I can play a game like Terraria with simplistic graphics and love it. Great game!
Or games like Factorio or Oxygen Not Included are fabulous. Other games like Ori or Hollow Knight are wonderful.
Then there are games in the mid-ground like XCOM2. Nothing super fancy but works.
Then there are some titles like Red Dead Redemption or Witcher 3 where the graphics are stellar.
There is no better or worse. Just what makes sense for the game and there is room for them all.
I love all of it.
Occasionally the graphics bug me. I loved Civilization-V graphics and found Civ-VI graphics, modified to work on consoles, to be lacking. They were not “bad” but a step back IMO.
Oh, sure. I just meant that back in the day, we were generally willing to put up with certain abstractions that only vaguely resembled what a tree or even a person looks like for the sake of having a 3d game rendered on the fly. Some people got fancy with good textures, etc… and others didn’t. I mean, look at say… Lara Croft in early Tomb Raider for an example of the sort of rough-looking stuff I’m talking about.
Nowadays, the expectation is that your trees will look mostly like trees- the leaves will move, the branches will sway, etc… The game may not render every leaf individually, or dynamically construct unique trees or anything, but they generally look good enough to not pull you out of that immersion. And we expect better rendering of people than the old Lara Croft polygon boobs.
Past a certain point there are certainly diminishing returns for the cost of outlay.
I recall being wowed by the leap from ZX spectrum to Amiga, then a little less so from Amiga to PS1, less again to the generation after that…and so on.
I now have a Switch and the graphics are perfectly adequate as long as the games are good enough. I don’t see the graphics of the next gen consoles and think “wow” anymore. They are little more realistic each time but not enough for it to be a paradigm shift and entice me to spend my hard earned cash.
Heck, the last three games I played were re-makes of Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy and Pikmin3. None of which suffered from having graphics that are not cutting edge.
Wow, I never realized that the early Tomb Raider was that bad. Heck, I never realized that any game was that bad-- If your 3D avatar is that crude, why are you even using 3D for the avatar at all? Sprites of that time looked far better (also crude, of course, but better than that).
It’s interesting looking back at graphics of the nineties if you already played games at the time. I remember finding Doom very impressive, as it was a step up from what was available before. Nowadays, of course, its original graphics are considered very crude and make it almost unplayable: updated Doom game engines improve ion it for a better experience.
But I think the focus on stills supports the point made above. Tomb Raider was considered an achievement partly because it compared well to the competition (this was the general level of graphics), but also because it allows 3D movement and because of its gameplay. When playing, the crudeness of graphics isn’t as important. Moving objects are usually not viewed in much detail.
I recall that at the time it was realized that the graphics could be improved (notably that is when dedicated GPUs appeared, which could do smoothing of the crude graphics). I also remember being aware of the relative lack of detail, because when you had to look for some objects or switched or handles the pixel size might make it difficult to do so.
Of course better graphics would have been preferable. But I sometimes wonder whether the graphics capabilities of today are actually a hindrance for game development, as it means that you need to spend lots of money to create beautiful graphics, while the gameplay suffers from a relative lack of attention. It makes games more expensive but not more fun to play.
Although it’s easily the worst aged era in gaming graphics, at the time it was pretty cool! Heck, I remember being impressed by simple demos where you’d spin a 3D shape so the idea of controlling a 3D person in a 3D world was pretty exciting. Even if they did have all of twenty polygons and painted on “textures”. Plus, a lot of people’s idea of “high tech” computer imaging consisted of wire frames and vectors and this was largely the same but with paint on it.
And, heck, terrible looking Lara Croft was still a big enough deal to create a thousand rumors of mythical nude mods or cheat codes.
Yes, that’s exactly as I member. It was really neat at the time but, like I mentioned in my previous post, it’s in that early 3D era where it didn’t age well. Hell, I even remember being stunned by the 3D of C64 games like The Sentinel (also known as The Sentry) and Stunt Car Racer. Polygons! Or even the use-your-imagination-liberally flight sims like F-19/F-117 Stealth Fighter or F-15 Strike Eagle before that.
Come to think of it – it’s not the super early 3D that was bad, it was that “uncanny valley 3D” of the early-to-mid 90s that aged partciularly badly. At least IMHO.
Also, when did Tomb Raider become that violent? I was playing the original with my daughter who was 4 at the time a couple years ago. Then I found out there was another Tomb Raider, a “reboot” or whatever from the 2013. So I played that as well with my daughter sitting beside me, since she liked the original so much. Um … bad idea.
I’ve mentioned this before, but computer graphics are my job- specifically, special effects (fire, smoke, electricity, that sort of thing). With most of what I do, if I do my job right nobody notices. It’s only the really flashy effects… or the bad ones… that you remember.
Yeah, more specially when they started applying it to human models. A low-poly 3D fighter ship was fine but a low poly person with muddy painted on textures just looked awful (in retrospect). It puts me off (re)playing stuff like Morrowwind when you can get high-res mod packs for the environments but the people still look like they were carved out of rotten turnips.
As for Tomb Raider, I guess pulling down on the sex/boobs slider makes the violence slider go up. Webcomic from 2013 about the game that still amuses me.
The one that knocked me out was “Knight Lore”. It ran on the ZX Spectrum and was released in 1984 to general astonishment that such graphics were possible on such a modest machine.
Actually it was even more incredible than that. It was finished in 1983 well over a year before the actual release. Reason being that “Ultimate” (who later became “Rare”) had other unfinished games in the works which they worried would not sell once Knight Lore came out so they held it back for ages on purpose.
so you can see their point. I do remember clearly as a teenager with my mates watching Knight Lore first load up on release day in WH Smiths and the general reaction was “you have got to be fucking kidding me”
Wait, there’s a sex/boobs slider? (I assume it’s called something else in the game). Yeah, I don’t think I ever went into any of the customization menus. I just sat down and started playing “The Girl Game” with my daughter as I started thinking “WHAT GAME IS THIS!!!Well, there goes my dad-of-the-year award – not that I was in the running anyway.” I eventually scooted her out of the room. Glad to see with the Webcomic that I’m not the only one that noticed. I just assumed it was some incremental increase in gore that was just that much more shocking because before Tomb Raider 2013, Tomb Raider II was the last I played.
We had a good streak of female protagonist games going there with the original Tomb Raider I & II and No One Lives Forever I & II (the first one I especially loved, and I came 18 years late to the party. That was exactly the type of first person shooter I enjoy: great sense of humor, decent story, a stealth element, and easy enough for someone like me who is not a hardcore gamer.)
Yeah, it is pretty impressive. The Speccy or the US-branded Timex Sinclair versions didn’t get much traction around here, but there was some pretty impressive stuff done with that computer as I’ve seen on Youtube.
I remember getting some game with a similar 3D isometric perspective on the C64. Looking it up, the game officially was called “Bobby Bearing” but my crack of it had a different name – I seem to remember it being called “Spindizzy,” which is yet another isometric game that has a similar look. Those isometric games were super cool looking at the time. Oh, yes, and the port of Marble Madness. I remember being frustrated by that game for hours. It does not play anywhere near as well with a joystick as with a trackball, and I wasn’t about to buy a trackball just for one game.
Hah, no. But they decreased her bust in the modern titles and have her more realistic dimensions so I guess they figured they had to turn up the violence to compensate.
2006 seems to be around the time I felt the improvements slow down.
Psychonauts(with its widescreen and HD patch from the creator) looks amazing today. Okami HD looks amazing today.
I’d add that I’ve never seen a movie special effect better than Davey Jones in Pirates 2 and 3. Part 2 also came out in 2006.
I was fairly “wowed” by Breath of the Wild, especially its draw distance. Certainly games have impressed me, like Witcher 3 or Read Dead 2, but if you go back a decade before Psychonauts and Okami, the differences are much more noticeable.
There was once a day where the difference between mediocre graphics and good graphics made a difference in how the game played and felt. Now it doesn’t; the difference between awesome and super awesome doesn’t affect the mechanics of the game.
That’s not to say graphics can’t matter, but it’s not about how technically proficient they are; it’s about how smart the art direction is. Games that are heavily drenched in browns and greys may be extremely technically impressive, but don’t offer anything of interest the way a game like Subnautica does. A game like Civilization VI that looks good but has no particular art style isn’t as fun to look at as a game like They Are Billions with its thoughtful, original style. Just above, Mahaloth notes Breath of the Wild, which simply looks great; any number of similar games on more powerful systems just don’t, because they lack artistic originality, style, and incorporation into the game’s universe.
I’m playing a game right now called “Hades,” which has a cartoony, vaguely anime-flavored look. It’s great; the graphics work really feel for the tone and atmosphere of the game. They aren’t as super realistic as other games, but that’s not the point.
Yes, and I played it on the Wii U. Despite playing Witcher 3(max graphics) and Read Dead Redemption 2(Ultra settings) on my gaming computer, I would still say that Breath of the Wild on the Wii U is the peak of gaming graphics.
It’s more than how technically challenging it is. It is just so artistic.
Yeah, I can still play the heckout of Bioshock Infinite, which came out in 2013 and the graphics do not “feel” bad. I would probably redo the models of most of the NPCs to closer match Elizabeth’s Disney-ish looks, but that’s about it. Since it’s very stylistic, almost cartoonish, I don’t even think about a character not casting a reflection in a pane of glass, for example. Because that probably wouldn’t happen even in an animated movie of that caliber. I really wish more games did follow this type of art direction.
I DID notice that, however, on Cyberpunk 2077, where everything looks so real. Go into a mirrored elevator, and everybody BUT your character shows up in the mirror? Looks bad, like a mistake, even though the game looks otherwise great. You just expect more. Cyberpunk 2077 looks, in real-time, as good or better than a lot of game Bink video cutscenes of the early aughts.
