this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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I want more games like valheim. Could care less about the graphic HD quality. Just give me a good game that looks good enough I can forget about my actual life for a while.
Valheim took 4 years to make.
I work in gamedev. Even with simple graphics, making a successful game generally takes a lot of time to make. It's not just graphics. Design, writing, QA, art, console compliance, and a huge amount of engineering effort especially in multiplayer games. It takes time to get right. And we've all seen what happens when "AAA" games are released before they're ready just because a bean counter said they had to.
The blockbuster hits with simple graphics that a solo dev made in a few months are the exception, not the rule.
Exactly. I've been working for several years in the industry and the most time consuming part of the development is not graphics; it's design (in all shapes) + implementation + iteration until all is polished and the game is good no matter how it looks.
Same. I really appreciate the hyperrealistic, amazing graphics of stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 don't get me wrong, but I would be more than happy to accept a game with even like Half-Life 1 levels of graphics as long as it has amazing gameplay and story and lots of real hand-crafted content. Obviously, you can have both (CP2077 again!) but you have to really pay for that, and I'd be okay with those games being rarer and having more games like I described.
I personally don't appreciate it. As someone who has always worked on a budget-mid tier PC, I find that "high end" graphics just means "don't download". They tend to perform terribly regardless of the quality I set and they tend to look really bad with the quality dropped; compared to games that intentionally have low res textures and simpler game engines, which look and perform much better.
I like games that are more focused on providing me with new mechanics to learn and overcome. I like puzzles. I like strategy (e.g. RimWorld).
Cyberpunk is also a good example because it was all flash and no substance. It ran terribly and had nothing new to provide to the gaming world. I liked it a bit, but downloaded dozens of gigs just to get bored in an hour or two was not super fun. I often am comparing memory usage to how many hours I've put in a game. CS:GO, RimWorld, CitySkylines, etc are all relatively much smaller in total size and yet I've poured days into them. I just feel like at a certain point, these AAA titles are just spending money on design because they don't have the patience to value mechanics. So we end up with 100GB of textures and a re-roll of the same classic mechanics we've been playing for a decade.
Too many AAA studios are trying too hard to deliver the best looking graphics because of "consumer expectations". Yet there are games like Zelda or Elden Ring that may not have prettier graphics or cutting edge tech like some AAA games but they sure as hell have fun gameplay that people like. It's expectations like this is what drives this constant issue of games launching broken. Developers have to keep crunching to meet deadlines with unrealistic scopes.