It all started going downhill when Nethack added color support in 1989: https://nethackwiki.com/...
Dwarf Fortress ASCII graphics only rule
a year ago by Catoblepas to c/onehundredninetysix
BodilessGaze 48 points a year ago
couch1potato 5 points a year ago
For me it was the windows telnet session window adding color support. I grew up playing a MUD.
MudMan 10 points a year ago
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.
starman2112 13 points a year ago
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.
MudMan 7 points a year ago
Well, I assume most people splitting things this way typically think of design as gameplay design or systems design.
Either way I'd argue it's a bit of a misunderstanding of both what goes into good non-photoreal visuals and of the concept of game design.
HellieSkellie 7 points a year ago
Dwarf fortress is peak.
MudMan 5 points a year ago
Honestly, I briefly considered going to fish for the right symbol and I decided it wasn't worth it.
I can't decide if I'm annoyed or proud that obviously someone was going to get pedantic about it.
I genuinely thought people were going to pop out to mention I was saying design is a function of graphics with that second one before they did provide the symbol, so you've exceeded expectations there.
caseyweederman 4 points a year ago
Design tsu graphics
Catoblepas 13 points a year ago
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.
tobis 15 points a year ago
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.
tobis 4 points a year ago
If you are suggesting that I got this position from listening to an influencer, I’m afraid not. I earned this opinion through my own efforts.
I had three computers in a row experience horrible shadow blurring and nothing seemed to fix it. I spent maybe 100 hours meticulously troubleshooting what the hell was wrong before asking a computer savvy friend to come over and take a look, and he was just like “Oh, that’s just TAA, everyone’s computer looks like that.” And lo and behold, if you turn anti-aliasing off, it disappears.
A couple of examples I took while troubleshooting: https://imgur.com/a/cqdgIRq https://imgur.com/a/x6mTKx0
It turns out everyone sees the same thing in almost every game, but until you notice it your brain just filters it out. In many modern games they don’t even give you the option to turn it off. I would have started a hate movement myself, but found out a r/fucktaa community already existed. No lemmy equivalent yet, I believe.
MudMan -1 points a year ago
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.
drosophila 7 points a year ago
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.
MudMan 5 points a year ago
This somewhat wall-of-text-y post is most interesting for going back to my original point about how this argument has been in place for decades with little change.
I mean, seeing Half-Life 1 pop up as an example of drive-by game development is interesting, given that it's THE game that debuted highly scripted interactive narrative sequences. I wasn't there, but I can only imagine the sort of planning it must have taken to figure out the complex sequences where AI entities do things in tandem with the player. I do know for a fact that it took a long time to rig any sort of map for HL1 (because they did provide the dev tools for modding and I did mess around with them). HL1's enemy AI was an early example of a game that required level designers to manually set up navigation nodes on the geometry (because those flippy ninja enemies later in the game needed to know where they could jump and take cover). I remember it being so cool but noticeably harder to do in your spare time than, say, the old Quake stuff.
Anyway, nobody is saying there aren't costs to complexity, but the focus on visual fidelity as a linear relationship to gameplay complexity is at best reductive. The problem is that end users can see graphics. So if something looks nice but just hasn't figured out core aspects to gameplay it's easier to assume one thing drove the other rather than, say, not having spent enough time prototyping, or having trend-chasing leadership change their minds multiple times about fundamental aspects of the game because something new got big last month or whatever other behind the scenes stuff may have sent development off the rails.
I don't have time to go over the other guy's stuff, but I will say that I respect anybody who tries to do development with their whole ass out in public, especially if they're learning. I get anxious just thinking about it.
Catoblepas 2 points a year ago
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.
MudMan 1 point a year ago
I'm gonna need some sourcing for that assertion, because man, there are no more underpaid and overworked developers in the gaming industry than indies living on a friend's garage, having two jobs and coding all-nighters on a passion project.
Crunch horror stories are real, but big "AAA" devs are more likely to have some type of overtime policy they can adhere to and a decent compensation package.
I'd argue about arbitrary deadlines, too, but it's a case by case basis there. In any case, both indies and larger devs are often working to the same type of deadline, that being "we're running out of money".
Buddahriffic 1 point a year ago
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.
MudMan 1 point a year ago
This view on things where a guy in a suit is telling a bunch of passionate artists how to do their day to day jobs is entirely separate from reality.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of big, merecenary operations out there, but this is a) not how those play out, and b) very easy to sus out without needing to have a roll call of the studio.
Case in point, Baldur's Gate 3, which people keep weirdly excluding from "AAA" was made by a large team that balooned into a huge team during the course of development. That never seemed a budget, size or graphics problem to me. Or about what degree people in the studio happen to have, for that matter.
If you don't want to play hyper compulsive live services built around a monetization strategy that is perfectly legitimate. Gaming is very broad and not everybody needs to like everything. It's just the categorizations people use to reference things they supposedly dislike that seem weird to me.
straightjorkin 9 points a year ago
Purists when an artform incorporates another artform: >:(
Gradually_Adjusting 6 points a year ago
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.
MudMan 3 points a year ago
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.
Gradually_Adjusting 1 point a year ago
Thanks for taking my wall of text as it was intended, mainly just carving out a space for a few of my hobbyhorses and trying to be slightly self-aware about it for once. I knew I was laying down a lot of railroad track and I hope nobody thinks I'm demanding to be taken seriously. Usually the username does the trick there.
I confess I don't read enough interviews with game industry people to know where their heads are at with regard to most things. The prevailing trends they chase and talk about are very commercial in nature, and it just leaves me cold to talk about which creative choices they think will make the most money - if you have a source for more substantive interviews I'm all ears.
I do like that there are "ugly" games (low-poly, or at least less grounded in realism) that are proving that there's money in prioritizing other aspects of the creative - but I worry that they'll just learn the wrong lessons. I read last night that Monopoly Go! has so far spent over a billion USD on advertising alone. I am still reeling from that fact, and I don't have a context to make sense of it. I haven't even played that game, nor do I recall having seen ads for it. A billion doesn't go as far as it used to, I guess.
You're right that it's not necessarily a cycle, any more than tectonic plate migration is a cycle. It's too large and slow to really say how it'll turn out. I think if we zoom out really far, it might be the case that there aren't as many universally cherished cultural touchstones as there used to be, substantive culture feels like it's becoming more diffuse and niche as time goes on. Even a dear friend of over two decades with largely the same tastes can talk for ages without mentioning anything I've ever heard of. There's so much, everyone's bound up in a personal little tornado of content. I guess I'm on a natural phenomena metaphor kick.
I have high hopes for the future of 2D design in games. You can work your ass off on 2D and 3D and make either look good, but the work really shows more with 2D - an example like Sea of Stars spring to mind, with their highly dialed-in Chrono Trigger looks with anime cut scenes. The tools continue to change, but you can always spot when hard work wasn't done.
RowRowRowYourBot 2 points a year ago path: 0 17069681 17071022, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 2
MudMan 2 points a year ago
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.
RowRowRowYourBot 1 point a year ago path: 0 17069681 17071022 17071110 17071387, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
kruhmaster 2 points a year ago
laughs in Vampire Survivors
MudMan 3 points a year ago
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.
A_Union_of_Kobolds 48 points a year ago
Dwarf Fortress has graphics now! You don't have to install the Lazy Newb Pack! What a time to be alive
Solely_a_Catt 15 points a year ago
You can still play the ascii-version :P
Sabata11792 12 points a year ago
The game is free, the graphics cost extra.
A_Union_of_Kobolds 8 points a year ago
After seeing that docuseries on the brothers I felt even better about buying it. They seem like genuinely nice people who managed to get rich doing what they love without exploiting anyone. That's the dream right there, and I wish them and the Balatro guy happy lives
Cethin 5 points a year ago
No, it's pretty understandable now. With that said, I don't think ASCII was that bad, once you spend a handful of hours in it. It's really not any different except the sprites replace characters, but if you knew what the character meant it's almost the same amount of information. The sprites can give a little more information because they can actually display clothing, hair, etc. It isn't significant though.
A_Union_of_Kobolds 5 points a year ago
Idk I never used it. I'm just playing the raw Steam install, it's come a long way
UltraGiGaGigantic 2 points a year ago
Check out DFhack if you haven't yet. It can be used as a cheat engine but there is way more to it then that.
I use it all the time and I've never used cheats in it.
You can installing through the steam storefront. Just search dfhack
UltraGiGaGigantic 2 points a year ago
I needed the steam version. I've been watching DF from the sidelines and wishing for it for a long time. Yes I know about the tile sets and they didn't help much.
Going through the menus was way harder in the previous version as well. Excited to see future changes. I think a big siege rework is coming up next!
germanatlas 28 points a year ago
You think games have to be fun?
You will play pathologic and fear and hunger until the situation improves
Schadrach 12 points a year ago
...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.
Zoomboingding 4 points a year ago
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.
TriflingToad 24 points a year ago
I see both sides of the argument and generally lean on the older games are fun side, but my God, just let people enjoy what they want. Gaming eletism is so annoying and doesn't even stop people from playing new games anyways.
Get them knowledge that duenvo is an issue, not that they should be still playing super mario bros 1 or snake on a Nokia if they want to own their games.
_stranger_ 15 points a year ago
starman2112 10 points a year ago
Largely because it has such strong art direction. They really make use of the high resolution to make the humans look more human, and the non-humans look more alien
That said, if I have one criticism about the game, it's that there isn't really a lot of cohesion between character/creature designs. It's the same thing that bugged me about Stellar Blade, as opposed to something like Nier Automata or Gears of War. The nevrons don't really look like they belong in the game the way locusts do in Gears.
But I am only in Act 2. Maybe this criticism will wane as I learn more about them
embit 20 points a year ago
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..).
KoalaUnknown 19 points a year ago
I feel like the older, pixel sparse graphical style is making a comeback.
A lot of recent surprise hits were of that style:
UltraGiGaGigantic 1 point a year ago
Cannot recommend valhiem enough. Don't let anyone convince you to do a no portal run though. Traveling is a big component to the game but doing no portal runs just makes traveling such a burden and I feel takes the magic out of it.
I wish I could get my friends to do another run but they are all waiting for the deep north update (the final one AFAIK).
Zanathos 18 points a year ago
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 ". 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.
Zoomboingding 5 points a year ago
I played a MUD based around the combat school in Ender's Game. That was amazing to my 2002 brain.
JackbyDev 18 points a year ago
https://store.steampowered.com/...
Just wish it was a bit longer, but for the price of free I can't complain. I suggest going in blind and high if that's your thing.
HollowNaught 17 points a year ago
Graphics are cool, but I'd rather prefer a fun game over a good looking game
RizzRustbolt 10 points a year ago
The only roguelike I play is Rogue.
RowRowRowYourBot 4 points a year ago path: 0 17070143 17071042, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
SpookyBogMonster 9 points a year ago
OK, but... Does anyone have recommendations for obscure text-based games? Sounds rad tbh
Catoblepas 8 points a year ago
I was going to recommend The Great Machine: A Fragment by Jonas Kyratzes (writer for The Eternal Cylinder and The Talos Principle, if you’ve heard of those), but it looks like it’s not on his website anymore :( It’s probably been close to 20 years since I played it, but I remember enjoying it. It’s about being a soldier in a war.
bitjunkie 6 points a year ago
path: 0 17086528 17088636 17089389, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 1
Catoblepas 5 points a year ago
Holy shit, nice! Time to go back down the rabbit hole
Bytemeister 8 points a year ago
West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
UltraGiGaGigantic 3 points a year ago
Start pulling the lumber off the house to build a fortnite tower into the sky so I can see further.
Bytemeister 4 points a year ago
You've been eaten by a Grue.
chiliedogg 4 points a year ago
Back in my BBS days I enjoyed Trade Wars quite a bit.
SaharaMaleikuhm 4 points a year ago
Do visual novels count? They are text-based with images added on top.
tigeruppercut 3 points a year ago
Also check over at !retrogaming@lemmy.world
TootSweet 9 points a year ago
I'm in the middle of my first playthrough of Morrowind right now. Maybe I should go find a mod that makes the graphics worse. Maybe one that limits the resolution to 480p and makes everything monochrome wireframe with a viewing distance of just two or three meters.
Catoblepas 10 points a year ago
That wasn’t the original experience on Xbox? 😜
skulblaka 4 points a year ago
480p and 3 meter draw distance definitely was, I can tell you that much.
I remember getting on PC and installing the Longer Draw Distance mod for the first time, and discovering that you could throw a rock farther than the distance between Seyda Neen and Pelagiad. The illusion of distance was only preserved by the close draw range and the fact that you walk at half the speed of smell at level one.
UltraGiGaGigantic 1 point a year ago
OG Xbox could barely run morrowwind. The load times were so long because the game had a memory leak or something and the Xbox had to be "rebooted" during the load screens sometimes.
Quetzalcutlass 7 points a year ago
There actually was a famous mod for an Elder Scrolls game that made it look worse: Oldblivion for Oblivion. The game had high system requirements for the time, and the mod did things like removing the 3D foliage/grass so crappy GPUs could run the game.
owl 8 points a year ago
I find it more irritating when people post two screenshots to make the argument: This picture looks better than this picture, therefore the graphics in this game are better than in this game, therefore this game is better than this game. The most complex form of media to date is luckily very easy to compare.
MystikIncarnate 8 points a year ago
First, I can't afford a new computer or even a new graphics card. All these "gaming on a budget" type things are all priced in USD, and I'm in Canada after conversion and the Canada tax, local shops are selling it for a lot more.... I can only imagine that going up with the tariffs.
Second, graphics ain't shit. Look at some of the most popular games around and some of them have the "worst" graphics. I don't mean to pick on any game in specific, but I'll mention two notable examples: the first is Minecraft. Square voxels and pretty basic visuals all around. Easily one of the most popular titles of all time. I don't play it, but I get it. The other example I want to point to is schedule I. Honestly the graphics in the game, when compared to the nearly realistic content that games like assassin's Creed has, and it's basically trash by comparison. The game is huge and hugely popular. The graphics, or lack thereof, is not a detractor from how fun the game is.
Don't get me wrong. High graphics can contribute to a good game; and therein lies the problem. You need to have a good game that you can apply the graphics to, in order for it to be valuable. If you take away the graphics and replace the visuals with something far more basic, and the game loses its appeal, your game sucks. Fix that first, then try again.
I have a pretty massive collection of steam titles that I'm planning to play as things start to devolve into higher and higher specs for basically no gains. Like ray tracing, it's cool, looks good... But I don't need it to have fun in a game. I usually turn it off because it compromises performance for basically no real gain. Sure, shadows look a bit more shit, and lights aren't as glowy, but I don't care about that. I just want to play. Why is RT a requirement for some games now? The hell?
Anyways. High graphics are better in more cinematic games, but publishers have gotten so obsessed with making cinematic content that they forgot to include a game with it.
Give me more substance, more character development, more scenes, not just action.
Yaky 4 points a year ago
I never understood the point of realistic (or heavily stylized) graphics. Maybe it's just me, but after about 5 minutes of "wow" my brain's visual processor starts treating it as anything else, whether it's Doom 2, Borderlands 2, or Stalker 2.
MystikIncarnate 0 points a year ago
Doom 2? From 1994?
I should play that game again
UltraGiGaGigantic 3 points a year ago
I would agree that schedule 1 has very high graphics.
decipher_jeanne 7 points a year ago
Graphism allows to convey story and emotion much clearer. Imagine playing baldurs gate 3 with gta4 stiff low poly faces. The character would be much less expressive and thus emotions become harder to convey.
superniceperson 11 points a year ago
My person in Chrysler, BG 2 existed and was just as expressive with just voice and still pictures. And half the lines weren't even voiced.
SpruceBringsteen 7 points a year ago
Elin is the game you're looking for.
It's not ascii... but it is very ADOM influenced. And very japanese.
ILikeBoobies 5 points a year ago
People want to be proud of their art
Making hair is a lot easier now than before, especially because your computer can handle more than 1000 faces
drunkpostdisaster 6 points a year ago
There is a mod to turn it back to ascii tiles.
UltraGiGaGigantic 3 points a year ago
Hey its still confusing as fuck. It just let's my smooth caveman brain kinda understand what's happening.
thickertoofan 2 points a year ago
it is a mix, i won't play minecraft with fortnite like graphics, i love to play vampire survivors because its a dopamine bomb. it really depends on the situation. But id play the GTA games for the open world mechanics and graphics. you can't really make a great point out of this.
dipcart 1 point a year ago
The steam deck has helped me break this habit. I love the system itself so much that I'm kinda just not interested in stuff that won't play on it. A big one for me is doom the dark ages.
On the other hand though, I have played so many indie games that I likely wouldn't have otherwise played and loved all of them. It has genuinely changed the way that I play video games.
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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.
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