to dynamically cover the model in ice crystals. I’m also going to have to author materials and shaders for the ice, and worry about what that looks like in combination with the existing materials in different lighting conditions, not only for that enemy but for all the ones than can be frozen.
This sort of stuff is mitigated somewhat by modern tooling, and mitigated even more by the production pipelines that large studios have, but its these same production pipelines that make impossible the sort of drive-by-development and flexibility that you saw in the creation of a lot of earlier games like DOOM, Thief, and Half Life 1. (And when lots of changes are made late in development you usually end up with horrific crunch and a bad game at the end.)
Ultimately there’s a reason that low-budget indie games gravitate towards pixel art or low-poly art styles. Sometimes an indie game will come out that is very high fidelity, but these will generally be walking simulators with no visually present human characters (so, no interactions or characters to animate). And its for the same reason that games with the most complicated gameplay interactions (Dwarf Fortress, NetHack, etc) or the most highly branching storylines (Fallen London) tend to be text based.
EDIT: A couple of real world examples:
This is a retrospective on the development of Anthem. While obviously a lot of bad things were going on there, including a lack of leadership or clear vision, I can’t help but think of that as an example of old style drive-by-development running up against its limits. Every time they’d change the traversal mechanic it would invalidate the world design another team already did, and how many other mechanics are tied to level design? Any time one part of the team couldn’t decide on what they wanted to do, other parts also had to redo their own work, and as a result they spun their wheels for years.
My other example is this developer. He’s clearly passionate about his work and wants it to look as good as possible, but I worry that he doesn’t realize what a can of worms he’s opened by setting that standard for animations now. Its not that he spent months learning how inverse kinemetics work, its that he’s now committed to making sure every single enemy looks good when interacting with anything it can encounter so that nothing stands out by looking jank or unfinished compared to its peers. A problem that’s made worse by the fact that it sounds like you can take control of any enemy and take it anywhere, meaning anything can interact with anything in the entire game. He has already run into a problem with his manticore enemy not being able to fit through doorways and has started talking about making an IK-driven animation where it tucks its wings in as the player approaches the door. What’s gonna happen if the player presses the fly or jump button when that’s happening? Now multiply that question for every gameplay mechanic for every enemy in the game and every weird situation that might require a custom animation.
For me, I shy away from AAA games in general because the bigger the studio and higher the budget, the greater chance that there’s MBAs involved that will push design decisions that favour making more money over making a good game.
I think some people correlate that with graphics, maybe because the diminishing returns on effort put into graphics means those amazing graphics could have come at the cost of time spent on the gameplay elements, though I don’t personally think a great game and great graphics are mutually exclusive.
Hey, love your take on this. Can you tell us more on what is “opportunity cost in collaborative media” and how it relates to games? I don’t understand these words, and I’d rather get the explanation from a human being :3
It’s not like designers in big studios are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the rendering engineers to finish the peach fuzz on people’s cheeks.
Okay! I don’t think that either. I think they’re underpaid and overworked like virtually everyone in the games industry and unable to put out quality products because of arbitrary deadlines. That kind of thing is much more common with AAA games (which studios don’t seem to know how to define either, given that now they’re going on about AAAA and AAAAA games) than it is with indie games.
I’m going to be annoying for a second, but I promise to try and make it worth it: It isn’t about purism or even “fun”, because not all art is meant to amuse. Art is allowed to be anything, and we should treat critique of art (including games) an an exploration of what the creator was trying to do, to what extent they succeeded and how, what it makes you think of, and possible meanings. Play is merely one aspect of a game’s artistic content.
The entire subject of fun in terms of game design is, artistically speaking so nascent that there is hardly any history to that field of study. We’ve been making up for lost time in recent decades, but the entire concept of game theory is not even a century old.
So, that was probably annoying of me. But the point I’m here to make is that “fun vs graphics” isn’t really the conversation we’re trying to have.
One conversation we should have is the problem that exists with how games are funded and how those financial incentives can shape the creative side in a way that might hinder what’s being done with the medium. Games aren’t just art, they’re big business, and the conversation is taking place within the context of the tech industry, geopolitical trends, and even monetary policy. Now that the industry is so large, it often feels like creators working with big budgets are becoming risk-averse and often greedy. When traditional artists seem overly risk-averse and driven by financial incentives, the art world turns on them in a big way. Look at Anish Kapoor and vantablack.
Another conversation to have is graphics in gaming within the larger computing industry. We’re at the tail end of Moore’s law and the GPU market seems like it’s starting to turn away from gaming towards other perceived cash cows like LLMs and generative AI. So we should not expect graphics cards to continually get better forever, or even cheaper honestly. It’s been the case for decades, but the situation is dynamic.
For a long time, it seems like there has been a bad combination of forces at play in gaming: the promise of endlessly increasing computing power, and lurching shifts in monetary policy that lead initially to massive tech speculation and then periods of focusing intensely on profitability.
I think it’s reasonable to predict that we’re going to see smaller development budgets in gaming, increased focus on well-optimized code, a shift away from the emphasis on realism in games, or a general collapse in the “big budget” gaming industry as some or all of these fail to materialize.
Meanwhile, indie gaming has been on a hit streak. That food chain has been thriving at lower trophic levels, and no wonder. They’re taking more risks, being more generous, and reaching less highly than their larger peers. It’s a winning formula under tight monetary policy and the overall larger context.
I’ve said far too much, sorry to drop this on you.
You kinda moved things to a bit of a pre-decided set of rails there. I don’t know that the previous poster was particularly concerned about the concept of “fun” or the economics. But hey, I get wanting to find a place to say your piece.
FWIW, you’re not wrong about a lot of that, although I wouldn’t express it that way. I do have a few caveats for you.
For one thing, chasing the hardware hasn’t been as big of a deal for a while. I don’t think most game devs or execs are dumb enough to notice that WoW, Minecraft, The Sims, Roblox and a bunch of other major hits are not on the visuals cutting edge. Competing on high end visuals is comfortable for studios with access to a bunch of funding because it cuts off some of the competition, but there are big chunks of the industry where being flashy and high-tech cuts off big pieces of the potential market (mobile, handheld and PC, traditionally). A big part of this conversation is nerds consistently conflating home console and high end PC with the entirety of the gaming market, when it’s a small corner.
I’m also not sure that the investment boom and crunch thing is a cycle. Investment has been there for a long time, it is now leaving. I’m not sure it’ll come back. That will probably have the consequence of moderating budgets, as you say, but don’t underestimate how much that vacant top end for visuals will remain appetizing to some as competition there dries up.
And conversely don’t underestimate how big “indies” can get. I brought it up elsewhere, but Expedition 33 is making waves for being a small team, and they themselves have identified as “double A” a few times. But if you look at that next to, say, Persona 5, those lines start to blur a lot. As the tools evolve and, unfortunately, a bunch of experienced devs brain drain right into unemployment the ability of indies to reach scopes that were AAA just a few years ago will also increase.
On that comparison, by the way, I would not be surprised at all if it turns out all that sleek 2D UI art in Persona or Metaphor (not to mention the anime cutscenes) turned out to have been more expensive than the heavily middleware-reliant cinematic presentation in Expedition 33. Perception of cost is already out of whack and it will probably get weirder in an environment of consolidated engines and weird vectors for machine generation of assets.
The only time this was valid was when the Sega Saturn tried to do rounded 3D objects. I swear taking a single step in “Shining the Holy Ark” took 5 seconds which wouldn’t have happened if everything had edges
I think Gouraud shading was pretty cheap back then.
I gotta say, I don’t think we complained enough that gen about having every game look like a bad attempt at origami running at 15 fps.
Anybody complaining that modern games are too focused on visuals for not enough return needs to deeply rethink how we all collectively went from perfect 60fps Mega Man to whatever Mega Man Legends was.
I mean, people are still out there defending GoldenEye, and I must remind you that Doom had existed for years at that point.
Love Vampire Survivors. Would be better without the Castlevania asset flippiness, but still love it.
But here’s the thing, people mistake being able to make a good basic-looking game with not being able to make a good visuals-focused game.
I also love Cyberpunk, Indiana Jones, Expedition 33 and a bunch of other games that care about their visuals a LOT.
You think games have to be fun?
You will play pathologic and fear and hunger until the situation improves
…and then there’s the second Fear and Hunger, where my first run ended with the Woodsman because I chopped off the arm holding the giant axe instead of killing his dick, and then the dick detached and went all Alien face hugger and stunned me while he beat me up with his remaining arm.
Of course I like explaining Pathologic to people as “the game that looks at a glance like it’s an FPS adjacent RPG but in which when you first get a gun you will probably immediately sell it to buy some bread”. Fucking plague caused by an infected wound in a very unusual location.
Ice Pick are amazing. I’m a huge fan of The Void, where you are a soul in purgatory trying to survive, while appeasing the two other factions: brutish mutant Brothers that roam around taking all the resources, and docile naked Sisters that need your help to survive. The art style is utterly unique and the music/atmosphere is darkly beautiful. But it’s a stressful resource management sim at its core.
Growing up, one of my best friends parents set us up with a terminal MUD connection. Basically an old school, text based only MMO. You had to type in your commands, “look north”, “walk east”, “attack <enemy name>”. I was able to make a Sayian character, walk around town and Kamehameha my foes. I recall finding Smurf village and getting killed many times by Papa Smurf.
I wish I remembered what server it was or if any even exist any more.
I’ve been running one of these since 2009, it’s a ton of fun. No saiyans or smurfs though
Mine is self written, but there are engines out there you can get and customize. I hear good things about Evennia
