Any of you feel like we’ve become so fixated on graphics and perfomance to the point where the actual game part of a video game is often overlooked, or at least underemphasized? I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I come across on social media regarding gaming is about resolution, ray tracing, DLSS/FSR, frame rates, frame time, CPU and GPU untilization, and all of that stuff, and I’m honestly sick of it! I mean performance markers have always been discussed when it comes to PC gaming, but now even console gaming is getting this treatment! Don’t you miss the days when you just installed the game and just played it? I know I do. What do you think?
Valheim was one of the best selling games and is still a huge success. Indies are getting better and more popular to the point that even big companies like Nexon are indiewashing their studio and pretending that Dave the Diver is an indie game with pixel art instead of a work of one of the biggest publishers there is. In my experience most of the gamers nowadays are people that grew up on minecraft, terraria or probably more likely today - roblox.
So basically no, I don’t think so. Maybe big studios want you to believe that and it might be true for a casual FIFA or CoD gamer but for anyone else, there are more options than ever and the supply of good smaller simpler games is just overwhelming, the days are too short to even keep track of them anymore.
I didn’t actually know about Dave the Driver being a big publisher until just now. I felt that game was kinda under-developed for how hyper it was and now I’m even more disappointed.
It only has like 6 major areas and the levels didn’t have that much variety. Plus the side content is fairly under polished. I enjoyed it for the first 60ish percent but was kinda forcing myself to finish it by the end.
That’s pretty telling when a big company can’t even make a convincing imitation of a low budget game.
What you’re describing is not exactly gaming, but a different hobby entirely which is sometimes referred to as benchmarking. I’ve dabbled in it myself for some games, and the goal isn’t to experience and talk about the game as it is, but to figure out how to benchmark, best settings for performance and all that jazz.
Discussions about specific games for their merits are still very much alive on the internet though, you usually have to go to reddit and look for a dedicated subreddit for the game you’re interested in or their itch/discord if it’s a small indie game.
Well, game journalists need to sell gaming hardware and AAA games. Those guys have the ad money.
Just play what you like.
Tbh… no, i don’t feel like we did. Those things have always been discussed on the mainstream ever since gaming became a thing. It mostly sounds like you have an algorithm/internet bubble problem, maybe it’s time to curate your feeds more to cater to your tastes? If you’re interested in a nice gaming podcast that doesn’t focus on graphics i can very much recommend “Gaming in the Wild”, it’s very chill and covers a variety of games, i like the way he describes things.
You may as well have typed this in 2009 or 2015.
It used to be that people argued that it’s worth getting the new game console because “better graphics”. The console wars hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just expanded.
In any case, in regards to just installing a game and playing it, no, not really. When I was playing games in college in 2012 it was still a time when you would open a game and go to the settings menu to adjust settings.
Sometimes it was just turning off motion blur, but there was always settings to change to try to reach a stable 60FPS.
Nothing changed, it just expanded. Now instead of 60FPS it’s a variable 60-240FPS. Instead of just 720p-1080p resolution, unless it’s portable, it’s 1080p minimum otherwise variable up to 4k. Instead of “maxing out” we now have raytracing which pushes software further than our hardware is capable.
These aren’t bad things, they’re just now 1) slightly marketed, 2) more well known in the social sphere. There isn’t anything stopping you from opening up the game and going right away, and there’s nothing stopping other people from wondering about frame timings and other technical details.
Sure, focusing on the little things like that can take away from the wider experience, but people pursue things for different reasons. When I got Cyberpunk 2077 I knew that there were issues under the hood, but my experience with the game at launch was also pretty much perfect because I was focused on different things. I personally don’t think a dip here and there is worth fretting over, but some people it ruins the game for them. Other people just like knowing that they’re taking full advantage of their hardware, hence figuring out the utilization of their components.
There’s one last aspect not mentioned. Architectures. 10 years ago games would just boot up and run… But what about games from 10 years before then? Most players not on consoles were having to do weird CPU timing shenanigans to be able to boot up a game from (now 20) years ago. We’re in the same boat now with emulation, which while emulation is faring better, X360/PS3 generation games that had PC ports are starting to have issues on modern Windows. Even just 5 or 6 years ago games like Sleeping Dogs wouldn’t play nice on modern PC’s, so there’s a whole extra aspect of tinkering on PC that hasn’t even been touched on.
All this to say, we are in the same boat we’ve always been in. The only difference is that social media now has more knowledge about these aspects of gaming so it’s being focused on more.
The one thing I do agree with though is that this is all part of software development. Making users need better hardware, intentional or not, is pretty crazy. The fact that consoles themselves now have Quality vs Performance modes is also crazy. But, I will never say no to more options. I actually think it’s wrong that the console version of games often are missing settings adjustments, when the PC counterpart has full control. I understand when it’s to keep performance at an acceptable level, but it can be annoying.
Always turn off motion blur and DoF if you can.
I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn’t really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).
I feel like I might get a ton of downvotes for this, but I kind of disagree. Maybe when it comes to things like texture detail, we certainly don’t need every single hair on Roach modeled with full physics or anything.
That’s only a subset of what constitutes graphics in a game though. I think that while it is computationally expensive, the improvements in lighting that we’re seeing contribute to making graphics more realistic and do matter.
I get that people meme on Ray Tracing and the whole RTX On thing, but lighting techniques like Path Tracing, Global Illumination, and Dynamic Illumination are just as much a generational shift as physics was in HL2. Output resolution and texture resolution got pushed to a point where any further gains are marginal improvements at best. Physics is getting to that point, although there’s still room for improvement. Look at how well the finals handles destruction physics, or the ballistics models used in Arma 3. Lighting is the next thing being refined, and it has a ways to go. I’d bet that in 10 years full, real time, dynamic, ray traced lighting will be taken for granted, and we’ll be arguing whether there’s any value or added realism benefit to increasing the number of individual rays cast by each light source, or how many bounces they take. I’d also not be surprised if people were memeing about RTX Sound On at that point and saying that game audio peaked with HRTF or Spatial Audio.
In the battle of KPI vs Mixed Methods, objective vs subjective, some prefer objective…
I’m not a PC gamer, perhaps the people who play PC games invested a lot in their rig and expect a studio experience. So they review it and other people realize they are not getting the best experience.
Nintendo Switch users with NSO might not realize that the software emulation used to run those games suffers from latency, and they will enjoy themselves until someone they trust brings it up and sends them down the rabbit hole.
I’m currently grinding a game that looks like it was made in 2015 and had a few bugs. I don’t care because it is what I want to play.
I get what you mean, though.
Depends on what games you’re playing and where/who you’re discussing gaming with.
Well, my thoughts on this are pretty ‘basic.’ I buy games that I enjoy. I think that <5% of my games purchased in the last two years are games that have been released within a year of when I buy them.
There are more than enough games that are amazing from the past 30 years to keep me occupied for the next 10, and not a single one of them stresses my 12 year old computer. Plus, while I can understand the complaints about Steam being the massive titan that it is, I am quite happy with them and their Linux gaming enabling work. I really do just install games and play them.
Yeah, I’m sick of it as well. Having to guess whether my rig will play something at a framerate that won’t make me sick because a dev studio chose pretty graphics (that aren’t really much better than AAA 10 years ago) over good optimization.
Most of the games I play are relatively undemanding for this reason. That and because indie games don’t have as much monetization.
Nothing happened. It is the same as always. There was no time, when graphics (and audio) weren’t the hottest shit to talk about. We did that in the 90s in ads, game magazines and in the schoolyard. And the people before us did the same. The buzzwords back then were different but that’s all.
Maybe stop watching youtubers, if that annoys you? Idk.
It’s hype for marketing. Our society is based on consumption and over spending. The GPU and CPU manufactures want us to keep spending money to have the latest and greatest.
Any of you feel like we’ve become so fixated on graphics and perfomance to the point where the actual game part of a video game is often overlooked, or at least underemphasized?
I feel like everyone else has.
I feel it’s a bit like any hobby. You’d see casual film enjoyers and then those who refuse to watch unless it’s a bluray on their 4k Dolby Vision TV with 1000 nits OLED brightness. There are some who just enjoy listening to music on their airpod knockoffs by streaming on YouTube music and then there are those who buy $500 headphones with high quality gold plated aux wire and a custom DAC and use some obscure format to really enjoy music. There are some who enjoy team sports and then there are those who know personal routine of each player and the wetness of the grass or the year of the ball’s manufacturing and its impact on throw.
It’s a spectrum.
Stalker 2 had bugs on launch yet it easily sold 1 million copies. Black Myth Wukong uses frame gen to achieve 60 fps on PS5 and otherwise it locks to 45 fps, yet it has broken all records. Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it’s beloved.
These people aren’t the ones talking about resolutions and frame rates on X, but just playing the damn game in millions.
Just like millions use sub par TV settings and stream music or don’t have much clue about team sports but still have a great time.
Elden Ring is still a stuttery mess on PC and barely hits 60 fps on consoles, even the $700 one, yet it’s beloved.
I have an old ass PC and a PS5 with the game on both and they run smooth as shit unless you’re using raytracing, which literally doesn’t even change the visuals in the game; it just makes it slower.
Stalker 2 is a busted mess. The performance issues have been fixed mostly after 3 patches, but the game itself shits itself once you get to a certain story mission. Literally nothing works beyond that point. The A-Life system does not work, scripted events are all jacked up, IDK if anyone else is getting this but every now and then I have my secondary weapon replaced with a random other weapon that I didn’t even have in my inventory, sound effects don’t play properly, the hud completely disappears, and so many more things that make me glad I’m only playing through GamePass and didn’t actually buy the game. There’s a good game under the mess, somewhere. But they should have just bit the bullet and delayed it another month or two instead of releasing what they did for the holidays.
The reason they sold so many copies though, is because pre-ordering. People bought them before they ever saw the game in action. And games like Stalker 2 are the reason why you shouldn’t pre-order. Because the chances of getting burned by busted-ass shit like this is increasingly more common. Again, because people pre-order the fuck out of games.
I don’t really relate as I typically linger two or more years behind the cutting edge games and tech so by the time I get it my hardware can easily run it and I can actually just install the game and play.
That and all tge good games float to the top of the pile in that time so I rarely end up spending money on something I don’t enjoy.
I just buy them in the steam sale and never play them
