Maybe we should stop chasing Graphics?

[Aotrs Commander]

I've been saying that for years. Graphics have been perfectly Good Enough for twenty years in some cases (e.g. Planescape Torment) and perfectly playable in most others except for maybe shooters (which I have zero interest in anyway).

I do my part for the industry¹ by not buying or playing any AAA games (or free-to-play games), and I the only game that had lootboxes that I think I ever played - and the only multiplayer game I ever played (Mass Effect 3) I got bored of and stopped playing specifically because of the loot boxes.



Paradox is currently getting most of my pennies at the moment; while their steady stream of DLC irks some, given the hundreds of hours you play PDX games for, I consider it no different really, so the amount of money I have spent on any one wargame or roleplaying game. (I just spent about £80 of new BattleMech figures this last month or so, for example.)



¹It is not a lot, but it is all I can manage currently; when I am finally allowed to conquer the world, of course, I will do a great deal more and with significantly more explosive disembowlings (to a great deal more industries than computer games, though I'm tempted to do them first on the basis of promotng the thought that if I'm prepared to do that to ultimiately trivially unimportant things like computer games, what will I do to actually important things. But that will come in time, I'm afraid.)

[CharonsHelper]

Thing is, to loop back to the original topic, so much of the budget is spent on minuscule and largely unnoticeable graphical increases. That's WHY (or part of why, creating a new engine for every new game like some companies do is also a big issue) cost to produce is so much higher.

Except - if such spending wasn't needed to get the same sales - someone would do it and make way more profit.

As that's not the case...

[Rynjin]

Except - if such spending wasn't needed to get the same sales - someone would do it and make way more profit.

As that's not the case...

Not really, since the marketing is where all the sales come from, and they've been pushing "hyper realistic graphics" as a major selling point.

They brainwash the population into thinking they want a thing, then spend a bunch of money on delivering the thing, and then it sells. If they marketed something else as heavily they'd get the same result. Only difference is shiny graphics are really EASY to market since they're clearly visible.

Reminder that Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is currently the most played game on Steam (and it looks like a game from 2007) and Minecraft is one of the most popular and well-selling games of all times.

Overtuned graphics are not necessary for sales, they just make a really easy crutch.

[Triaxx]

Individual power is fractional, not 0. While a single person not spending $60 is small enough to be inside the margins of error. $600 is ten people not buying and still barely enough to make a dent. A hundred people is $6K. A thousand people is $60K. That's around the point where companies start to take notice. It's why they're so heavy into good reviews.

Graphics aren't the budget issue. Because you have to remember, most of the money isn't paying for assets. It's paying the wages of the artists creating this stuff. So take those budgets and divide by the wage estimates and see just what that money is buying. The same goes for all the rest of the bits of a game. It's all work-hours.

That said, gameplay should be the trump card. If the game looks fantastic, but plays horribly, people won't keep it. But people will play games with less than stellar graphics if the gameplay is exceptional, such as Stardew Valley, or Dwarf Fortress. (Those are just the two off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.)

[Scowling Dragon]

Anyway, my point wasn't that 1 guy could lift Mount Everest. My point was that its best start with yourself before you tell others what to do. Going from a perspective that 1 person is 0, and that we need massive mobs of people lobbying at the government demanding they take our rights away because our weak wills just can't stop consuming any garbage that gets plopped in front of us I feel is completly wrong.

Next up, this doesn't require any banning or intervention, just stop buying it. Go cold turkey.
I consider that I myself felt addicted to the rush of MTG cards for a while, but then I quit because It was a hollow chase, but even now I feel a tingle whenever I see a booster pack at a Rite Aid.

I am of the belief that it should be man and principle over Government and Law. This indeed also applies to gambling.

That said, gameplay should be the trump card. If the game looks fantastic, but plays horribly, people won't keep it. But people will play games with less than stellar graphics if the gameplay is exceptional, such as Stardew Valley, or Dwarf Fortress. (Those are just the two off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.)

My point was about the AAA market. Stardew Valley and DF as indies that exist in its shadow. Which is good that there is a place for them, but if that mountain collapses, it will bury what was there in its shadow as well.

[factotum]

My point was about the AAA market. Stardew Valley and DF as indies that exist in its shadow. Which is good that there is a place for them, but if that mountain collapses, it will bury what was there in its shadow as well.

I'd have to disagree there. The sort of people who buy indie games will likely keep buying them even if the AAA games industry crashes, because they're intrinsically more about the gameplay than the graphics. It's also worth noting that the *last* video game crash of 1983 was primarily a North American phenomenon--in the UK we kept on buying games for our Spectrums, C64s and BBC Micros and barely noticed that a games console didn't have any games coming out for it anymore.

[Triaxx]

I disagree. It proves that AAA titles are the core of the industry, but no longer it's sole reality. Even if AAA's stop, it's no longer the killing blow that it would have been a couple years ago.

[Scowling Dragon]

I'd have to disagree there. The sort of people who buy indie games will likely keep buying them even if the AAA games industry crashes, because they're intrinsically more about the gameplay than the graphics.

No, I don't mean the AUDIENCE. I mean investors, scale, budgets, promotion.

E3 as a bloated mess as it is, Is a good thing to piggyback attention for smaller scale developers. With its collapse that sort of large scale promotion is gone.
Journalist websites (As corrupt as they can be) get money from Adds to the AAAs. No AAAs no Ads no Articles to publish to spread word around.
With No blockbusters you can forget about VR (Not saying its the BEST but point being its something that would also loose investors).

AAAs also can push tech in a GOOD way, but without their massive bodies to pave the way, smallers are gonna have way harder time rising in it.

[Forum Explorer]

[QUOTE=Scowling Dragon;22474534]

You're acting as though the two are equivalent, for some reason. One person does not matter. 5 people matter infinitesimally less. A million people matter somewhat. A billion matter more.

1,000,000*0=0

A better way, (and the way I think Rynjin meant) is that one person has say 0.0001 units of power. A corporation has a 1000. Now you don't need to equal a corporation to make it notice the effect, but you need a lot more then one person working together.

Anyway, my point wasn't that 1 guy could lift Mount Everest. My point was that its best start with yourself before you tell others what to do. Going from a perspective that 1 person is 0, and that we need massive mobs of people lobbying at the government demanding they take our rights away because our weak wills just can't stop consuming any garbage that gets plopped in front of us I feel is completly wrong.

Next up, this doesn't require any banning or intervention, just stop buying it. Go cold turkey.
I consider that I myself felt addicted to the rush of MTG cards for a while, but then I quit because It was a hollow chase, but even now I feel a tingle whenever I see a booster pack at a Rite Aid.

I am of the belief that it should be man and principle over Government and Law. This indeed also applies to gambling.



My point was about the AAA market. Stardew Valley and DF as indies that exist in its shadow. Which is good that there is a place for them, but if that mountain collapses, it will bury what was there in its shadow as well.

...He pretty much does. In fact, I suspect most people in this thread do. I mostly buy Indie games, but I do intend to buy Warhammer Total War 2. The last AAA game before that was X-Com 2, which I'll likely pick some DLC for as well. As for playing games that have Loot Boxes, well the company can tell who and how much they are getting from Loot Boxes. If he plays Overwatch and never buys Loot Boxes, then Blizzard can see that. They just don't care because he's in the minority of players. Going back to the above, we (all players who play Overwatch but don't buy Loot Boxes) likely only have a power of ~10. Blizzard simply doesn't care about us or that we aren't buying Loot boxes.

If sufficient people got sick of it, then they would correct their behavior. You can even see this with Overwatch because sufficient people raised an outcry about a particular pose of Tracer's and got it changed. Loot Boxes simply don't bother most Overwatch players, or they don't bother them enough for the players to complain about it/not buy them.

I doubt it.

No, I don't mean the AUDIENCE. I mean investors, scale, budgets, promotion.

E3 as a bloated mess as it is, Is a good thing to piggyback attention for smaller scale developers. With its collapse that sort of large scale promotion is gone.
Journalist websites (As corrupt as they can be) get money from Adds to the AAAs. No AAAs no Ads no Articles to publish to spread word around.
With No blockbusters you can forget about VR (Not saying its the BEST but point being its something that would also loose investors).

AAAs also can push tech in a GOOD way, but without their massive bodies to pave the way, smallers are gonna have way harder time rising in it.

Indie games don't get that much attention at E3. For that matter, E3 is kinda a joke these days. It's been a long time since I actually got any news from it.

Journalist Websites would be replaced by blogs. Or they'd draw revenue from different ads.

That's true, but on the other hand, I don't think a collapse will happen before VR is developed, considering it's already a thing.


Honestly, these days, a platform like Steam is a really good way to find Indie games, since it'll auto recommend new ones to you based off their popularity. It also has a whole advertising thing built into it. There are also lots of Youtube Reviewers and other review sites/Let's Plays that don't actually generate money from AAA companies.

Thing is, if the AAA companies collapsed, there are a lot of little companies that'd love to step up and take over that niche, hopefully learning why the AAA companies collapsed and doing things differently enough to avoid that problem. A collapse would hurt maybe VR, but I don't think it would really effect people like me, who already don't really buy much AAA stuff.

[deuterio12]

This is getting me quite concerned, as a person who one day hopes to be in the industry is this chase for Graphics. Im not talking about Aesthetics (Aesthetics>Graphics in the longrun anyway), but I feel like this has become a tumor for the industry.

Plenty of indie titles around with not-uber graphics around.

And in my humble opinion a good game stays good even after a bunch of years. I'm a big fan of retro stuff and I'm always catching up with older titles I had no time to play when they came out.

On the other hand vision is the primary human sense. There will always be a big crowd of consumers that will value uber graphics above everything and anything else. It's not only in video games, people also want uber HD TV and hyper HD cinema and holograms and whatnot. Eye candy sells. Eye candy has virtually always sold, probably since humans figured out money.

Either way, I would say all sides get plenty to enjoy. The indie titles with lesser graphics just get less publicity, but they're there if you look for them. And with stuff like Unity and Unreal Engine and other game making engines, you too can go and design your own game with pretty nice graphics. Even if they're not the "AAA" uber quality, if your story and gameplay are good too, it will sell.

[Vaz]

Lootboxes are not technically gambling, but they touch on all the same pleasure centers in your brain that gambling does. The anticipation, the fanfare, the randomness, it's all just like a slot machine. In a way it's worse than gambling, because you can't even get your money back if you 'win'. But it preys on the same kind of addictive personalities that casinos do.

When I buy a Scratch Card, I get a piece of paper. Why is that not regulated?

[factotum]

When I buy a Scratch Card, I get a piece of paper. Why is that not regulated?

Um, it is? Scratch cards and lotteries in general *are* acknowledged as gambling in most countries. The UK National Lottery couldn't exist until Parliament passed a law allowing it to, for instance, and it is entirely illegal for a shop to sell a lottery ticket or a scratchcard to a minor.

[Knaight]

If you were a pinball player you might have said the same once, or poker, or any other game that still exists but has been reduced in popularity that way.

Sure, and radio was going to kill reading, after which television was going to kill reading, after which the internet was going to kill reading. How's reading doing again?

This is without getting into the numerous flash in the pan fads that rapidly died off without killing anything.

Lootboxes are not technically gambling, but they touch on all the same pleasure centers in your brain that gambling does. The anticipation, the fanfare, the randomness, it's all just like a slot machine. In a way it's worse than gambling, because you can't even get your money back if you 'win'. But it preys on the same kind of addictive personalities that casinos do.

Not getting your money back is a way that it is much, much better than a slot machine. There's no losing a bunch of money and then continuing to play to try and earn it back, getting ever deeper in the hole. That cycle is a large part of why gambling is so much better at stripping money away from people than other games.

[Triaxx]

I still can't see VR as being the big thing they're all trying to make it. I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong, but at the same time, I won't be surprised to find it fade out again.

Yes, AAA ad revenue might fall off, but that's assuming a total collapse. And I'm not too worried about Games Journalism dying horribly. Given the prevalence of repeated bias and industry buying of good reviews, combined with companies not giving out review copies until after launch to prevent negative reviews from hammering sales of bad games, perhaps it's best it die.

[lord_khaine]

Not getting your money back is a way that it is much, much better than a slot machine. There's no losing a bunch of money and then continuing to play to try and earn it back, getting ever deeper in the hole. That cycle is a large part of why gambling is so much better at stripping money away from people than other games.

And the problem is that companies have been straight up looking and learning from casinos on how to put gambling into their games. Pretty Good Gaming had a youtube video a little while ago about how loot boxes are straight up gambling. And how its relying on dirty tricks like creating a disconnection in your mind between your money and loot boxes. By making you buy those boxes with an in-game currency that you buy with cash. Just like Casino's and tokens.

[warty goblin]

I honestly have no idea whether or not VR games become a big thing. But if they do, I suspect they'll be a big thing for the EAs and Ubisofts and Activisions of the world, since if anything the requirements and payoff for ludicrous graphical investments are even higher there. I suspect they haven't ploughed a lot of money into VR development yet, just because the hardware install base isn't there, and nobody's sure yet what a good VR game even is, but if/when that happens, the companies with the hordes of texture artists are going to have a big advantage.

I'm also not really sure I see a huge connection between loot boxes and the quest for better graphics. After all, loot boxes seem to have been pioneered in FTP games, which generally aren't graphical powerhouses, and a lot of the games that use them now aren't either. Rather I suspect loot boxes have become really attractive because they give your game a very long revenue tail and cost basically zilch to support. This is going to be attractive to basically any publisher anywhere.

[Aotrs Commander]

This is going to be attractive to basically any publisher anywhere.

Except the ones who are reliant on the goodwill of their customer base (and which are not, by their nature, games that will attract the general I-don't-think-about-it public) and/or until someone pushes the paid-random-loot to far (and it will happen) and then legistaltion happens.

You can only screw the customer so far before the backlash outweighs the benefits.

(E.g Photobucket.)

(Speaking of Photobucket, apropros of nothing, Crome and Firefox now have some add-ons which supposedly unblock Photobucket's embedding block. Something I find extremely amusing and very justified.)

[CharonsHelper]

Sure, and radio was going to kill reading, after which television was going to kill reading, after which the internet was going to kill reading. How's reading doing again?

This is without getting into the numerous flash in the pan fads that rapidly died off without killing anything.

If you back far enough - Socrates was against reading because it was a crutch and would ruin peoples' memories.

[Tvtyrant]

Sure, and radio was going to kill reading, after which television was going to kill reading, after which the internet was going to kill reading. How's reading doing again?

This is without getting into the numerous flash in the pan fads that rapidly died off without killing anything.

But it did? Or at least they did exactly what I said about video games, publishing house and newspapers publish on much thinner margins and are much less robust than they used to be, as well as bookstores going out like blockbusters left and right.

Perhaps trains? No wait. Oh, oh telegrams. Drat. I got it, quills!

[Knaight]

But it did? Or at least they did exactly what I said about video games, publishing house and newspapers publish on much thinner margins and are much less robust than they used to be, as well as bookstores going out like blockbusters left and right.

None of this maps well at all to radio (which coexisted with the wildly successful dime novel boom), television (which killed nothing), or even videogames. What this maps to is the internet, and even then that's not a matter of killing reading. It hurt print, sure - while website after website made mostly of text went up.

[Tvtyrant]

None of this maps well at all to radio (which coexisted with the wildly successful dime novel boom), television (which killed nothing), or even videogames. What this maps to is the internet, and even then that's not a matter of killing reading. It hurt print, sure - while website after website made mostly of text went up.

So it was only effected by direct competition, and you don't believe that VR and overlay technology will be directly competitive with videogames. I see the point of our contention, as I do.

I think overlay technology is going to be cheaper and easier to make, more affordable and look better while allowing people to go about their daily lives (who wants back pain and bad eyes really?) The advantages of being able to set up a boss fight in a park or put quest givers in coffee shops and bars is good for both the game and those businesses, and matches more peoples desires. Will there still be sitting and playing videogames? Sure. But the money is going to go elsewhere.

[lord_khaine]

I think overlay technology is going to be cheaper and easier to make, more affordable and look better while allowing people to go about their daily lives (who wants back pain and bad eyes really?) The advantages of being able to set up a boss fight in a park or put quest givers in coffee shops and bars is good for both the game and those businesses, and matches more peoples desires. Will there still be sitting and playing videogames? Sure. But the money is going to go elsewhere.

Funny you should mention this, the latest study on the subject reveals that CS players have a noticeably sharper eyesight, along with a better ability to detect movement in the corner of the eye.
Not surprising really, as its something that they train several hours each day.

[Forum Explorer]

So it was only effected by direct competition, and you don't believe that VR and overlay technology will be directly competitive with videogames. I see the point of our contention, as I do.

I think overlay technology is going to be cheaper and easier to make, more affordable and look better while allowing people to go about their daily lives (who wants back pain and bad eyes really?) The advantages of being able to set up a boss fight in a park or put quest givers in coffee shops and bars is good for both the game and those businesses, and matches more peoples desires. Will there still be sitting and playing videogames? Sure. But the money is going to go elsewhere.

I disagree with this. It's the old immersion problem, in that being out in public in VR is actually less immersive, because you'll be way too aware of other people. When you're at a bar, you don't typically see someone playing their DS for example, they are talking to other people. Plus if you are tracking things like taking a step to move, then you'll hit a problem of simple exhaustion. Sandboxes require a lot of movement, and other games like Metroid that have boss fights where you must move a lot to dodge attacks, will also be exhausting. More importantly though, is you need protection against running into stuff in the real world.

These problems can't be hand waved away, before you can claim that there are advantages to setting up a boss fight in a park, or quest givers in public locations, you'll have to provide very real solutions to these problems. Then there are lots of genres of game that don't benefit at all from making it a VR, like strategy games.

I think most VR stuff is going to be in a smallish room, and won't track movement at all of that well. It'll be great for things like rail shooters, mystery/horror games, all vehicle games, and likely some other stuff I'm not remembering. Which basically means it'll become a new console, and won't wipe out all non-VR games altogether.

[Triaxx]

A lot of people over think VR movement. You can accomplish a lot just by using distance to the sensors. So if you lean towards the sensor you move forward, lean back, you're backing away. I figure sensors will eventually turn into something like an eight pointed star each with different wavelengths of laser so it can tell the difference if you're leaning forwards or sideways, depending on what is reflected and how strong the signal.

[Forum Explorer]

A lot of people over think VR movement. You can accomplish a lot just by using distance to the sensors. So if you lean towards the sensor you move forward, lean back, you're backing away. I figure sensors will eventually turn into something like an eight pointed star each with different wavelengths of laser so it can tell the difference if you're leaning forwards or sideways, depending on what is reflected and how strong the signal.

That has the posture problem, AKA I don't stand perfectly straight all the time. I sway and shift as I stand, so maintaining a particular stance would rapidly become uncomfortable. And considering it's still an 'artificial' action (you certainly aren't walking to walk), you might as well replace it with controlling by a joystick.

[Lethologica]

Counterpoint: graphics matter for indie games, too. It's far from just a AAA phenomenon. Sure, indie games are less cutting-edge than AAA games at any given time, but the development in graphics over time has been huge for independent game developers. And that development is in large part driven by those graphics-focused AAA games.

A fair number of people think they don't care about graphics because they play indie games and not AAA games. But their gaming experience is equally enabled by the industry's focus on graphics.

[Triaxx]

Depends on the game I guess. Having a button to hold to keep going would help.

Yes, all games have graphics, but smaller games have to do with less, because they don't have the budget to throw at them.

[factotum]

Counterpoint: graphics matter for indie games, too. It's far from just a AAA phenomenon. Sure, indie games are less cutting-edge than AAA games at any given time, but the development in graphics over time has been huge for independent game developers.

Counter-counter point: look at Shovel Knight and Stardew Valley, both extremely popular indie games (the latter one *so* popular it's been ported to the Nintendo Switch). The graphics in either game would not look out of place on an early 90s console.

[Erloas]

Some thing to keep in mind, any game that relies on atmosphere is probably using quite a bit of graphic technology that only exists because of the "big games" wanting to do something to look better but was overall a small part of their overall design. Fogs, particle effects, conditional/point lighting, are all directly related to games pushing the graphic edge. At this point some levels of that have been around for quite a while, and unless you are over about 30, you may not know/remember a time when those weren't "a given." Physics is another big one and it is being used more and more, in just about everything, but it is "behind the scenes" and not noticed as much as it used to be and doesn't get a whole lot of marketing attention any more.

The other question is who is familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley? As things get more realistic the smaller things that are out of place stand out a lot more. It isn't that "moving hair" is some ground breaking piece of technology, but if you have other things that look good and something like that which doesn't work like people expect then those little things start to stand out. They aren't doing those "little things no one will notice" as a marketing gimmick, they are doing them because without them people feel out of place and uncomfortable even if they can't place why.

I would also point out that very stylized graphics, as opposed to very realistic graphics, aren't necessarily less technologically advanced. All of the people that say "well this game looks amazing and it isn't realistic looking at all" are probably not aware of the technology being used. Advances in graphics technology can be used in a *lot* of different ways, and they aren't always used to make things look more realistic.

Someone mentioned Player Unknown's Battlegrounds as "a game that looks 10 years old" and is still highly played. Have you actually looked at the system requirements for the game? They are relatively high, they are almost identical to CoD: WWII. Middle-earth: Shadow of War has similar requirements. And just searching through Steam I came upon Gold Rush: The Game, which is an indie game, very specifically trying to look realistic and with the highest system requirements of the games I've mentioned just now. Then there is AAA game Total War: Warhammer II, which has the lowest system requirements of this list, it could be ran on something 5-8 years old.

As another point, most AAA games are designed to be multi-platform, and if a game is running on a console it is at least a few years back on system requirements compared to where current PCs are. All of the aforementioned games system requirements pretty much sit at the closest PC equivalent to the current gen consoles. And we can be pretty much guaranteed that AAA games aren't going to go higher because they have to run on consoles.

[Rynjin]

Someone mentioned Player Unknown's Battlegrounds as "a game that looks 10 years old" and is still highly played. Have you actually looked at the system requirements for the game? They are relatively high, they are almost identical to CoD: WWII. Middle-earth: Shadow of War has similar requirements.

Yep, running a shooter with individual inventories for 100 separate players on each server at a time is pretty system intensive. What's your point?