Yeah, though graphics can be important depending on what you're going for. Cyberpunk 2077 looks amazing. Does it look better than super mario brothers 3? No, dumb comparison. I want someone out there pushing the boundaries but it aint the only way
Hardware manufacturers will never stop pushing for better sales numbers on their new products, and since they're major players in the games industry that means big publishers will never stop pushing for higher graphical fidelity.
@@chimera1381It's about wether or not crafting is added as just another system or as a central part of the game. To keep the action going in an open-world game, having stuff like durability and crafting at specific stations in the world will kill the flow of the action. Even a staple such as inventory space can be seen as an unnecessary addition to several games. In other games you can argue that it is part of the preparation for an adventure or the central way to progress through the game.
@@chimera1381 When he said remove crafting, he didn't mean _all_ crafting, just in games where it's not a part of the core gameplay mechanics. Games like Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc. all have crafting as part of the core gameplay mechanics. But other games add crafting (like he mentioned) as an additional thing to make improving your gear more tedious.
That requires human beings, who require being paid. Game companies want to gain more and pay less. So they reduce their human workers, for AI but AI does not have imagination. Therefore cannot create a good product.
Sometimes people don't know what they want until they have it. A lot of people I knew were sceptical when full touchscreen phones were first introduced. Of course not all of it succeeds - VR still hasn't taken off. On the flip side, there's this thing called generating your own demand, and that's 100% what marketing is all about.
@@patchycb@patchycb9837 yeah but they aren't really talking about specific mechanics of the game. They're talking about how a "smaller" studio made a game so incredible with a world that really breathes and feels exciting all the way through. Something genuine and heartfelt, you can really feel the passion and love put into it. These other studios won't go down that path and instead will make some mediocre crpg, idk if they actually would but the point is they will miss the idea entirely. Also idk if someone who reviews a game on steam is the average gamer, but I mean that speaks alot more on the games than the individual. Something you can put 100hrs into and not feel satisfied, the games are so bloated with nonsense quests and garbage that at the end of your time it just ends up feeling hollow
And then minecraft turns out to be the best selling game of all time. Wikipedia has a good list of the top 50 highest selling games and it's not just the assassin's creed series and call of duty.
@@T9K66 sounds like hes playing on console. fun fact the reason they mandate motion blur on every console game is bc it makes it harder to spot flaws on a tv, they know it makes actually playing the games worse they just dont respect console players enough to let them have the superior experience
Efficiency gains not leading to lower overall utilization of resources has been studied since the first Industrial Revolution and is named Jevons Paradox
@@junipre985 Nah, there are some really cool games that come with realism and work better for it. Portal 1 and 2, Soma, Titanfall 2, The Talos Principle, all great games with realistic art styles. And they all work with the realistic style in a way that fits: Portal and its sterile testing environments, Soma and its dark atmosphere that just fits with the philosphical themes, Titanfall 2 Story Mode is simply a great block buster experience, And The Talos Principle does a great job at wondering if your character is human by putting it in a realistic environment.
Art style is still considered graphics, so caring about any form of graphics and how the game looks instead of fun and the gameplay just shows the priority you set upon yourself
it will never change, the mainstream gaming industry is driven by people who want to just consume the latest triple A slop with the ULTRA REALISTIC GRAPHICS, WATER MECHANICS AND BRAND NEW CRAFTING SYSTEM for a couple of hours every week. The good thing is that it's so easy to make games now that there are lot of good double A and indie companies out there making exactly the game you want, you just have to know where to look
I prefer a game designed well with fun gameplay and fun stories but the reason why gaming graphics are getting more intricate is because people want to do it. There’s talented and dedicated people improving technology everyday, some technology that in reality does not amount to much help in society but they can and will do it. Not everything is profit driven for the cutting edge, we always want to improve and progress.
That's because the influencers on Twitch and UA-cam not only are running the highest end hardware you can get, but encourage toxic behavior around being smug if anyone isn't running said hardware. I swear so many chatters on Twitch act like every PC gamer is running a 4090, it's obnoxious. They rag on consoles (except the Steam Deck because when it runs 30 fps it's suddenly better than the Switch...for some reason). I genuinely hate hate hate this aspect of the hobby. Obviously I'm not including NL in there, if anything I have a hard time watching some of his streams because they can be lag fests.
@@njebs.I haven't bought a new GPU in like 7 years. I recently got a laptop for school and it can play almost all my games without having a dedicated GPU. Indie enjoyers are eating good in that regard
@aBlackMage I got into PC gaming very late, and I've never bought a new GPU ever. Went from a 2nd hand r9 390x in 2018 to a 2nd hand rx 480 in 2020, and I've never felt the need to upgrade. Just play as low graphics as you need or play indie 💪😎.
I had full-blown rot from buying a 4090. I purchased a steam deck afterward and struggled for the first like two or three months to palate a game running on medium settings. I really should be in the mines for that one
He's forgotten there was a game he liked and played regularly, which still has a subscription model and regular updated content: Trackmania Too bad about his motion sickness
Trackmania's sub is cooked, I guess it is a normal model for other live service racing games but regular gamers just don't want a 1 year sub as the only option. I've bought it once and played for like 3 months and that was fine, but now they even increased the price because they have given up on new players and just want to milk their established players instead.
@@Dschonathan For sure they need a more enticing price structure. However, gaming is still one of the best in terms of value for your money (as long as you got the hardware). Compare it to cinema and Netflix, 20$ is so much value. Even if you only spent 2h a week, that's 24h of entertainment in 3 months
@@Crytaljam So true. Why is it a year. I don't think i'll ever think to myself "Oh yeah this YEAR im going to play trackmainia". I like playing it every now and then a little bit. For some people its their main game and maybe that makes sense for them. But I'm sure for most it's something the forget and remember about every few months to a year and play it for a bit. I bought the year sub once because i was enjoying it a lot at a certain time, but I dont even think I played it after i bought it
@@oOBeagleOo You just explained why they do it right? Why let people subscribe for a month here and there if you can also force people to pay for a year that they never would've gotten otherwise? Definitely a bit of a gross move on their part
I wish big companies would do what they did in 2001 and reflip their assets and (to a lesser extent) their engines to make 5 or 6 games using a solid foundation instead of just restarting every time. edit: the more i think about this, I feel like this is an american company problem specifically.
Graphics are the most prominent and accessible aspect of any game. That is why its the most spoken about. It takes nothing to appreciate that something looks good or pleasing. It takes a bit of effort to find something plays well.
At first, all that was needed were graphics that could communicate "That's You!" and we reached that point before real screens were invented, with some higher-end oscilloscopes. Then we wanted "This is a guy" which began before home consoles and was mastered in Prince of Persia. "This is a guy but in 3D" was another decade, and finally "This is a happy guy and this is a sad guy" has proven exceptionally difficult, but it's basically doable with only MoCap improvements, without pushing polygon counts and light transport equations any further. If someone back in ye day wanted to make L.A. Noire but they only had the Amiga I can understand why they'd want a revolution in graphical fidelity, but we're past that now. The returns have fully diminished, there are no longer games that are impossible to make because of graphics technology. So Stop.
@@dexterrkk3711 On the other hand my brother was more blown away by Ori and the Will of the Wisps when buying the latest Xbox compared to Cyberpunk. Though Cyberpunk definitely deserves praise for its graphics, it does massively enhance the experience.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 If you want a game to feel like a mystical and whimsical fairy tale ... Ori's art style can be effective. For displaying a gritty and depressing cyberpunk dystopian future super-city you really want realism. One of the reasons AAA studios make those big games is because only they can. Competing with indie games is tough, theres tons. One of the first things game devs do is decide art style and think long and hard about how and why. Monetization however comes from the top and usually is the problem
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 Cyberpunk for me was just another TAA sludge triple A game where if you go through the bother of disabling anti-aliasing (ridiculously annoying to do with CP2077 btw) the game still looks hideous, because TAA was just slapped on as a last minute cover-up for how bad the aliasing actually is. I loved the game, but it looks pretty shit for a realistic game.
Games should prioritize artstyle over realistic graphics. But in other hand, i'm once asked my friends about graphics priority in games and they replied : "heeell nooo, some pixel ps 1 bullshit breacks my immersion!"
My personal take that Bloodborne is the best looking game ever made (very personal, not stating it as fact) was absolutely torn to shreds by some cutting edge PC digital foundry type friends, they said it looked like shit even for 2015, how anyone can think that truly confounds me
@@jackrabbitsalad932 People conflating graphics and style which aren't the same. Bloodborne has framerate problems (it has an uneven frametime through the entirety of the game I believe) but its graphical style I believe enhances the experience a player has with its world. One can admire what it gets right, and what it doesn't and thankfully From has gotten better over time with the technical issues (although Elden Ring wasn't perfect).
I heavily disagree about battlepasses being a good thing if done right. Battlepasses existing means you need to play a game like a job or else you miss out on content (for most games the stuff you miss out on os gone forever), and when every game has a battlepass, you feel overwhelmed. You can't possibly grind like 4 games at a time every single day. I don't wanna play Fortnite or Dead By Daylight every day. Sometimes I wanna just read all day. But when I do that I feel like I'm losing out on this exclusive legendary skin that will never ever come back because it's meant to be a trophy for people that play the game 60 hours a week.
Good battle passes exist, though they ironically use different names to avoid the negative stigma surrounding the system. There are passes that don't cost money, time out, or phase out content. Two examples come to mind but I'm sure there's more: Deep Rock Galactic has free passes that last 6 months (or longer x.x) and at the end of the season pass content is grandfathered into the loot pools you're already drawing from. Helldivers 2 has multiple passes, one that's free and one you can pay (or grind a bit) for; both of which are permanently available. That said the FOMO-addled, burnout inducing, AAA battle passes are certainly the norm right now. Hopefully the next microtransaction fad we get isn't quite as soul sucking...
made up argument. a 700 developer, 6yeardev period title with a 300 milly budget shouldnt look like shit. but back in the days you had banger midsized focused titles on a 2 year dev time 30dev team that slapped. its all about communication and expectation
As a dev, I think you've hit the nail on the head. It doesn't matter that a game doesn't *need* cutting-edge graphics to be good, because any game that signals that it has a "realistic" visual style is going to be judged against all the ones that are investing in those graphics. And once you're committed to high quality graphics, every part of development suddenly gets way more complex: higher optimization demands, longer art development cycles, a need for more and higher-skilled artists, extra code systems to support facial animation and other details, and so on. The only reliable way to escape the trap is to create a distinct visual style that's obviously not intending to be realistic, and that's not always creatively viable for the game's concept.
Hating on graphics is such a played out talking point, at this point it's such a big circlejerk argument. My hot take is: While graphics are completely overrated by (usually AAA) game companies who put a lot of money and time on it that could be better spent elsewhere, often leading to derivative and safe products. By itself, chasing graphical fidelity isn't a bad thing. I think there are plenty of games that have used a realistic artstyle really well. Shadow of the Colossus is such a technical masterpiece visually, it used techniques like self-shadowing and other things that wouldn't be commonplace until the PS3. It's realistic artstyle helps bring the more unrealistic elements (the colossus) to appear more beliveable. The game even runs at ~20 fps because of it, so it was a huge undertaking for the dev team. Helldivers 2 was also a recent game that used it well. Robot planets with all the fog and destruction look spectacular.
No one is saying realism is bad, it's the numbers game that is bad. You can have shadow of the colossus without trying to be cutting edge. You can have novel fog and destruction engines without trying to push the latest hardware.
@@hexcodeff6624 Shadow of the colossus was cutting edge. I do understand what you are saying about the numbers game. We have reached a plateau in terms of graphics, and chasing for the sake of it is bad. That I agree.
@@Mister32 Yes? The visuals aspects of SotC is talked about and discussed often, just go to a discussion forum or something and see for yourself. Helldivers 2 too, in a lesser degree but that was just a personal anectode more than anything. I don't know why are you trying to discredit how these games look, especially when they work to enhance the gameplay experience in multiple ways.
@@deleteTF i think the main thing people hate is the constant trying to improve graphics in our present time. We reached a point where graphics can only improve so much and no big leap anymore, leading to bloated game size, way longer dev time, ignoring fun aspects etc.
5:50 is actually an amazing example of this subject. Fromsoftware has it down where there is incredible depth both in lore and mechanics if you want it but also a simple 1 to 2 sentence description of the necessary info. It's got tons of options with nearly equal meaningful variety even in Armored Core where they've got a spreadsheet worth of stats they have a "at a glance" view of the core important ones that you can just quickly look at and decide whether it's for you or not. Hopefully more studios big and small take a page out of their book and focus more on the fun part of interfacing with the game. Balancing games depth with accessibility without taking the fun out is a difficult art form but we have so many good examples of how to do it there is little to no excuse for experienced devs to not be able to reflect the available examples to a meaningful capacity. There are some takes that Northern Lion has that have either really irked me or I just disagree with but more often than not like here he is absolutely on point.
Development teams should be 10 times smaller but paid twice as much. Maybe even give them a cut of sales so they have a financial incentive for their game to achieve long-term success.
biggest issue with 99% of current games is that everything feels so unresponsive and overproduced. I don't want to play a tutorial, have nice animations or cutscenes, just give me direct responses to when I click a button
@@DraconicCatgirl BG3 actually has the amount of content to justify the file size though, it's not like a generic call of duty being like 120gb when all you do is a 30 minute campaign and do shooty on like 10 maps.
@@DraconicCatgirl File size has nothing to do with optimization. What are you even trying to argue here? Every new game that comes out these days is using 4K assets alongside uncompressed audio. That's why they are often over 100GB now.
You're a pretty shining example of what I'm about to say. Lots of the large triple A companies follow the profit driven approach like you mentioned. There is demand out in the world that wants to be filled. The larger companies follow the same formats and try to squeeze the methods in which previous successes have been had. It is incredibly similar to a problem with modern AIs. They choose to min/max that which has worked before, but then fail to innovate. The companies then fall in to "model collapse" as the margins they can eek out begin to diminish. People become bored as things become stale. This now allows indie devs the opportunity to capture the market from people who are bored with the same reiterations put out by the big firms. The games you like to play are typically from no name studios. If you're a team of 3 and you put out a game that ends up selling like 1 million copies for 10 bucks..... You're likely set for life for a normal human. Stardew valley is a pretty good example of this (obviously going solo dev is entire crapshoot and you're playing a lottery). But you have a singular developer who was smart enough to capture the audience that wanted a more modern game similar to Harvest Moon. And now the guy has like a 40 million networth. It is obviously still a gamble. But everything is probability. And the odds are likely in favour of indie devs atm.
I think it just depends on the game I'm playing. When I'm playing Gran Turismo 7 with a racing wheel and a monitor relatively close to my face, I appreciate the fine details and fidelity of that cockpit view. If I'm hacking and slashing in Cult of the Lamb, I'm enjoying the distinct art style.
It's about matching function with form. A realistic racer sim benefits from having realistic graphics. A game about cutesy animals sacrificing each other is probably better off not looking realistic at all.
@@louieberg2942 This is one of the first things a studio decides, and honestly this entire debate is weird to me since most games I play seem to make the decision just fine. There are plenty of examples of stylized, and realistic games on the market today. The lootbox and cash shop argument however makes total sense
We have reached the point in games where Graphical Fidelity can no longer improve in leaps. There is no 2D to 3D or SD to HD anymore. Style has always been important to games, and this is true now more than ever. If you look at a game like Starfield and compare it to something like the Original Persona 5 or Nier Automata. No one would say Starfield is better looking despite being much higher resolution and Fidelity. Give me Celeste and Stardew over Cod MW3 (2024).
I still think SV looks cheap compared to the older Harvest Moon games. It's a solid title though, dozens and dozens of hours put into both SV and HM games
It's less "gamers are voting with their wallet" and more "games cost so much to make and require so much investor capital that studios can't turn a profit on anything anymore". Gamers are spineless, just look at that famous picture of the Steam group that was protesting Call of Duty.
Weirdly the example i use for this is Call of Duty... for some reason back on the 360 when almost everything was 30fps COD4 decided not to slather post processing effects over everthing and do 60fps instead, and everybody loved it, the speed and responsiveness of the gameplay made COD4 one of the biggest games of all time and nobody complained that it wasn't doing what Killzone 2 did, because while it did look amazing at the time Killzone 2 felt like you were crawling through molasses, everyone remembers moments like All Ghillied Up and it didn't need insane hardware to do it, and the clean visuals still looks great today. The other example is obviously Crysis, people bought new hardware for Crysis because it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before but it's been diminishing returns ever since, i don't think my PC would run that new Indiana Jones game and i don't think the average person would be able to tell you why, it's not an open world game with tonnes of NPCs and systems from what i can tell it's pretty linear.
I think we need to go back to the short period in time where high quality assets were an entirely optional download that you could choose to not have so that a game that would otherwise take up 50+ GBs of storage only takes up 5
Good graphics definitely are important, just not necessary. On visuals alone art direction / style is more crucial to how good a game looks. If a game looks beautiful graphically on top of having good art direction it's a plus
I like lootboxes cuz the alternative is to just straighten up buy the product for a insane amount of money, that said I also don’t like paying for lootboxes lol
I don't like the whole "I want worse graphics" argument. I do want good graphics, but that doesn't mean TAA-blurry dithered wannabe realism that needs a 2000$ RTX GPU to run above 60fps (looking at you UE5). Modern AAA games look no better, in some aspects even worse than games did 8 years ago and run way worse. On the other hand, I like games that have retro graphics but I don't want this to be overplayed either. I don't want this to be an excuse to have every game look like a SNES/Genesis or PSX/N64 game.. Just have a coherent visual style that doesn't look like ass...
UNIRONICALLY YES make games shorter than "as long as we can weasel cash out of you" and I do not need my machine rendering every pore on my characters model mid combat or at any point for that matter. AND OBVIOUSLY PAY YOUR DAMN DEVS AND STOP OVERWORKING THEM TO THE POINT WHERE ITS AN EXPECTED PART OF THE INDUSTRY. I don't give a hoot about being on the right side of history I just want my hobby to be in the hands of people that actually give a damn.
Ever since roughly the PS4 / Xbox One generation, and especially PS4 Pro / Xbox One X, graphics have reached a point where any improvement is negligible at best. It's much wiser to focus on other aspects of the visuals.
I'd argue even on the PS3. Did the PS4 look better? Sure, it totally did. Was there a single PS4/5 game that couldn't have been made on the PS3 if they made the graphics simpler? No. Not at all. Even like 98% of games made since the PS2 could be readjusted to run on the PS2 without any issues.
they make games look good and gameplay bad because they are only trying to attract the casual market, casual players only care about graphics and do not have enough time to play to care about gameplay
@@zzeroara9511 why are you puttiing cyberpunk in that category when it not only has great graphics, but also fun gameplay, an amazingly detailed world, great characters, and a fun story?
I dont care too much about graphical fidelity, but i do really care about art direction and art style, i would much rather play a game that looks like Sly Cooper, Dishonored, Sifu, God of War (both old and new, great art direction in both) or Legend of Zelda wind waker, than i would play yet another hyper realistic game thats gonna look ugly and dated a week from now, whereas games like Sly Cooper 2 still looks like its ripped right out of a comic book, and that game was released on the ps2 goddamnit.
It seems like people in the comments don’t understand that art direction is still part of graphics, Any form of visual stimulus is part of graphics, I think what people is trying to say is they hate realistic graphical fidelity but instead they mix the words up and hate of graphics which just means the visual parts of a video game
that's just semantics though. when people make that argument it's extremely clear that they're talking about graphical fidelity, nobody is going "I HATE THAT THIS GAME HAS TEXTURES AND MODELS ON THE SCREEN! I JUST WANNA LOOK AT A WHITE PLANE!"
It do be like that. There's ingame monetization for pretty much every single genre out there. They'll find out what you like and weaponize it against you.
Imagine my awesome battle pass themed retail store irl idea. Spend money and win stupid cosmetics to customize your self checkout experience. Purchase milk via 50 crystal but you can only buy crystals in increments of 35. You can earn gold by buying certain things on the daily/weekly/monthly challenges and you can use that gold to buy some crystals.
Because of the accessibility of game development, large amounts of money and resources are the only thing separating triple a studios from smaller studios. They're leaning into the only unique quality they have.
Games can still look amazing without being as absurdly expensive as the AAA industry is making them. There are certainly tradeoffs. You can't make the final act of Baldur's Gate 3, with the most incredible and detailed medieval fantasy city ever put into a video game, without that being very expensive. So if we want that kind of thing, games will have to keep being stupidly expensive to make. But you can make absolutely gorgeous games without breaking the bank on high fidelity mocapped graphics. Darkest Dungeon looks better than Darkest Dungeon II; Songs of Conquest looks better than any of the 3D HoMM offerings; Battle Brothers looks better than Mount & Blade; Hades looks better than any of the 3D Diablo games. Don't Starve looks great, Streets of Rage 3 looks great, Star Renegades looks great, Sea of Stars looks great, Tactical Breach Wizards looks great. Looking good is about color choices and style and art direction and talent, not about how many polygons a face rig is made of.
Idiot in chat "you're right they should lay off more people." No dude they should just make more, smaller games that can all pull their own weight rather than putting all their eggs in one basket on giant bloated garbage that they NEED to make infinite money on to survive.
The worst thing about video game monetisation is that unlocks in games are so mindless now. Unlocking costume in Street Fighter or Armour in Halo 3 was so fun. Now it’s all in battle passes where you do boring repetitive challenges over and over again or pay money to unlock tiers.
the part where he talked about gamers now speaking with their wallets but then their beloved game franchise gets turned into a steaming pile because they are just cycling through everything that made money in the past, was like a knife through the chest.
One of the biggest factors that I think has led to bloated team sizes is this idea that in order to add new content you have to add 20 tons worth of new systems to arbitrate and stretch that content out which requires 500+ people to make possible. It isn’t that the content put out there and their systems don’t require those people it’s that game development from the higher ups perspective requires those systems which subsequently needs those people; the worst thing you could do is reduce the dev team sizes and keep trying to pump out that same shit, at the same speed, at the same level
gaming gets much better when you start to learn to recognize features that are put into a game bc they sound good to a board room of non-gamers & erase those games from your mind
You can't stop big scummy greedy corporations from being big scummy greedy corporations... But you CAN recommend your favorite indie/low budget games to all your friends/family/associates. Anyone who's busy playing good games is not gonna consider buying slop.
I knew gaming was kind of cooked when Oblivion had a 50% off sale on all of their DLC, and *as a joke* they *doubled* the price of Horse Armor to try and act like they were in on the joke, and they said people still bought it
i feel like the triple a industry is way too unsustainable, and an industry crash is probably inevitable unless something changes. every new release has to be either a time consuming live service game or a 200 hour sprawling open world game, and consumers aren't going to have the time to juggle them all.
I really wish he would have refuted the "looks worse" comment, when people say that they mean a 3D game with less triangles. Since one of the points of the video is that graphics isn't everything.
the thing with lootboxes being banned in belgium is that im pretty sure its either uninforced or only enforced for like, physical releases or some shit. the only game ive ever seen lootboxes being unnavailable (im in belgium) is counter strike. i can play gacha games just fine, they're not banned or anything. maybe its a volunteer thing or maybe steam doesnt care
Games like fifa and nba2k also respect the law and don’t allow players from Belgium to gamble. I think it’s maybe the smaller games that can go under the radar
The pc gaming industry has been ruined by rich tourists who dont actually play games and only want to upgrade their cool towers. I've seen this happen to so many other hobbies and interests, too.
"imbues your sword with whimsy" is so fucking funny
I’m about to fight god lfg
I read this before watching and mistakenly thought "Oh man I just ruined the joke",
nope, it still lands, holy fuck my sides are gone
"Imbues my sword with whimsy" is just a euphemism for "making my sword flaccid"
It was whimsical
I care about how a game looks. I don't care about graphics. Important distinction.
Exactly - I've always cared about aesthetic elements like art direction but not graphics..
Yeah, though graphics can be important depending on what you're going for. Cyberpunk 2077 looks amazing. Does it look better than super mario brothers 3? No, dumb comparison. I want someone out there pushing the boundaries but it aint the only way
@@Lowekinder idk, mario 3 is a bit crusty all around, id say cyberpunk has a better style
Hardware manufacturers will never stop pushing for better sales numbers on their new products, and since they're major players in the games industry that means big publishers will never stop pushing for higher graphical fidelity.
we're all saying this
“Just remove the crafting” broooo thank you - they are literally just extra chores
Removing crafting and praising Stardew Valley is wild though...
@@chimera1381learn to think outside of absolutes
@@chimera1381It's about wether or not crafting is added as just another system or as a central part of the game. To keep the action going in an open-world game, having stuff like durability and crafting at specific stations in the world will kill the flow of the action. Even a staple such as inventory space can be seen as an unnecessary addition to several games.
In other games you can argue that it is part of the preparation for an adventure or the central way to progress through the game.
@@chimera1381 When he said remove crafting, he didn't mean _all_ crafting, just in games where it's not a part of the core gameplay mechanics. Games like Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, etc. all have crafting as part of the core gameplay mechanics. But other games add crafting (like he mentioned) as an additional thing to make improving your gear more tedious.
@@chimera1381 "...from every game that doesnt need it"
I love indie games with distinct art styles that any device can run smoothly. Very well said.
Thanks Librarian.
ultrakill
Pizza Tower
That requires human beings, who require being paid. Game companies want to gain more and pay less. So they reduce their human workers, for AI but AI does not have imagination. Therefore cannot create a good product.
I agree completely. That said, Pizza Tower is ugly as shit.
Celeste and V.A. Proxy
massive publishers be like: "we need to keep up with consumer exectations."
My brother in christ, you set those expectations.
Sometimes people don't know what they want until they have it. A lot of people I knew were sceptical when full touchscreen phones were first introduced. Of course not all of it succeeds - VR still hasn't taken off.
On the flip side, there's this thing called generating your own demand, and that's 100% what marketing is all about.
“Shows over the top generated trailer filled with buzzwords”
That's economics! That's the kind if bullshit we're creating he'll on earth for!
@@patchycb@patchycb9837 yeah but they aren't really talking about specific mechanics of the game. They're talking about how a "smaller" studio made a game so incredible with a world that really breathes and feels exciting all the way through. Something genuine and heartfelt, you can really feel the passion and love put into it.
These other studios won't go down that path and instead will make some mediocre crpg, idk if they actually would but the point is they will miss the idea entirely.
Also idk if someone who reviews a game on steam is the average gamer, but I mean that speaks alot more on the games than the individual. Something you can put 100hrs into and not feel satisfied, the games are so bloated with nonsense quests and garbage that at the end of your time it just ends up feeling hollow
And then minecraft turns out to be the best selling game of all time. Wikipedia has a good list of the top 50 highest selling games and it's not just the assassin's creed series and call of duty.
I always hate it when a game has hyper detailed realistic graphics and then they fucking ruin it with motion blur you can't turn off
You can always turn it off. Check ur ini files for the motionblur_1 option and turn it to 0.
@@T9K66 sounds like hes playing on console. fun fact the reason they mandate motion blur on every console game is bc it makes it harder to spot flaws on a tv, they know it makes actually playing the games worse they just dont respect console players enough to let them have the superior experience
Motion blur only looks bad on low fps
Motiom blur always looks horrendous@@r1n488
@@r1n488okay but by "lower fps" do you mean it in th normal way of like 20 frames or in the capital G gamer way of anything below 240
Efficiency gains not leading to lower overall utilization of resources has been studied since the first Industrial Revolution and is named Jevons Paradox
Industrial Revolution mentioned
Cue the manifesto
But it’s not just offsetting the efficiency, teams are bigger than ever typically.
didnt that carl marks guy say something about that
@@amethystjester my buddy mark says things like this, if that's who you mean
the Cotton Gin:
Art style > realism every single time
Realism IS an art style
@@FizzyCapeyes but it's dogshit and very overrepresented in everything
@@junipre985 Nah, there are some really cool games that come with realism and work better for it.
Portal 1 and 2, Soma, Titanfall 2, The Talos Principle, all great games with realistic art styles.
And they all work with the realistic style in a way that fits: Portal and its sterile testing environments,
Soma and its dark atmosphere that just fits with the philosphical themes,
Titanfall 2 Story Mode is simply a great block buster experience,
And The Talos Principle does a great job at wondering if your character is human by putting it in a realistic environment.
@@hexcodeff6624and Tetris is the best selling game of all time.... What's your point?😂
Edit: he changed his comment
Art style is still considered graphics, so caring about any form of graphics and how the game looks instead of fun and the gameplay just shows the priority you set upon yourself
Interesting the way he talked about this before Balatro released and now Balatro just stormed the Game Awards and competed against AAA games.
Starting the Joker crafting bit just as he enters the screen with the chirping crickets is perfection.
5:57 i desperately need a dark souls mod with Bobs Beard Oil and Whimsy implementation
it will never change, the mainstream gaming industry is driven by people who want to just consume the latest triple A slop with the ULTRA REALISTIC GRAPHICS, WATER MECHANICS AND BRAND NEW CRAFTING SYSTEM for a couple of hours every week. The good thing is that it's so easy to make games now that there are lot of good double A and indie companies out there making exactly the game you want, you just have to know where to look
Can you share some tips on where to look?
lol no. now it's just stream kiddies wanting to do what daddy streamer does.
@@Vozkal glitchwave
I prefer a game designed well with fun gameplay and fun stories but the reason why gaming graphics are getting more intricate is because people want to do it. There’s talented and dedicated people improving technology everyday, some technology that in reality does not amount to much help in society but they can and will do it. Not everything is profit driven for the cutting edge, we always want to improve and progress.
That's because the influencers on Twitch and UA-cam not only are running the highest end hardware you can get, but encourage toxic behavior around being smug if anyone isn't running said hardware. I swear so many chatters on Twitch act like every PC gamer is running a 4090, it's obnoxious. They rag on consoles (except the Steam Deck because when it runs 30 fps it's suddenly better than the Switch...for some reason). I genuinely hate hate hate this aspect of the hobby. Obviously I'm not including NL in there, if anything I have a hard time watching some of his streams because they can be lag fests.
"Devs should be paid less. Hi I'm Northernlion"
BASED
You should own nothing.
"imbues your sword with whimsy" is killing me
I read this before I heard it and it still killed me
good graphics < good art direction < good mechanics
Mechanics are overrated.
@@cezarstefanseghjucan
Found the marketing team.
@@cezarstefanseghjucan mechanics is literaly what makes games games dumb dumb
1:14 respect for that one guy in chat named KimWexlerF33T
No one cares about better graphics in games until they get scammed into buying the latest video card at launch
20% more gigafarts per megawatt
Funnily enough, tech channels have noticed a sharp decline in interest for GPUs aswell
@@njebs.I haven't bought a new GPU in like 7 years. I recently got a laptop for school and it can play almost all my games without having a dedicated GPU. Indie enjoyers are eating good in that regard
@aBlackMage I got into PC gaming very late, and I've never bought a new GPU ever. Went from a 2nd hand r9 390x in 2018 to a 2nd hand rx 480 in 2020, and I've never felt the need to upgrade. Just play as low graphics as you need or play indie 💪😎.
I had full-blown rot from buying a 4090. I purchased a steam deck afterward and struggled for the first like two or three months to palate a game running on medium settings. I really should be in the mines for that one
"Hang on let me get a verification can!" KILLED ME
"if its out and its trash im leaving the industry" comment made on the game of the year nominee
BOB'S BEARD OIL
Imbues your sword with whimsy!
Necessary to kill god.
He's forgotten there was a game he liked and played regularly, which still has a subscription model and regular updated content: Trackmania
Too bad about his motion sickness
Trackmania's sub is cooked, I guess it is a normal model for other live service racing games but regular gamers just don't want a 1 year sub as the only option. I've bought it once and played for like 3 months and that was fine, but now they even increased the price because they have given up on new players and just want to milk their established players instead.
@@Dschonathan For sure they need a more enticing price structure. However, gaming is still one of the best in terms of value for your money (as long as you got the hardware). Compare it to cinema and Netflix, 20$ is so much value. Even if you only spent 2h a week, that's 24h of entertainment in 3 months
@@Crytaljam So true. Why is it a year. I don't think i'll ever think to myself "Oh yeah this YEAR im going to play trackmainia". I like playing it every now and then a little bit. For some people its their main game and maybe that makes sense for them. But I'm sure for most it's something the forget and remember about every few months to a year and play it for a bit. I bought the year sub once because i was enjoying it a lot at a certain time, but I dont even think I played it after i bought it
@@oOBeagleOo You just explained why they do it right? Why let people subscribe for a month here and there if you can also force people to pay for a year that they never would've gotten otherwise? Definitely a bit of a gross move on their part
helldivers 2: aw so sweet
skull and bones: umm hello HR?
the difference is that Helldivers 2 has gameplay.
Helldivers 2 is big because it's fun to PLAY. If that game looked like a ps1 game, it would still be as big as it is.
Helldivers 2 wasn't published for the purposes of tax avoidance so
You're so great Librarian, your videos are truly extraordinary. +2s condensed so tight
Librarian we for real need all the songs you put in the outro in some sort of playlist or smth, they're real bangers
I wish big companies would do what they did in 2001 and reflip their assets and (to a lesser extent) their engines to make 5 or 6 games using a solid foundation instead of just restarting every time.
edit: the more i think about this, I feel like this is an american company problem specifically.
I feel like Nintendo, Activision, Ubisoft, 2K, Bethesda and Epic do this still. Honestly I think most people criticize them heavily for doing it
The Yakuza series still does this so much but makes great games
This is exactly what FromSoft does and everyone loves it. AND they release a game every other year (or they did before Elden Ring)
They still got a chance on the other year if Shadows comes out this year @@X4zerm4n 🤞
Bethesda still using the same engine for like 15 years
Graphics are the most prominent and accessible aspect of any game. That is why its the most spoken about. It takes nothing to appreciate that something looks good or pleasing. It takes a bit of effort to find something plays well.
At first, all that was needed were graphics that could communicate "That's You!" and we reached that point before real screens were invented, with some higher-end oscilloscopes. Then we wanted "This is a guy" which began before home consoles and was mastered in Prince of Persia. "This is a guy but in 3D" was another decade, and finally "This is a happy guy and this is a sad guy" has proven exceptionally difficult, but it's basically doable with only MoCap improvements, without pushing polygon counts and light transport equations any further. If someone back in ye day wanted to make L.A. Noire but they only had the Amiga I can understand why they'd want a revolution in graphical fidelity, but we're past that now. The returns have fully diminished, there are no longer games that are impossible to make because of graphics technology. So Stop.
Idk man i still like loading into cyberpunk and being stunned by the realism, when they sacrifice gameplay for it thats where it gets bad imo
@@dexterrkk3711 On the other hand my brother was more blown away by Ori and the Will of the Wisps when buying the latest Xbox compared to Cyberpunk.
Though Cyberpunk definitely deserves praise for its graphics, it does massively enhance the experience.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 If you want a game to feel like a mystical and whimsical fairy tale ... Ori's art style can be effective.
For displaying a gritty and depressing cyberpunk dystopian future super-city you really want realism.
One of the reasons AAA studios make those big games is because only they can. Competing with indie games is tough, theres tons. One of the first things game devs do is decide art style and think long and hard about how and why.
Monetization however comes from the top and usually is the problem
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 Cyberpunk for me was just another TAA sludge triple A game where if you go through the bother of disabling anti-aliasing (ridiculously annoying to do with CP2077 btw) the game still looks hideous, because TAA was just slapped on as a last minute cover-up for how bad the aliasing actually is. I loved the game, but it looks pretty shit for a realistic game.
He's so right and so bald
As bald man I approve this message
he's as right as he is bald
Outro goes INSANELY hard
that's a classic from the 90s
a 90s classic, without a doubt
Games should prioritize artstyle over realistic graphics. But in other hand, i'm once asked my friends about graphics priority in games and they replied : "heeell nooo, some pixel ps 1 bullshit breacks my immersion!"
Pixels on a ps1 you say
Sounds like you need to get some friends that aint stupid
Realism is an art style though
@@Shiftarus yeah, i mean games are already looking realistic enough to explore variety of styles.
My personal take that Bloodborne is the best looking game ever made (very personal, not stating it as fact) was absolutely torn to shreds by some cutting edge PC digital foundry type friends, they said it looked like shit even for 2015, how
anyone can think that truly confounds me
@@jackrabbitsalad932 People conflating graphics and style which aren't the same. Bloodborne has framerate problems (it has an uneven frametime through the entirety of the game I believe) but its graphical style I believe enhances the experience a player has with its world. One can admire what it gets right, and what it doesn't and thankfully From has gotten better over time with the technical issues (although Elden Ring wasn't perfect).
I heavily disagree about battlepasses being a good thing if done right. Battlepasses existing means you need to play a game like a job or else you miss out on content (for most games the stuff you miss out on os gone forever), and when every game has a battlepass, you feel overwhelmed. You can't possibly grind like 4 games at a time every single day. I don't wanna play Fortnite or Dead By Daylight every day. Sometimes I wanna just read all day. But when I do that I feel like I'm losing out on this exclusive legendary skin that will never ever come back because it's meant to be a trophy for people that play the game 60 hours a week.
Only one that does it right is deep rock
Good battle passes exist, though they ironically use different names to avoid the negative stigma surrounding the system. There are passes that don't cost money, time out, or phase out content. Two examples come to mind but I'm sure there's more:
Deep Rock Galactic has free passes that last 6 months (or longer x.x) and at the end of the season pass content is grandfathered into the loot pools you're already drawing from.
Helldivers 2 has multiple passes, one that's free and one you can pay (or grind a bit) for; both of which are permanently available.
That said the FOMO-addled, burnout inducing, AAA battle passes are certainly the norm right now. Hopefully the next microtransaction fad we get isn't quite as soul sucking...
@@TheLibraryofLetourneau Honestly even DRG's feels sort of meh. At least it's free but it's definitely pretty forgettable most of the time
@@TheLibraryofLetourneau got even better with added option to activate old seasons
A battle pass done right means there would be no time constraint, you don't *have* to grind it out if you don't want to miss out on what's in it.
Wake up honey NL shitting on aaa games again
The Dark Souls rant is so good. I watched this video when it came out and this is what made me a NL fan.
Same, this introduced me to NL
That's one of the reasons why I play indie games, most single player too
No one cares about graphics until a trailer drops with mid graphics and everyone calls it shit
shouldn't have called it quadrupel A then
made up argument. a 700 developer, 6yeardev period title with a 300 milly budget shouldnt look like shit. but back in the days you had banger midsized focused titles on a 2 year dev time 30dev team that slapped. its all about communication and expectation
As a dev, I think you've hit the nail on the head. It doesn't matter that a game doesn't *need* cutting-edge graphics to be good, because any game that signals that it has a "realistic" visual style is going to be judged against all the ones that are investing in those graphics. And once you're committed to high quality graphics, every part of development suddenly gets way more complex: higher optimization demands, longer art development cycles, a need for more and higher-skilled artists, extra code systems to support facial animation and other details, and so on. The only reliable way to escape the trap is to create a distinct visual style that's obviously not intending to be realistic, and that's not always creatively viable for the game's concept.
@@ActionScripter I'd play another Soma if it looked like Soma, is that a "high graphics" title?
@@Dancyspartan But we dont live in "back in the day" we live in today. Your expectations are different now, like it or not.
i love the outro songs
hearing the guitar start playing i just started giggling waiting for how he was gonna get into it
2:18 could one say that you might be moving.... dialecticly?
Hes becoming too powerful
Hating on graphics is such a played out talking point, at this point it's such a big circlejerk argument.
My hot take is: While graphics are completely overrated by (usually AAA) game companies who put a lot of money and time on it that could be better spent elsewhere, often leading to derivative and safe products.
By itself, chasing graphical fidelity isn't a bad thing. I think there are plenty of games that have used a realistic artstyle really well. Shadow of the Colossus is such a technical masterpiece visually, it used techniques like self-shadowing and other things that wouldn't be commonplace until the PS3. It's realistic artstyle helps bring the more unrealistic elements (the colossus) to appear more beliveable. The game even runs at ~20 fps because of it, so it was a huge undertaking for the dev team.
Helldivers 2 was also a recent game that used it well. Robot planets with all the fog and destruction look spectacular.
No one is saying realism is bad, it's the numbers game that is bad.
You can have shadow of the colossus without trying to be cutting edge. You can have novel fog and destruction engines without trying to push the latest hardware.
@@hexcodeff6624 Shadow of the colossus was cutting edge. I do understand what you are saying about the numbers game. We have reached a plateau in terms of graphics, and chasing for the sake of it is bad. That I agree.
Mmm, yes, two games known for how they look and definitely not their engaging gameplay.
@@Mister32 Yes? The visuals aspects of SotC is talked about and discussed often, just go to a discussion forum or something and see for yourself. Helldivers 2 too, in a lesser degree but that was just a personal anectode more than anything.
I don't know why are you trying to discredit how these games look, especially when they work to enhance the gameplay experience in multiple ways.
@@deleteTF i think the main thing people hate is the constant trying to improve graphics in our present time. We reached a point where graphics can only improve so much and no big leap anymore, leading to bloated game size, way longer dev time, ignoring fun aspects etc.
5:50 is actually an amazing example of this subject. Fromsoftware has it down where there is incredible depth both in lore and mechanics if you want it but also a simple 1 to 2 sentence description of the necessary info. It's got tons of options with nearly equal meaningful variety even in Armored Core where they've got a spreadsheet worth of stats they have a "at a glance" view of the core important ones that you can just quickly look at and decide whether it's for you or not. Hopefully more studios big and small take a page out of their book and focus more on the fun part of interfacing with the game. Balancing games depth with accessibility without taking the fun out is a difficult art form but we have so many good examples of how to do it there is little to no excuse for experienced devs to not be able to reflect the available examples to a meaningful capacity.
There are some takes that Northern Lion has that have either really irked me or I just disagree with but more often than not like here he is absolutely on point.
Development teams should be 10 times smaller but paid twice as much. Maybe even give them a cut of sales so they have a financial incentive for their game to achieve long-term success.
biggest issue with 99% of current games is that everything feels so unresponsive and overproduced. I don't want to play a tutorial, have nice animations or cutscenes, just give me direct responses to when I click a button
Just in time for my Saturday morning Library binge
Not only is realism ugly as shit, it also bloats file sizes.
It’s a fucking lose/lose/lose situation.
Downloading 20+GB of 4k files to play the game that can only run at 1080p anyway because it's so poorly optimized. I love modern gaming
@@Alo-is-io "No you don’t get it it IS optimized! That’s why it’s ONLY 81GB!"
-Someone IK about BG3
@@DraconicCatgirlwell the the BG3 file size is so high because of voice acting
@@DraconicCatgirl BG3 actually has the amount of content to justify the file size though, it's not like a generic call of duty being like 120gb when all you do is a 30 minute campaign and do shooty on like 10 maps.
@@DraconicCatgirl File size has nothing to do with optimization. What are you even trying to argue here? Every new game that comes out these days is using 4K assets alongside uncompressed audio. That's why they are often over 100GB now.
You're a pretty shining example of what I'm about to say. Lots of the large triple A companies follow the profit driven approach like you mentioned. There is demand out in the world that wants to be filled. The larger companies follow the same formats and try to squeeze the methods in which previous successes have been had. It is incredibly similar to a problem with modern AIs. They choose to min/max that which has worked before, but then fail to innovate. The companies then fall in to "model collapse" as the margins they can eek out begin to diminish. People become bored as things become stale. This now allows indie devs the opportunity to capture the market from people who are bored with the same reiterations put out by the big firms.
The games you like to play are typically from no name studios. If you're a team of 3 and you put out a game that ends up selling like 1 million copies for 10 bucks..... You're likely set for life for a normal human. Stardew valley is a pretty good example of this (obviously going solo dev is entire crapshoot and you're playing a lottery). But you have a singular developer who was smart enough to capture the audience that wanted a more modern game similar to Harvest Moon. And now the guy has like a 40 million networth. It is obviously still a gamble. But everything is probability. And the odds are likely in favour of indie devs atm.
I think it just depends on the game I'm playing. When I'm playing Gran Turismo 7 with a racing wheel and a monitor relatively close to my face, I appreciate the fine details and fidelity of that cockpit view. If I'm hacking and slashing in Cult of the Lamb, I'm enjoying the distinct art style.
It's about matching function with form. A realistic racer sim benefits from having realistic graphics.
A game about cutesy animals sacrificing each other is probably better off not looking realistic at all.
@@louieberg2942 This is one of the first things a studio decides, and honestly this entire debate is weird to me since most games I play seem to make the decision just fine. There are plenty of examples of stylized, and realistic games on the market today.
The lootbox and cash shop argument however makes total sense
the part about people defending gacha games with "what do you expect it's a gacha game" is so true, the most annoying corporate simp shit ever
We have reached the point in games where Graphical Fidelity can no longer improve in leaps. There is no 2D to 3D or SD to HD anymore. Style has always been important to games, and this is true now more than ever.
If you look at a game like Starfield and compare it to something like the Original Persona 5 or Nier Automata. No one would say Starfield is better looking despite being much higher resolution and Fidelity.
Give me Celeste and Stardew over Cod MW3 (2024).
I still think SV looks cheap compared to the older Harvest Moon games. It's a solid title though, dozens and dozens of hours put into both SV and HM games
Yes, remove the crafting. Also RPG elements and random loot.
Basically, everything that Palworld thought was popular enough to for their game chimera.
It's less "gamers are voting with their wallet" and more "games cost so much to make and require so much investor capital that studios can't turn a profit on anything anymore".
Gamers are spineless, just look at that famous picture of the Steam group that was protesting Call of Duty.
Weirdly the example i use for this is Call of Duty... for some reason back on the 360 when almost everything was 30fps COD4 decided not to slather post processing effects over everthing and do 60fps instead, and everybody loved it, the speed and responsiveness of the gameplay made COD4 one of the biggest games of all time and nobody complained that it wasn't doing what Killzone 2 did, because while it did look amazing at the time Killzone 2 felt like you were crawling through molasses, everyone remembers moments like All Ghillied Up and it didn't need insane hardware to do it, and the clean visuals still looks great today.
The other example is obviously Crysis, people bought new hardware for Crysis because it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before but it's been diminishing returns ever since, i don't think my PC would run that new Indiana Jones game and i don't think the average person would be able to tell you why, it's not an open world game with tonnes of NPCs and systems from what i can tell it's pretty linear.
I think we need to go back to the short period in time where high quality assets were an entirely optional download that you could choose to not have so that a game that would otherwise take up 50+ GBs of storage only takes up 5
This is the best TEDTalk I’ve ever watched!
Good graphics definitely are important, just not necessary. On visuals alone art direction / style is more crucial to how good a game looks. If a game looks beautiful graphically on top of having good art direction it's a plus
I like lootboxes cuz the alternative is to just straighten up buy the product for a insane amount of money, that said I also don’t like paying for lootboxes lol
I don't like the whole "I want worse graphics" argument. I do want good graphics, but that doesn't mean TAA-blurry dithered wannabe realism that needs a 2000$ RTX GPU to run above 60fps (looking at you UE5). Modern AAA games look no better, in some aspects even worse than games did 8 years ago and run way worse. On the other hand, I like games that have retro graphics but I don't want this to be overplayed either. I don't want this to be an excuse to have every game look like a SNES/Genesis or PSX/N64 game..
Just have a coherent visual style that doesn't look like ass...
one of his best takes
"If it comes out and it's trash, I'm leaving the industry"
Balatro ends up being the goat, he's stuck here forever
This mf doesn't even know what the whimsy buff does ICANT
im here for the end. i was not there at the beginning of gaming, but i want to be there for the end.
shareholder game development is a wild philosophy they cant believe gathering dragon piles of capital and consolidation and then gutting personnel.
Got a Skull and Bones ad LMAO
UNIRONICALLY YES make games shorter than "as long as we can weasel cash out of you" and I do not need my machine rendering every pore on my characters model mid combat or at any point for that matter. AND OBVIOUSLY PAY YOUR DAMN DEVS AND STOP OVERWORKING THEM TO THE POINT WHERE ITS AN EXPECTED PART OF THE INDUSTRY. I don't give a hoot about being on the right side of history I just want my hobby to be in the hands of people that actually give a damn.
Ever since roughly the PS4 / Xbox One generation, and especially PS4 Pro / Xbox One X, graphics have reached a point where any improvement is negligible at best. It's much wiser to focus on other aspects of the visuals.
I'd argue even on the PS3. Did the PS4 look better? Sure, it totally did. Was there a single PS4/5 game that couldn't have been made on the PS3 if they made the graphics simpler? No. Not at all. Even like 98% of games made since the PS2 could be readjusted to run on the PS2 without any issues.
2:37-5:44 (3:09) +1,000
they make games look good and gameplay bad because they are only trying to attract the casual market, casual players only care about graphics and do not have enough time to play to care about gameplay
case in point: cyberpunk, saints row 2021, etc
@@zzeroara9511 why are you puttiing cyberpunk in that category when it not only has great graphics, but also fun gameplay, an amazingly detailed world, great characters, and a fun story?
I dont care too much about graphical fidelity, but i do really care about art direction and art style, i would much rather play a game that looks like Sly Cooper, Dishonored, Sifu, God of War (both old and new, great art direction in both) or Legend of Zelda wind waker, than i would play yet another hyper realistic game thats gonna look ugly and dated a week from now, whereas games like Sly Cooper 2 still looks like its ripped right out of a comic book, and that game was released on the ps2 goddamnit.
As usual humans are great at creating cool stuff and just good at weaponizing it.
Greed is the issue. If greed wasn’t a thing it would all be love and creation
It seems like people in the comments don’t understand that art direction is still part of graphics, Any form of visual stimulus is part of graphics, I think what people is trying to say is they hate realistic graphical fidelity but instead they mix the words up and hate of graphics which just means the visual parts of a video game
And honestly its silly because usually the games that have realistic graphics benefit from them.
Not all... but most
that's just semantics though. when people make that argument it's extremely clear that they're talking about graphical fidelity, nobody is going "I HATE THAT THIS GAME HAS TEXTURES AND MODELS ON THE SCREEN! I JUST WANNA LOOK AT A WHITE PLANE!"
It do be like that.
There's ingame monetization for pretty much every single genre out there. They'll find out what you like and weaponize it against you.
The world is doomed because we exist. We are the harbingers. The 8 billion horsemen.
Imagine my awesome battle pass themed retail store irl idea.
Spend money and win stupid cosmetics to customize your self checkout experience.
Purchase milk via 50 crystal but you can only buy crystals in increments of 35.
You can earn gold by buying certain things on the daily/weekly/monthly challenges and you can use that gold to buy some crystals.
2024 is wild because we'll get the craziest nicest games with like 50 microtransactions stapled on
Because of the accessibility of game development, large amounts of money and resources are the only thing separating triple a studios from smaller studios. They're leaning into the only unique quality they have.
Games can still look amazing without being as absurdly expensive as the AAA industry is making them.
There are certainly tradeoffs. You can't make the final act of Baldur's Gate 3, with the most incredible and detailed medieval fantasy city ever put into a video game, without that being very expensive. So if we want that kind of thing, games will have to keep being stupidly expensive to make.
But you can make absolutely gorgeous games without breaking the bank on high fidelity mocapped graphics. Darkest Dungeon looks better than Darkest Dungeon II; Songs of Conquest looks better than any of the 3D HoMM offerings; Battle Brothers looks better than Mount & Blade; Hades looks better than any of the 3D Diablo games.
Don't Starve looks great, Streets of Rage 3 looks great, Star Renegades looks great, Sea of Stars looks great, Tactical Breach Wizards looks great.
Looking good is about color choices and style and art direction and talent, not about how many polygons a face rig is made of.
Idiot in chat "you're right they should lay off more people." No dude they should just make more, smaller games that can all pull their own weight rather than putting all their eggs in one basket on giant bloated garbage that they NEED to make infinite money on to survive.
I liked the video as soon as he said to remove crafting from games
The worst thing about video game monetisation is that unlocks in games are so mindless now. Unlocking costume in Street Fighter or Armour in Halo 3 was so fun. Now it’s all in battle passes where you do boring repetitive challenges over and over again or pay money to unlock tiers.
The confusion levels heads NODDERS
I used to be a graphics snob when I first built my pc, but as I got older art style and gameplay is vastly more important.
you grew wise with your age
the part where he talked about gamers now speaking with their wallets but then their beloved game franchise gets turned into a steaming pile because they are just cycling through everything that made money in the past, was like a knife through the chest.
I feel like gathering/crafting part of a game can in fact be the most enjoyable part. Sometimes it's there for no reason. Other than that, he's right.
One of the biggest factors that I think has led to bloated team sizes is this idea that in order to add new content you have to add 20 tons worth of new systems to arbitrate and stretch that content out which requires 500+ people to make possible. It isn’t that the content put out there and their systems don’t require those people it’s that game development from the higher ups perspective requires those systems which subsequently needs those people; the worst thing you could do is reduce the dev team sizes and keep trying to pump out that same shit, at the same speed, at the same level
gaming gets much better when you start to learn to recognize features that are put into a game bc they sound good to a board room of non-gamers & erase those games from your mind
You can't stop big scummy greedy corporations from being big scummy greedy corporations...
But you CAN recommend your favorite indie/low budget games to all your friends/family/associates.
Anyone who's busy playing good games is not gonna consider buying slop.
I knew gaming was kind of cooked when Oblivion had a 50% off sale on all of their DLC, and *as a joke* they *doubled* the price of Horse Armor to try and act like they were in on the joke, and they said people still bought it
he really is always playing with duplo when taking about these very insightful deep topics
unexpected lightning crashes at the end jammin
We're Costco guys, of course we buy the battle pass
Has been extremely incremental improvements since the days of the dreamcast. Graphics are WORSE today than we imagined they would be by now.
typa shit yahtzee's been on for a decade
History is cyclical; we are simply returning to the arcade model, but with modern technology and more coomerism.
i feel like the triple a industry is way too unsustainable, and an industry crash is probably inevitable unless something changes. every new release has to be either a time consuming live service game or a 200 hour sprawling open world game, and consumers aren't going to have the time to juggle them all.
Thank you librarian.
I really wish he would have refuted the "looks worse" comment, when people say that they mean a 3D game with less triangles.
Since one of the points of the video is that graphics isn't everything.
I love how people assume that time and money investment = quality
If that was the case we wouldn't be in a drought of good company games for years now
the thing with lootboxes being banned in belgium is that im pretty sure its either uninforced or only enforced for like, physical releases or some shit. the only game ive ever seen lootboxes being unnavailable (im in belgium) is counter strike. i can play gacha games just fine, they're not banned or anything. maybe its a volunteer thing or maybe steam doesnt care
Games like fifa and nba2k also respect the law and don’t allow players from Belgium to gamble. I think it’s maybe the smaller games that can go under the radar
They should and are able to compress and optimize. They just have deals with graphics companies
Super realistic graphics are something you can show a boardroom to get more funding, it impresses people that don’t actually play games
The pc gaming industry has been ruined by rich tourists who dont actually play games and only want to upgrade their cool towers. I've seen this happen to so many other hobbies and interests, too.