The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024
If you’re a player or casual observer, the video game industry seems to have it all. Yet growth is now illusory, layoffs abundant, and game/studio shutdowns common. Why? And how might things change?
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Blablabla tldr - less money/profits in the gaming industry.
Everything is terrible and troubled now of course. Because without growth, what even is there?
(I didn't read skimped through the article)
Just make games with older graphics; it's cheaper, reduces visual bloat, and encourages player imagination to fill in the gaps, and investing xxx million dollars in a video game is dumb.
Seriously though, who asked for photorealistic graphics? If people agreed on a reasonable target, we could just have games at a reasonable size and cost, hardware upgrades wouldn’t need to be so insane, and teams could be put on other important things like, I dunno, making sure the game works instead of just looking pretty.
Do I need my games to have photorealistic graphics? No.
But there is something about the occasional game with such an impressive visual fidelity it makes you stop and go "wow, that is pretty".
It doesn't make up for poor gameplay, but played on top of good gameplay it does create an additional sense of wonder/amazement.
I definitely agree and hear what you're saying but strong art style achieves the same thing and invariably ages better. There are definitely occasionally those games going for photorealistic that make me pause and appreciate it but more often than not it's the games that really own a distinct, creative, and well thought out visual style.
I think the obvious games that had this reaction for me were the Witcher 3 and AssOdyssey, but neither of those are photorealistic, they both just make smart use of lighting and environment design. They're both gorgeous, stylized worlds.
AssOdyssey sounds like a very different kind of game.
What recalled this feeling for me was Crysis - which at the time was obviously gunning for visual fidelity and nothing else.
There are certainly cases where it helps. Ghost of Tsushima for example can really pull an emotional story because you can see the emotion on the characters.
I understand you, but I felt deep emotion seeing a 640x480 scene of a sprite (kidnapped female slave) punching another sprite and using some edgy language. Yes, it did require me to stop for a minute to imagine everything for it to hit this deep - which the game's turn based mechanics helped me with.
I also feel the less detailed something is, the more HORRIFYING and VIOLENT it appears, as it stimulates imagination much more than HD scenes in games and movies, where most of the times that won't be able to create something more SHOCKING that what you imagined (The modern +13 goal in games and movies plays a role too, so there might be bias)
There was a pirated TV channel that specialized - mostly - in horror movies, it had horrible audio and video quality - especially the bitrate, everything that appeared on the channel was horrifying, the lack of clearness induced a feeling similar to fearing the dark, the low bitrate in particular meant that you - the viewer - was practically blind in every fast scene, which dramatically increased the suspense.
You might tell me to just go read a book if I want to use my imagination, and actually that's a pretty nice suggestion.
PS: the game in the first paragraph is the first Fallout if anyone's wondering. I also barely heard of Ghost of Tsushima (or most modern games outside of FF7R)
This is a great comment, and you're right, I just think there's room for both and realistic games can still be stylized and make you say "wow".
Also I recommend Ghost of Tsushima, the gameplay is really solid, the graphics are beautiful, and I really enjoyed the story.
It's an open world, linear story, and it has a very strong visual style.
