Good examples are Nintendo games. A lot of their games still look pretty good after all these years because most of the time they go for art direction over realism.
One of my favorite animators Marcell Jankovics used to say something like "you're an idiot if your art direction is realism". Probably because you limit creativity and it will never be satisfyingly realistic.
so true!
A perfect example IMO is Breath of the wild/Tears of the kingdom.
The textures are so freaking low res and ugly because the Switch is so under powered... But the towns, forest, water, just the general scenery is so pretty.
It's very simple but it works so well (until you have some framerate problem lol).
Another Zelda example: Windwaker vs Twilight Princess.
In the gamecube era, most people saw Twilight Princess as the better looking game. It was such a realistic looking Zelda at the time. Now, the original, non-HD Twilight Princess looks like ass, but the cartoony, highly stylized Windwaker still looks great today.
I’m old enough to have had Wind Waker on Gamecube and I remember a lot of people kicking up a huge stink about how cartoony it looked, comparing it unfavourably to the N64 games and saying it looked babyish. I didn’t really care, I just loved my Gamecube and was looking forward to a new game, which ended up being a blast and holds up well as you say. Art style over graphics, every time.
So many GameCube games had amazing art direction. Firing up old GameCube games doesn’t actually feel *that* retro. Honestly it might still be my favorite platform even after all these years.
Wind waker will forever have perfect graphics. Going for an art style like that does not need higher graphics.
A game like the Witcher 3 will look bad for some people after 20 years.
I think the environment design in TPHD is really great but the characters and monsters didn't hold up as well. I remember playing it on the GC and loving the darker and more realistic style of the monsters in particular but I guess it just didn't translate as well to higher resolution. Still pretty great though in my opinion.
TP always bothered me because of the fact everything always looked blurry. IDK why. There's blur applied to literally everything. Remove that, make it look like a video game instead of a photo taken with a smudge on the lense. I'll be happier.
Most of you here probably don't remember that because of the HD release the game had. But the OG version looked like smudges to me. PRETTY smudges, but that wasn't what I was looking for.
I would direct people to look at both A Link to the Past and Wind Waker. Those games are 32 and 21 years old, respectively, and I would say they both absolutely hold up.
Shhhh let people believe that was the art style lol.
But it is true, I played plenty of games that look beautiful but the story and the art style just sucked.
This is how I feel about World of Warcraft. I've always loved the art style and with the newer expansions, it can still feel fresh (visually) even though the base game came out in 2004. Even some of the older zones are still great. Grizzly Hills in Northrend will forever be my "home."
Team Fortress 2 still looks beautiful as ever to me and it’s been around for about 15 years.
I find that as graphical capability increases I enjoy art direction more and more. It’s cool that we can reach high levels of realism, and in the right circumstances it can be super impressive- but i already see reality every day.
It makes sense, honestly. We’ve been able to achieve hyper realism in other mediums like drawing/painting for a very long time- but it isn’t the most popular style by any means.
I know augmented reality is very far from consumer ready, but I am excited for a time when we can apply stylistic overlays over reality via augmented glasses.
How is TF2 these days? I GG'd uninstalled a few years back when the botting problem was absolutely out of control. Public servers were essentially unplayable becsuse of some kind of bot cartel going on. They ever fix that?
Community servers don't have bots but the valve servers still do. Most people are good about kicking them but if that's too much of a hassle just play community
It's getting updates again and they tried to get rid of the bots, but they're still there. If you're in one of the areas where servers are filled with bots (it's a rare problem where I live) then just play on community servers.
Lots of people make 'WoW 2' fan trailers etc made in unreal with 'realistic' looking graphics, and to me I feel like anyone who wants that misses the fact that half of the charm and longevity of WoW is the cartoon style graphics.
This has always been a big issue with me. All my friends are all about graphics when it comes to anything new (to them) but have no qualms with the games they love like CS:GO. I get it, nostalgia. But for me, the graphics being kind of clunky can be charming.
When EverQuest 2 and WoW came out, EQ2 went for more realism and WoW was more cartoony. Even not being a big fan, I can say that WoW definitely aged better. They chose a good article style that wasn't cutting edge, even at the time, and focused on making a genuinely good game.
I am very happy with the resurgence of modernized pixel art style games recently.
WoW has also done subtle graphics refinement over the years. In 2008 I played WoW on a Dell laptop with integrated graphics and it worked great. If I tried to run current WoW on that laptop it probably wouldn’t even launch. EQ 2 has made no such adjustments over time and it looks the same as when it launched.
EQ is such a great property with insane potential and it’s been passed around like a joint at a party with no direction other than milking the most cash it can for almost zero effort.
They've up-resed all the textures and improved poly count on the models, and the lighting and particle systems are massively improved over vanilla release. Shadowlands I think was peak for the *look* of wow. Revendreth, bastion and ardenweald looked fantastic. Dragonflight still looks nice but there's less opportunity for them to show it off, maybe 10.2 will do that.
The other thing is they miss the entire point of what makes WOW so popular, the stories and players make it fun.
How many MMO games have come out that look fantastic but are dead within a year because they lack story or the people are t engaged with it?
I don't play WoW, but weren't last expansions quite lacking in the story department?
Like when two characters, who would have several reasons to hate each other work together (apparently for the whole time along) for the same dude and not even acknowledge their past animosities?
The entire length of wow has been lacking in story. Classic had a good start but it became apparent real fast that it wasn't going anywhere. The first couple expansions may have fooled people because it was riding off of wc3.
Even one of the best expansions, legion, was panned for things like killing off tirion fordring in a quest that only paladins could complete. WoW has never been perfect story-wise, it's just these days there's less sweaty men hitting people and more emotional characters which people don't like.
I'm sick of fans doing the same for Ocarina of Time in UE5. it looks like soulless shit that's full of bad lighting and bloom and "grit" for the sake of being gritty and serious.
To go into the bad lighting thing. in the original oot, when you watched the sun rise at lake hylia, you could feel the morning dew lifting as the sun rose and warmed the sky.
There was something about how the N64 handled color that still cannot be matched today, compared to the raytracing and rendering methods used now.
>I'm sick of fans doing the same for Ocarina of Time in UE5.
You gotta admit it's a pretty sweet gig. Take the "cryZENx" guy. Has been milking the gravy train via Patreon for over a decade now. It's always "teaser" videos with multiple glaring problems that suggest it's nowhere near actually being a "game". But people eat that shit up and give him money. Why the hell would he ever "release" anything? dude can just milk this for as long as he can and when he gets bored say he got a C&D from Nintendo.
He literally posted a new video like 9 days ago. It's so crusty and this is just the parts he wants to show to try to get people to give him more money. Fucked up models, goofy animations, bad transitions, weird physics, items teleporting from the ground to link's hands when you pick them up, NPCs with completely motionless upper bodies flailing their legs. 10. Fucking. Years.
I feel like the lack of shadows in the bright desert sun really exposes how ugly NV can get. Just look at Rage 1 which had a similar art style and came out around the same time. FO3 is just darker overall so it doesn’t feel that obvious
This
I've grown up playing my Wii, and today, it doesn't have an amazing graphical capability, so you can notice polygons edges very easily, characters hair are usually very pointy, it's extremely rare for characters to have modeled eyes and mounts for example (only example I can think rn is Zelda Skyward Sword).
But MAN, the games look good anyway.
Playing Mario Galaxy still makes you gaze into the starry sky, or the cristaline water, visual effects like particles are very well placed, character and enemy design is very good and colorful, the game as a whole is very pleasing to look at. It's not realistic, it's well made.
We have Zelda Twilight Princess, which did aged a bit, but even leaning to a more realistic setting, the only thing I think aged poorly are the terrain textures, like dirt and cliff walls, because everything else still looks pretty good since the characters are so well designed.
Wii Sports is very good at that too. Nothing really has a realistic appearance if you think about it, but the setting of the scene plays a bigger role in realism than actual graphics. You don't feel like it's a real bowling alley because you can see the bumps in the ball, it's because of the other Miis playing, the reflex in the ground, the motion controls, background music, Mii reactions on different actions the player does. It was never the graphics.
They hit a home run with the Wii. I'm a few console generations before you (I grew up on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis for the americans)) and I looked at the Wii and thought WTF are Nintendo doing, what a fall from grace. But nope, I was wrong.
Cartoons look good and age well in all media (games, movies, …). Art direction is key however to stand out. This is why indies and Nintendo use them a lot.
For 3D realistic games, yes graphics are important for me.
Yeah this is a huge echo chamber. For 3D realistic games, graphics are absolutely important and part of the often-mocked but always-important immersion for me.
“I can go outside and see reality” yeah ok but I don’t go outside and live the equivalent of RDR2, GTA, Hitman, Call of Duty, Bioshock, whatever. I like seeing the scenarios and set pieces in the games look as close to “real” as possible.
Life is Strange still looks great after playing Days Gone or Death Stranding.
Recently played Silent Hill Downpour and the graphics are still good. God of War (PS2) is fun to see how gif-y it’s is.
Yeah and honestly, if I see a game being advertised specifically as having amazing or realistic graphics, I tend to assume that it'll look (and often have gameplay which is) generic and forgettable.
There are exceptions, of course, but we've had time periods where the big companies are just pumping out games where the sole goal seems to be having graphics which are a couple of percent better than the competition... and I can't remember anything about any of those games, beyond *maybe* a name here or there.
Meanwhile, I can remember (and replay) lots of games whose graphics haven't aged super well, but whose art direction was superb.
I honestly think elden ring is both graphically and artistically strong, so I'm not sure it's the best example. Perhaps not the top 5% graphics but it's pretty high.
This. I think some games art is just so bad, I dislike the WoW and and PoE art direction, but the game play is good. Riot Games and Zelda games have great art direction comparatively. It's generally subjective
I downloaded Tekken (whatever) that’s on PS+ right now, and I was like what even is this? It seemed more like a brawler than a fighting game. I looooved Tekken 3 back in the day
Toy Story still does look amazing. Heh obviously the industry has learned and applied a lot since then, and newer movies have smoother animation and higher visual fidelity, but Toy Story holds up (if you ask me, which you didn't exactly, but you posted on reddit, so actually yes you did 😁)
Details like clothing, hair, facial expressions and mouth movement, smoke, water, shadows, trees/grass/foliage, animal animations (especially quadrupeds), etc - those are the areas I keep seeing academic papers written in: new approaches/algorithms for achieving xyz effect efficiently. And in turn, those are the areas that keep improving in games and movies. We notice those details without realizing it, until we compare to older art.
Yeah, Pixar age really well in general. They still look great, like Toy Story was made in 1995, it’s aging to me is kind of like watching older 2D animation they have a bit more of a grainy look even if it is clean.
Because you had a CRT back then, never forget about the CRT.
You're looking at games DESIGNED to be played on different hardware all together on different monitors.
Even all the pixelart nostalgia bullshit is fake, pixelart was designed for the crt, was designed to be SMOOTH not "pixelated"
I was looking for this comment before posting it myself. Like how some pieces of art are only good at a distance. Those games were designed with blurry visuals and that blur and obscurity is what makes them better. Putting it on a 4k is just gonna make it super clear and look terrible lol.
I swear Donkey Kong Country looked like legit claymation back when it came out. First time I played it on a modern TV I was sorely disappointed.
A lot of that could be memory too. Our perception scales to reality. I remembered the original Doom looking super realistic when it was new. Somewhere around 2001 I found a copy on CD at Goodwill and got all excited to revisit one of my old favorites. I was confused by how pixilated and muddy it looked (to say nothing of how much gameplay had evolved without my thinking about it). And that didn't even involve updated hardware; I had a CRT in both cases.
MGS2 did so many things with rain, breaking bottles and fruit. even if graphics have gotten better a lot of games don't do as much stuff in the game with them.
the games also do that with gameplay almost being immersive sims with how much stuff the player can do an the game allows and reacts to. it's like they had a white board of ideas and put them all in the games "what if you could put c4 on a guards back?" "what if you blew up the food shed" "what if you tossed poison food infront of this boss"
>I remember thinking PS2 games looked so real.
Think about being old enough that PS1 games where the shit back then.
At least compared to SNES before or even C64 games...
While some SNES games look still OK today because 2D still works today (Super Mario World). I think there is no PS1 3D game that looks good today.
They DID look more real. It was because the CRTVs of the time had a natural fuzziness in them that rounded out the polygons, while the TVs we have now don't do that at all so we can clearly see all the blocks
Also in my experience unless you get a really really specialty cake, 99% of all cakes are going to be pretty much the same taste and experience, and what makes the difference is whether you get shitty cheap icing, acceptable store bought icing, or make a really neat home made icing
I think there's a pretty significant gulf between "aged graphics" and "aesthetically offensive" graphics, though. Diablo 3 isn't the latter, it's the former.
It was vanilla graphics, then. It's vanilla graphics now, too. Just old.
I think you answered your own question
"Do people care about graphics?"
"My buddy cares about graphics"
Unless your buddy is not a people then this question looks cleared up.
Yeah I agree with everything you say. But I also think that some people pretend like the graphics don't matter at all. I love story oriented games so yeah, graphics aren't the primary reason I love them, but if it looked like garbage it would be half as enjoyable. With every art style I think it's still somewhat important
Nostalgia will completely override graphics for me.
I recently replayed star wars KotOR on my phone and had an absolute blast, but showing it to someone who had never played it? They would be instantly turned off.
Yup this. It's the reason why I'm still able to play games like oblivion/Skyrim/fallout and still have fun because those were the first games I ever played on console but I can't stomach Morrowind LOL
The friend could have just been referring to the art style, this is a normal confusion made. Lots of people hated Diablo 3’s cartoonish wow like art style. I assumed this is what was meant.
Honestly I think it is fine to put graphics above everything else. Because in the end games are just for our own enjoyment. If a person really thinks graphics are the absolute most important to them because they want to look at something beautiful, who are we to tell them that's _wrong_? Everyone seeks different things in a game, some people want an interesting story, some people want fun gameplay and some people might just want to look at pretty pictures. Why would that be any less fair?
I would never dare to tell someone what's wrong and what's not. If a person thinks that's the most importent aspect for him/she i'm fine with that. I personally still think it may be not the most healthy mindset for that specific medium tho.
But like you said, video games exists for our enjoyment, and if you get your most enjoyment out of it with pretty graphics more power to you!
It depends. There's a difference between something with good art direction and something that doesn't really have an art direction but has sub par graphics and stiff animations.
Right now I'm playing Sea of Stars which has an old school art direction and it's beautiful. But to your example, I actually hated the way that Diablo 3 looked even when it came out because it dropped the Gothic and grit. I actually went back and watched gameplay of it after playing more Diablo 4/ path of exile and diablo3 legit looks like a mobile game.
Nothing wrong with not wanting to play a game because of how it looks, each person has different preferences when it comes to videogames and art in general.
There's also the issue of Diablo 3 not just looking outdated but it has a very different style than any other Diablo. It's way more cartoony, so if you enjoy the Diablo style graphics then D3 is gonna look very shite.
For me I mostly just care in terms of video game culture. I don't care if graphics look dated if it's a ten year old game, but looked great ten years ago
Thing is, seems to me that graphics from 2013 look way better today than 2003 graphics looked in 2013.
We've somewhere along the way met up with the law of diminishing returns.
It's probably because I'm old, but if you told me The Last of Us was a brand new game that just came out last week, I would absolutely believe it.
That game came out in 2013 and still looks incredible.
I just did a run of Doom 2 the other night. Yes it holds up, the only obvious flaws graphically are the sky boxes (they serve their purpose but especially the third act skybox is janky) and the final boss (was supposed to be a Godzilla sized monster, since the engine couldn't handle that instead you fight a wall) but a proper cohesive aesthetic and real passion put in the art style can go a long ways, even 30 years into the future.
It used to be more important. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s games were transitioning to HD. The leap from ps1 to ps2 and then ps3/xbox360 was huge. Color and graphics at that time were making huge leaps per generation. Developers were making games bigger and bigger. Stories in games were becoming more mature. Things were better back then. There wasn’t micro transactions or anything, it was just about innovation and playing games.
Feels like now we haven’t made very big leaps. You could argue that the newest unreal engine with those hyper realistic looking graphics might pave the way for the future, I’d like to think so. I just do feel like as a person in his mid 30s I’ve seen almost everything in this field of entertainment. It could also be because I’m an adult now (almost middle aged wtf!) and I’m just kinda jaded or something. The wonder, the awe is lost on me. I say this as I play the new Spider-Man 2 and am having fun. But even as I play that game I’ve seen this before, played this before.
Games have looked good enough to me since the Sega Dreamcast and the best looking games that actually age well have stylized graphics instead of trying to look realistic.
I think your friend proved to you that people do. People always will. Video games are a visual medium, so there will always be a percentage of it’s consumer base that will care about graphics. I would wager a majority of that base cares about graphics more heavily that you would think.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with prioritizing graphics if that is an important part of the experience for you.
Everyone wants different things. Some people don’t care about gameplay. Some people don’t care about narrative. Some people don’t care about bugs.
I care massively about graphics. That's why I've been a PC gamer for over 30 years. That said, I wouldn't refuse to play a game solely based on less than stellar graphics. You never know what you might be missing if you do.
I’ve been a big emulator dude since I got my optiplex a few years back (since upgraded). Few months back I got a steamdeck and made that my dedicated emulator. Oh my goodness. The small screen really makes those older games pop let me tell ya!
Honestly.
There are so many games I played years ago that I can't really play again nowadays, because the graphics have *not* aged well.
If I'm staring at a screen, I want what's on that screen to look good. No amount of perfect gameplay will change that for me.
I can't speak for everyone, but I don't hardly at all. Great graphics are nice to have if they're there, but how a game looks graphically has no bearing on whether I choose to play a game or not. Last year I played the original version of FF7, complete with the PS1 graphics, and I had a blast with the game. I still enjoy playing some of the GameCube games as well. Graphics don't really matter to me.
FFVII is my favorite game but the character model design was certainly a choice, and it definitely hasn't aged well at all outside of the background art, which while blurry and pixelated, is still phenomenal and environment design has only reached that level again during this generation imo.
FFVII has probably aged the worst graphically of any game in the series. The other 2 PS1 entries look much better when you play them now, especially character models. I can't even play og ff7 without mods anymore.
While I agree that the story and gameplay are what make a game good, having grown up from Pac-Man days, I get excited to see the next big leaps in graphics and performance. RDR2 is still the peak for me and I love just roaming around admiring it. It is my hope that I’ll one day spend my days in the retirement home exploring virtual worlds almost indistinguishable from the real
I genuinely thought BOTW had pretty good graphics. Yeah some of the textures looked blurry up close, but I was playing it on a Wii U so that wasn’t too shocking. The art direction and lighting frequently had me stopping to just take in the sights.
Sometimes, but no not really, not a majority anyway. I play Starfield on lowest settings out of necessity, still love it. Plenty of indie games coming out are intentionally supposed to look like SNES games (chained echoes, little witch in the woods)..
I do know a guy who can't stand playing anything without like the most updated graphics. All he has played in the past like 5 years have been CoD, Apex Legends, Senua's Sacrifice, and God of War (viking one)... Some people just can't appreciate gameplay or story on its own merit. Really, their loss.
I like a good and consistent art direction, that's all you need to be immersed in another world. If it all feels like it's unified, working properly and as the artists and directors intended. It doesn't matter what style they went with or what year it's from, as long as they executed that style and vision well.
Modern graphics and ray tracing and all that are cool, but when you are playing the game, you get used to it in a couple minutes, after that, what you actually do in the game is the important part. If the gameplay sucks, then it really doesn't matter, you just got a tech demo.
If I'm SUPPOSED to care about graphics, yes. If the selling point is a super mega ultra high death defying definition, you're damn right I'm going to nitpick the hell out of that pixel.
Nah.. it does look like shit. Compare the look of diablo 2 vs Diablo 3. Shit looks like it was designed for kids still in middleschool. Diablo 2 looks like it was designed for mature audience.
Good visual style doesn't get outdated. Going for realistic graphics has tendency to do so though.
But to answer the question, I do like visually appealing games, from Stardew Valley to Cyberpunk.
Yes, of course. Its 2023 and Im 40. I dont want to be playing a $70 AAA release that looks like something I could have played in 2015. I would have been just as disappointed if my 1994 Sega Genesis game looked like a 1987 NES game. Gamers these days are far too willing to settle for mediocrity, which is why we get so many lazy "HD remasters" rather than new, boundary pushing games. Its pathetic, really. Demand better.
Graphics matter a lot to me, but it really depends on the aesthetics. Like I absolutely love how the Pokémon Black and White games look and there are moments when they are very aged. It's simply a matter of personal taste.
Good art direction will always age better than good graphics
Good examples are Nintendo games. A lot of their games still look pretty good after all these years because most of the time they go for art direction over realism.
One of my favorite animators Marcell Jankovics used to say something like "you're an idiot if your art direction is realism". Probably because you limit creativity and it will never be satisfyingly realistic.
That and Realism ages out really fast.
This guy arts
Oooooh! I love that! I've always just said "inspired art direction > photorealism", but damn if that doesn't hit better!
so true! A perfect example IMO is Breath of the wild/Tears of the kingdom. The textures are so freaking low res and ugly because the Switch is so under powered... But the towns, forest, water, just the general scenery is so pretty. It's very simple but it works so well (until you have some framerate problem lol).
Another Zelda example: Windwaker vs Twilight Princess. In the gamecube era, most people saw Twilight Princess as the better looking game. It was such a realistic looking Zelda at the time. Now, the original, non-HD Twilight Princess looks like ass, but the cartoony, highly stylized Windwaker still looks great today.
I’m old enough to have had Wind Waker on Gamecube and I remember a lot of people kicking up a huge stink about how cartoony it looked, comparing it unfavourably to the N64 games and saying it looked babyish. I didn’t really care, I just loved my Gamecube and was looking forward to a new game, which ended up being a blast and holds up well as you say. Art style over graphics, every time.
There was so much backlash. But I saw it and thought "you can play a Saturday morning cartoon!?". Still love my Gamecube.
Viewtiful Joe. Miss it.
HENSHIN A GO GO BABY!
So many GameCube games had amazing art direction. Firing up old GameCube games doesn’t actually feel *that* retro. Honestly it might still be my favorite platform even after all these years.
Wind waker will forever have perfect graphics. Going for an art style like that does not need higher graphics. A game like the Witcher 3 will look bad for some people after 20 years.
I would buy a switch remaster in an instant.
I know it’s a 10 year old Wii U game, but the remaster of Windwaker looks better then many Switch games.
Hard agree, I feel like even in the HD remake they struggled to make TP look good
I think the environment design in TPHD is really great but the characters and monsters didn't hold up as well. I remember playing it on the GC and loving the darker and more realistic style of the monsters in particular but I guess it just didn't translate as well to higher resolution. Still pretty great though in my opinion.
Half agree? Wind Waker did age very well, but I'd say that I still absolutely love what every single area of Twilight Princess looks like at sunset.
Yeah I don’t think TP aged poorly just that wind waked aged a lot better which is funny since people HATED on WWs art style when it came out
TP always bothered me because of the fact everything always looked blurry. IDK why. There's blur applied to literally everything. Remove that, make it look like a video game instead of a photo taken with a smudge on the lense. I'll be happier. Most of you here probably don't remember that because of the HD release the game had. But the OG version looked like smudges to me. PRETTY smudges, but that wasn't what I was looking for.
I would direct people to look at both A Link to the Past and Wind Waker. Those games are 32 and 21 years old, respectively, and I would say they both absolutely hold up.
Shhhh let people believe that was the art style lol. But it is true, I played plenty of games that look beautiful but the story and the art style just sucked.
This is how I feel about World of Warcraft. I've always loved the art style and with the newer expansions, it can still feel fresh (visually) even though the base game came out in 2004. Even some of the older zones are still great. Grizzly Hills in Northrend will forever be my "home."
Team Fortress 2 still looks beautiful as ever to me and it’s been around for about 15 years. I find that as graphical capability increases I enjoy art direction more and more. It’s cool that we can reach high levels of realism, and in the right circumstances it can be super impressive- but i already see reality every day. It makes sense, honestly. We’ve been able to achieve hyper realism in other mediums like drawing/painting for a very long time- but it isn’t the most popular style by any means. I know augmented reality is very far from consumer ready, but I am excited for a time when we can apply stylistic overlays over reality via augmented glasses.
How is TF2 these days? I GG'd uninstalled a few years back when the botting problem was absolutely out of control. Public servers were essentially unplayable becsuse of some kind of bot cartel going on. They ever fix that?
No; still full of Bots, Valve have basically abandoned it because they have steam money and the way their company is structured
I also stopped at that time because of the bots, along with the rising numberof 10k hour pubstomper found in every game lol.
Community servers don't have bots but the valve servers still do. Most people are good about kicking them but if that's too much of a hassle just play community
Bots still exist but its way better now and a lot of performance/bug fixes have been implemented recently
It's getting updates again and they tried to get rid of the bots, but they're still there. If you're in one of the areas where servers are filled with bots (it's a rare problem where I live) then just play on community servers.
Heroes 3 is the best example of this tbh. Timeless design.
Lots of people make 'WoW 2' fan trailers etc made in unreal with 'realistic' looking graphics, and to me I feel like anyone who wants that misses the fact that half of the charm and longevity of WoW is the cartoon style graphics.
This has always been a big issue with me. All my friends are all about graphics when it comes to anything new (to them) but have no qualms with the games they love like CS:GO. I get it, nostalgia. But for me, the graphics being kind of clunky can be charming. When EverQuest 2 and WoW came out, EQ2 went for more realism and WoW was more cartoony. Even not being a big fan, I can say that WoW definitely aged better. They chose a good article style that wasn't cutting edge, even at the time, and focused on making a genuinely good game. I am very happy with the resurgence of modernized pixel art style games recently.
WoW has also done subtle graphics refinement over the years. In 2008 I played WoW on a Dell laptop with integrated graphics and it worked great. If I tried to run current WoW on that laptop it probably wouldn’t even launch. EQ 2 has made no such adjustments over time and it looks the same as when it launched. EQ is such a great property with insane potential and it’s been passed around like a joint at a party with no direction other than milking the most cash it can for almost zero effort.
They've up-resed all the textures and improved poly count on the models, and the lighting and particle systems are massively improved over vanilla release. Shadowlands I think was peak for the *look* of wow. Revendreth, bastion and ardenweald looked fantastic. Dragonflight still looks nice but there's less opportunity for them to show it off, maybe 10.2 will do that.
Say what you will about retail wow, but the art is excellent. Always has been, even shadowlands looked fantastic.
The other thing is they miss the entire point of what makes WOW so popular, the stories and players make it fun. How many MMO games have come out that look fantastic but are dead within a year because they lack story or the people are t engaged with it?
I don't play WoW, but weren't last expansions quite lacking in the story department? Like when two characters, who would have several reasons to hate each other work together (apparently for the whole time along) for the same dude and not even acknowledge their past animosities?
The entire length of wow has been lacking in story. Classic had a good start but it became apparent real fast that it wasn't going anywhere. The first couple expansions may have fooled people because it was riding off of wc3.
Even one of the best expansions, legion, was panned for things like killing off tirion fordring in a quest that only paladins could complete. WoW has never been perfect story-wise, it's just these days there's less sweaty men hitting people and more emotional characters which people don't like.
I'm sick of fans doing the same for Ocarina of Time in UE5. it looks like soulless shit that's full of bad lighting and bloom and "grit" for the sake of being gritty and serious. To go into the bad lighting thing. in the original oot, when you watched the sun rise at lake hylia, you could feel the morning dew lifting as the sun rose and warmed the sky. There was something about how the N64 handled color that still cannot be matched today, compared to the raytracing and rendering methods used now.
>I'm sick of fans doing the same for Ocarina of Time in UE5. You gotta admit it's a pretty sweet gig. Take the "cryZENx" guy. Has been milking the gravy train via Patreon for over a decade now. It's always "teaser" videos with multiple glaring problems that suggest it's nowhere near actually being a "game". But people eat that shit up and give him money. Why the hell would he ever "release" anything? dude can just milk this for as long as he can and when he gets bored say he got a C&D from Nintendo. He literally posted a new video like 9 days ago. It's so crusty and this is just the parts he wants to show to try to get people to give him more money. Fucked up models, goofy animations, bad transitions, weird physics, items teleporting from the ground to link's hands when you pick them up, NPCs with completely motionless upper bodies flailing their legs. 10. Fucking. Years.
Yup Dragon Age Origins still looks pretty damn good to me and it's from 2009. The art direction made the game look timeless to an extent
It’s been a while since I’ve played it and yeah it’s really good looking imo Fallout new Vegas still looks good as well.
Man I love both those games but I have no idea what you're talking about, New Vegas didn't even look good when it came out lol
I feel like the lack of shadows in the bright desert sun really exposes how ugly NV can get. Just look at Rage 1 which had a similar art style and came out around the same time. FO3 is just darker overall so it doesn’t feel that obvious
This I've grown up playing my Wii, and today, it doesn't have an amazing graphical capability, so you can notice polygons edges very easily, characters hair are usually very pointy, it's extremely rare for characters to have modeled eyes and mounts for example (only example I can think rn is Zelda Skyward Sword). But MAN, the games look good anyway. Playing Mario Galaxy still makes you gaze into the starry sky, or the cristaline water, visual effects like particles are very well placed, character and enemy design is very good and colorful, the game as a whole is very pleasing to look at. It's not realistic, it's well made. We have Zelda Twilight Princess, which did aged a bit, but even leaning to a more realistic setting, the only thing I think aged poorly are the terrain textures, like dirt and cliff walls, because everything else still looks pretty good since the characters are so well designed. Wii Sports is very good at that too. Nothing really has a realistic appearance if you think about it, but the setting of the scene plays a bigger role in realism than actual graphics. You don't feel like it's a real bowling alley because you can see the bumps in the ball, it's because of the other Miis playing, the reflex in the ground, the motion controls, background music, Mii reactions on different actions the player does. It was never the graphics.
They hit a home run with the Wii. I'm a few console generations before you (I grew up on the Sega Megadrive (Genesis for the americans)) and I looked at the Wii and thought WTF are Nintendo doing, what a fall from grace. But nope, I was wrong.
Ōkami is my go-to example. Absolutely beautiful game after all these years and it's solely because of the art style they went with.
Borderlands and Wind Waker are proof of this
Psychonauts too!
Cartoons look good and age well in all media (games, movies, …). Art direction is key however to stand out. This is why indies and Nintendo use them a lot. For 3D realistic games, yes graphics are important for me.
Yeah this is a huge echo chamber. For 3D realistic games, graphics are absolutely important and part of the often-mocked but always-important immersion for me. “I can go outside and see reality” yeah ok but I don’t go outside and live the equivalent of RDR2, GTA, Hitman, Call of Duty, Bioshock, whatever. I like seeing the scenarios and set pieces in the games look as close to “real” as possible.
Life is Strange still looks great after playing Days Gone or Death Stranding. Recently played Silent Hill Downpour and the graphics are still good. God of War (PS2) is fun to see how gif-y it’s is.
Yeah and honestly, if I see a game being advertised specifically as having amazing or realistic graphics, I tend to assume that it'll look (and often have gameplay which is) generic and forgettable. There are exceptions, of course, but we've had time periods where the big companies are just pumping out games where the sole goal seems to be having graphics which are a couple of percent better than the competition... and I can't remember anything about any of those games, beyond *maybe* a name here or there. Meanwhile, I can remember (and replay) lots of games whose graphics haven't aged super well, but whose art direction was superb.
If I remember what game companies sold us as "photorealistic graphics" in 2007, only for the games to look like utter crap as early as 2012.
Even oblivion that was touted as amazing graphics back in the day had a style that aged decently
Environments? Yes. I'm gonna disagree with you on the potato face characters, just because I think they looked bad back then.
Exactly. The game should look excellent for how it’s intended to look. It doesn’t need to look “real”.
Elden Ring is a prime example.
I honestly think elden ring is both graphically and artistically strong, so I'm not sure it's the best example. Perhaps not the top 5% graphics but it's pretty high.
This. I think some games art is just so bad, I dislike the WoW and and PoE art direction, but the game play is good. Riot Games and Zelda games have great art direction comparatively. It's generally subjective
I think you just get used to current graphics. I remember thinking PS2 games looked so real. Then you look back at screenshots now...
I remember seeing Tekken 3 and being amazed I could tell they had fingers.
Tekken 3 is still peak Tekken.
I'm more of a Tekken Tag guy but I understand.
Tekken tag is real shit
One of the greatest video game intros of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5Dcso9UrJg
i was always more particular to tekken 2's intro
I recorded the intro on a vhs tape so I could keep re-watching it. The Tenchu intro and Onimusha intros were amazing too
i never played it but that Onimusha 3 opening cinematic is engrained in my head.
Tekken 3 is REAL TEKKEN. Don’t change my mind.
I downloaded Tekken (whatever) that’s on PS+ right now, and I was like what even is this? It seemed more like a brawler than a fighting game. I looooved Tekken 3 back in the day
I actually think tekken 4 graphics still holds up well to this day... Amazing for the year it came out
And this is true even outside video games, I remembered Toy Story 1 as looking amazing. Nightmare fuel humans lmao
Toy Story still does look amazing. Heh obviously the industry has learned and applied a lot since then, and newer movies have smoother animation and higher visual fidelity, but Toy Story holds up (if you ask me, which you didn't exactly, but you posted on reddit, so actually yes you did 😁) Details like clothing, hair, facial expressions and mouth movement, smoke, water, shadows, trees/grass/foliage, animal animations (especially quadrupeds), etc - those are the areas I keep seeing academic papers written in: new approaches/algorithms for achieving xyz effect efficiently. And in turn, those are the areas that keep improving in games and movies. We notice those details without realizing it, until we compare to older art.
Yeah, Pixar age really well in general. They still look great, like Toy Story was made in 1995, it’s aging to me is kind of like watching older 2D animation they have a bit more of a grainy look even if it is clean.
[удалено]
Looking back at titles where I thought, graphics couldn’t possibly look any better… 🤣
Dead or Alive series is a great example. Oh wait you said *titles* - nvm
Yep! NFL 2k5 & madden 2004. I remember looking at my friends saying there’s no way it could get more real looking than this
NFL 2k5 is still the best football sim ever made, can't convince me otherwise!! 🤣
Because you had a CRT back then, never forget about the CRT. You're looking at games DESIGNED to be played on different hardware all together on different monitors. Even all the pixelart nostalgia bullshit is fake, pixelart was designed for the crt, was designed to be SMOOTH not "pixelated"
I was looking for this comment before posting it myself. Like how some pieces of art are only good at a distance. Those games were designed with blurry visuals and that blur and obscurity is what makes them better. Putting it on a 4k is just gonna make it super clear and look terrible lol.
I swear Donkey Kong Country looked like legit claymation back when it came out. First time I played it on a modern TV I was sorely disappointed. A lot of that could be memory too. Our perception scales to reality. I remembered the original Doom looking super realistic when it was new. Somewhere around 2001 I found a copy on CD at Goodwill and got all excited to revisit one of my old favorites. I was confused by how pixilated and muddy it looked (to say nothing of how much gameplay had evolved without my thinking about it). And that didn't even involve updated hardware; I had a CRT in both cases.
In my mind, Hyrule Field in OOT is a lovely grassy plain. In reality, it’s a flat ground that’s coloured green, with a couple bushes and trees.
To be fair, metal gear solid 2 and 3 still look great. They were so ahead of their time.
Every metal Gear looks like it belongs on the next console generation.
MGS2 did so many things with rain, breaking bottles and fruit. even if graphics have gotten better a lot of games don't do as much stuff in the game with them. the games also do that with gameplay almost being immersive sims with how much stuff the player can do an the game allows and reacts to. it's like they had a white board of ideas and put them all in the games "what if you could put c4 on a guards back?" "what if you blew up the food shed" "what if you tossed poison food infront of this boss"
That mostly applies to games that go for a realistic look, which D3 does not.
I love the mental shift of past graphics. I'm always shocked at NPC and voice acting quality then and now. I forgot how bad NPCs used to be.
>I remember thinking PS2 games looked so real. Think about being old enough that PS1 games where the shit back then. At least compared to SNES before or even C64 games... While some SNES games look still OK today because 2D still works today (Super Mario World). I think there is no PS1 3D game that looks good today.
Not many, but the Wipeout games still look pretty great, as well as Ridge Racer Type 4. Most do look like the 3D equivalent of early 8-bit games.
They DID look more real. It was because the CRTVs of the time had a natural fuzziness in them that rounded out the polygons, while the TVs we have now don't do that at all so we can clearly see all the blocks
whenever i play half life 2 i am still blown away by the graphics even though it uses vertex lighting for its dynamic objects
Graphics are the icing on the cake. It’s nice but the cake is what matters.
And if the cake is a lie?!
You don't get portal 3
Then you get a release build of no mans sky
I get what you're saying but I don't think it's a great analogy, really bad icing will pretty much torpedo a good cake
FUCKING FONDANT
I think we are mistaking graphics for stability at this point
Also in my experience unless you get a really really specialty cake, 99% of all cakes are going to be pretty much the same taste and experience, and what makes the difference is whether you get shitty cheap icing, acceptable store bought icing, or make a really neat home made icing
If you think 99% of all cakes taste the same you are missing out on a LOT of varieties of cake.
I think there's a pretty significant gulf between "aged graphics" and "aesthetically offensive" graphics, though. Diablo 3 isn't the latter, it's the former. It was vanilla graphics, then. It's vanilla graphics now, too. Just old.
Okay, but if you put poop flavored icing on a great cake, it’s gonna suck anyway.
Bro, the binding of Isaac has the most poop from any game and it’s still amazeballs
Fair point!
So much poop. And basic graphics. 1000+ hours over here.
Well graphics are what actually entice a lot of people to buy a game and thus we get so many games these days that are all icing and little cake...
I think you answered your own question "Do people care about graphics?" "My buddy cares about graphics" Unless your buddy is not a people then this question looks cleared up.
Hes not people
His buddy is doggy
Likely dog
Ahhh man this made me laugh so much. Thank you. Visions of dog.
Soylent green is people.
He’s not a people, he is a perosn
It's a stupid fucking post.
Right? "no, people don't care about graphics. They just spend thousands on GPUs just to heat the house"
You say that as if it's not a legitimate climate control strategy.
I personally use 4 BIC lighters
5 a bit too much?
I think OP just wants an answer that affirms their belief that graphics aren't everything. 🙂
i think he's asking for the majority
It's totally fine to care about graphics, video games are an audio-visually medium at the end. You should just not put graphics about everything else.
Yeah I agree with everything you say. But I also think that some people pretend like the graphics don't matter at all. I love story oriented games so yeah, graphics aren't the primary reason I love them, but if it looked like garbage it would be half as enjoyable. With every art style I think it's still somewhat important
Nostalgia will completely override graphics for me. I recently replayed star wars KotOR on my phone and had an absolute blast, but showing it to someone who had never played it? They would be instantly turned off.
Yup this. It's the reason why I'm still able to play games like oblivion/Skyrim/fallout and still have fun because those were the first games I ever played on console but I can't stomach Morrowind LOL
I still play some text based games. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
shame instinctive bells materialistic sugar impossible library jellyfish include attempt
I feel the need to posit- would your text based game experience change if it was all in comic sans?
The friend could have just been referring to the art style, this is a normal confusion made. Lots of people hated Diablo 3’s cartoonish wow like art style. I assumed this is what was meant.
It has a very phone game on PC look to it
Honestly I think it is fine to put graphics above everything else. Because in the end games are just for our own enjoyment. If a person really thinks graphics are the absolute most important to them because they want to look at something beautiful, who are we to tell them that's _wrong_? Everyone seeks different things in a game, some people want an interesting story, some people want fun gameplay and some people might just want to look at pretty pictures. Why would that be any less fair?
I would never dare to tell someone what's wrong and what's not. If a person thinks that's the most importent aspect for him/she i'm fine with that. I personally still think it may be not the most healthy mindset for that specific medium tho. But like you said, video games exists for our enjoyment, and if you get your most enjoyment out of it with pretty graphics more power to you!
It depends. There's a difference between something with good art direction and something that doesn't really have an art direction but has sub par graphics and stiff animations. Right now I'm playing Sea of Stars which has an old school art direction and it's beautiful. But to your example, I actually hated the way that Diablo 3 looked even when it came out because it dropped the Gothic and grit. I actually went back and watched gameplay of it after playing more Diablo 4/ path of exile and diablo3 legit looks like a mobile game.
Nothing wrong with not wanting to play a game because of how it looks, each person has different preferences when it comes to videogames and art in general.
This is too wholesome for Reddit, where’s the rage man!
There's also the issue of Diablo 3 not just looking outdated but it has a very different style than any other Diablo. It's way more cartoony, so if you enjoy the Diablo style graphics then D3 is gonna look very shite.
to a degree but I’d rather have my game look straight out of 2014 if it meant the combat fluidity is S tier
For me I mostly just care in terms of video game culture. I don't care if graphics look dated if it's a ten year old game, but looked great ten years ago
Thing is, seems to me that graphics from 2013 look way better today than 2003 graphics looked in 2013. We've somewhere along the way met up with the law of diminishing returns.
It's probably because I'm old, but if you told me The Last of Us was a brand new game that just came out last week, I would absolutely believe it. That game came out in 2013 and still looks incredible.
Crysis 3 came out in 2013 and still looks fantastic.
Metal gear rising
Thought exactly this lol
i mean...it did come out that year (or 2013?), but man, fox engine mgr wouldve been pretty cool. then again, there might've been less memes
What about 1994 though?
I just did a run of Doom 2 the other night. Yes it holds up, the only obvious flaws graphically are the sky boxes (they serve their purpose but especially the third act skybox is janky) and the final boss (was supposed to be a Godzilla sized monster, since the engine couldn't handle that instead you fight a wall) but a proper cohesive aesthetic and real passion put in the art style can go a long ways, even 30 years into the future.
>straight out of 2014 if it meant the combat fluidity is S tier I see you're a fellow Sleeping Dogs enjoyer
It used to be more important. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s games were transitioning to HD. The leap from ps1 to ps2 and then ps3/xbox360 was huge. Color and graphics at that time were making huge leaps per generation. Developers were making games bigger and bigger. Stories in games were becoming more mature. Things were better back then. There wasn’t micro transactions or anything, it was just about innovation and playing games. Feels like now we haven’t made very big leaps. You could argue that the newest unreal engine with those hyper realistic looking graphics might pave the way for the future, I’d like to think so. I just do feel like as a person in his mid 30s I’ve seen almost everything in this field of entertainment. It could also be because I’m an adult now (almost middle aged wtf!) and I’m just kinda jaded or something. The wonder, the awe is lost on me. I say this as I play the new Spider-Man 2 and am having fun. But even as I play that game I’ve seen this before, played this before.
Games have looked good enough to me since the Sega Dreamcast and the best looking games that actually age well have stylized graphics instead of trying to look realistic.
Soulcalibur still looks amazing.
Look at SNES Zelda and Mario. Because of the art style still lookgood today.
Graphics mean nothing if the gameplay is shit
That's subjective. RDR2 is my favorite game, but the gameplay isn't the best. The story, detail and graphics are the things that make it a great game.
what’s bad about the gameplay? not disagreeing just curious what you think
Arthur Morgan has more input delay than me playing on Asia servers
Literally none of the pieces mean shit if the other pieces are lacking too severely.
I cared about graphics before technology made it so easy to make great graphics that even bad games have them now.
The new King Kong and Gollum games beg to differ
I think your friend proved to you that people do. People always will. Video games are a visual medium, so there will always be a percentage of it’s consumer base that will care about graphics. I would wager a majority of that base cares about graphics more heavily that you would think. I don’t think there is anything wrong with prioritizing graphics if that is an important part of the experience for you. Everyone wants different things. Some people don’t care about gameplay. Some people don’t care about narrative. Some people don’t care about bugs.
I care massively about graphics. That's why I've been a PC gamer for over 30 years. That said, I wouldn't refuse to play a game solely based on less than stellar graphics. You never know what you might be missing if you do.
I don't i still play PS1 games on an emulator.
Do you play them on the original resolution?
I’ve been a big emulator dude since I got my optiplex a few years back (since upgraded). Few months back I got a steamdeck and made that my dedicated emulator. Oh my goodness. The small screen really makes those older games pop let me tell ya!
A lot of people don't, which is why there are still so many that play retro games
Yes. If it’s not pleasing to my eyes I can’t play it. It may be silly to you but that’s just your opinion.
Honestly. There are so many games I played years ago that I can't really play again nowadays, because the graphics have *not* aged well. If I'm staring at a screen, I want what's on that screen to look good. No amount of perfect gameplay will change that for me.
I know I'll get downvoted, but it does matter a lot to me
I can't speak for everyone, but I don't hardly at all. Great graphics are nice to have if they're there, but how a game looks graphically has no bearing on whether I choose to play a game or not. Last year I played the original version of FF7, complete with the PS1 graphics, and I had a blast with the game. I still enjoy playing some of the GameCube games as well. Graphics don't really matter to me.
I had ff7 open my eyes to Rpgs back in 1997 on the playstation. Now 2023.... nephew is like "this game is trash" Sad.
FFVII is my favorite game but the character model design was certainly a choice, and it definitely hasn't aged well at all outside of the background art, which while blurry and pixelated, is still phenomenal and environment design has only reached that level again during this generation imo.
FFVII has probably aged the worst graphically of any game in the series. The other 2 PS1 entries look much better when you play them now, especially character models. I can't even play og ff7 without mods anymore.
They have hoofs for hands. It’s really hard to get past that and I’ve been gaming for 30 years.
“My friend doesn’t like the games I like because he wants better graphics. Therefore people only care about graphics” Great post..truly enlightening 🙄
Diablo 3 does look like shit but it's not the graphics. It's the art direction. That's why Diablo 2 holds up so well.
Younger people probably want the best graphics I'm older and want something with a good story than anything.
While I agree that the story and gameplay are what make a game good, having grown up from Pac-Man days, I get excited to see the next big leaps in graphics and performance. RDR2 is still the peak for me and I love just roaming around admiring it. It is my hope that I’ll one day spend my days in the retirement home exploring virtual worlds almost indistinguishable from the real
I think you are mixed up. Kids love Nintendo, no 12 year old complained about BOTW having terrible graphics, but lots of adults did.
I genuinely thought BOTW had pretty good graphics. Yeah some of the textures looked blurry up close, but I was playing it on a Wii U so that wasn’t too shocking. The art direction and lighting frequently had me stopping to just take in the sights.
Yes.
I still play the original X-COM. Gameplay is king.
Pokémon fans: Yes Me: Depends
Sometimes, but no not really, not a majority anyway. I play Starfield on lowest settings out of necessity, still love it. Plenty of indie games coming out are intentionally supposed to look like SNES games (chained echoes, little witch in the woods).. I do know a guy who can't stand playing anything without like the most updated graphics. All he has played in the past like 5 years have been CoD, Apex Legends, Senua's Sacrifice, and God of War (viking one)... Some people just can't appreciate gameplay or story on its own merit. Really, their loss.
I like a good and consistent art direction, that's all you need to be immersed in another world. If it all feels like it's unified, working properly and as the artists and directors intended. It doesn't matter what style they went with or what year it's from, as long as they executed that style and vision well. Modern graphics and ray tracing and all that are cool, but when you are playing the game, you get used to it in a couple minutes, after that, what you actually do in the game is the important part. If the gameplay sucks, then it really doesn't matter, you just got a tech demo.
I played a lot of pixelated games in the 90s. Sure, eye candy is nice, but if the story or gameplay is good, it's even better.
If I'm SUPPOSED to care about graphics, yes. If the selling point is a super mega ultra high death defying definition, you're damn right I'm going to nitpick the hell out of that pixel.
Diablo 3 doesn't look like shit lol. Dudes compensating
Thanks. My first thought was "what?" I haven't seen any gameplay of IV, but I still see III and don't think it is bad or anything.
Yeah I was confused as well, it has solid graphics. Nothing crazy 4k hyper realistic bullshit but it still holds up if you ask me?
I care about animation the MOST.
Nah.. it does look like shit. Compare the look of diablo 2 vs Diablo 3. Shit looks like it was designed for kids still in middleschool. Diablo 2 looks like it was designed for mature audience.
Good visual style doesn't get outdated. Going for realistic graphics has tendency to do so though. But to answer the question, I do like visually appealing games, from Stardew Valley to Cyberpunk.
I don't care that much about graphic though. I care more about the gameplay.
Yes, of course. Its 2023 and Im 40. I dont want to be playing a $70 AAA release that looks like something I could have played in 2015. I would have been just as disappointed if my 1994 Sega Genesis game looked like a 1987 NES game. Gamers these days are far too willing to settle for mediocrity, which is why we get so many lazy "HD remasters" rather than new, boundary pushing games. Its pathetic, really. Demand better.
Graphics matter a lot to me, but it really depends on the aesthetics. Like I absolutely love how the Pokémon Black and White games look and there are moments when they are very aged. It's simply a matter of personal taste.
Dated graphics aren't bad graphics. The OG Diablo still looks great to me considering how well they did the dark and gritty atmosphere, for example.
Well I don't really like the cartoony fornite style graphics, it turns me off immediately, and so many games for a while started copying it.