[tracker1]

To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen?

The graphics can only carry you so far. There's indy adventure games with SNES level graphics that have millions of daily users.

[freedomben]

> Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay.

Yes, 100%. I love good graphics, but game play is the most important thing. If you don't have good gameplay the graphics mean nothing. A game with great game play and great graphics is something to behold.

I recently finished Split Fiction and they really nailed it. I hope studios take notice!

[folkrav]

Split Fiction is fantastic. My wife, about 0% gamer when rounded down, is still talking about it months later. I had a blast too - the game manages to be extremely fun and a decent challenge for both gamers and non-gamers alike. We'll be replaying it, but swapping characters next time.

When we played it, we had just finished It Takes Two, which was also great, but Split Fiction immediately dethroned it. I can't wait to see what Hazelight comes up with next.

[3eb7988a1663]

Is Split Fiction easier? While I thought the platforming in It Takes Two was fairly pedestrian, it was challenging enough that I was unable to get the other half to tough it out to the end.

[MarkSweep]

Split Fiction has a couple of mechanisms that make it accessible for people who are not experienced gamers. There is a general "reduce damage done by enemies" setting that make dodging attacks unnecessary. If you get stuck on something, there is a "skip to next checkpoint" button. This is very helpfully for the one or two really oboxiously hard parts. This is an improvement in accessibility over the developer's previous game It Takes Two.

I'd highly recommend Split Fiction, both for its game play and story. It is also superior to It Takes Two in that there is no part where the games "to continue playing, press X to dismember your daughter's anthropomorphic stuffed animal to make her cry". That was a jarring and unpleasant shift in tone for an otherwise mostly light-hearted game.

[rcxdude]

TBH, the whole of It Takes Two made me think 'these people are pretty terrible, I'm not sure I want to help them'. The stuffed toy bit was just the cherry on the cake. Good gameplay, not very good writing IMO (Split fiction is better but still... irritating at times)

[folkrav]

To me that was kind of the point of the story - people that entirely forgot why they ever did any of the things they did, their kid included, slowly realizing it was their damn fault all along.

[folkrav]

Some spots were a bit hard with Split Fiction too. There is a third-person shooter styled section my wife got pretty frustrated with at one point. But the overall game was good enough that she got over it.

[blauditore]

This has been a recurring theme since the dawn of video games: Everyone talks about graphics (devs and gamers), but ultimately the good and beloved games are the ones with great gameplay.

[swinglock]

It was more interesting when there were real tangible improvements. Game graphics has been like smartphones for a good long time now. Performance and feel (low latency and high consistency) still matters though, that is not solved, but it's also never marketed. Quality is not included with a UE license.

[z3phyr]

Also dazzling graphics has been mostly visual instead of experiential, that is, with the advances in GPU capabilities, we do get beautiful effects, but the intractability with the said infra is seems to be stagnant (and in some cases regressed)

The way things interact in the game world peaked around mid 2000s, just in time when CPUs started to not follow moors law.

As of now, interactive environments are still almost as good as half life 2 from 2004. Gaming is all about the feel of it, which also includes the visual component.

[grg0]

I think graphics peaked ~2015. But interaction still leaves a lot to be desired; we still have slipping and characters who can't walk stairs in AAA games to this day. Making characters more physically grounded and present seems like the obvious thing to improve to me.

[mfro]

This is something audiences are clearly desperate for today. I think it's obvious when looking at the huge success of Helldivers, Bodycam, Ready Or Not, Arc Raiders, (none of which are particularly innovative) players appreciate high quality, tactile and grounded world interaction.

[jjmarr]

Counterpoint is Roblox, which had one of the most innovative game engines ever. It could multiplayer simulate thousands of blocks of destructible terrain in 2006.

This feature was mostly ignored by the playerbase because developers found it easier to create static setups and focus on iterating on other parts of their gameplay.

[grg0]

The technological innovation still needs to be fun, though. Red Faction: Guerilla (2009) had destructible buildings to the point that they were constructed by laying down blocks in a physically correct way and letting the physics engine handle the rest, and blasting the hell out of them in the middle of open combat was incredibly fun.

[jjmarr]

It was very fun. Brick Battle, Galleons, the game with many towers. The explodey terrain put Roblox on the map initially.

The problem is the opportunity cost of destructible terrain was too high. Developers could get fun for lower effort by creating linear levels with better design/graphics/etc as destructible terrain makes everything "blocky" without significant developer work.

[ColdStream]

This is something 'The Last Guardian' absolutely nailed! Everything was just so grounded.

Yes, as a game it had a lot of flaws that many other games also had, but the things it excelled at were absolutely unique.

[mathgeek]

What did it excel at that hit the right notes for you?

[ColdStream]

It is sort of hard to describe but I would say specifically the animation system.

Everything has weight and flows spectacularly. They used a combination of key framed animations and procedural to have limbs conform to surfaces and have additional physics applied when needed. Combined with the physics system on the characters feathers and clothing, it all just ties together very well. It had a long development time of 9 years, before that became almost a standard, and it was basically just spent perfecting that system.

It also helps that they threw the bulk of the GPU time on the giant character to give it highwaulity shadow and highlights to ground it in the environment so well.

But the environment is a little bit of a let down in that the assets are clearly from the original Ps3 version they were working on. They cleaned it all up well enough with decent enough AA with everything being well 'grounded' but there was only so much they could do. There are a lot of assets that show the original memory limitations.

The problem was that the frame rate would drop terribly due to a lot of their decisions. And this is after they reportedly they had to significantly reduce the animations system capabilities over the Ps3 version because it was original designed to work with the Cell's strengths. Also took over a year just to port from the Ps3 to Ps4 due to the hyper specific tech they had built. Probably one of the few titles where the Cell's strengths shone well over the Ps4's architecture. If feels like if it was done today with modern GPU tech, they could do something amazing with this. But I think it is going to be permanently stuck on Ps4.

If you haven't played it, I wouldn't give it a hard recommendation because the gameplay is very fiddley in trying to conform to the animation system and most people just don't really get into the vibe of it all. But do check out a few minutes of it in action on Youtube and just to see how it all flows.

It is an wonderfully flawed ambitiously frustrating masterpiece. The vision is strong, some of the tech is strong, but the gameplay is a little weak and some parts of the tech is weaker.

I do see that the creator Fumito Ueda with Gen Design has a new title being funded by Epic called "Gen Altus" and it looks like they are taking all their skills over to UE5, it is going to be fun to see.

[ColdStream]

Still occasionally fire up Red Faction Guerilla just to see the promised future we never got.

[wincy]

This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphics, just the art.

Switch 2 is a fantastic console with an astonishingly fun first party library, and Nintendo just over there doing their own thing like they’ve always done.

[disgruntledphd2]

Nintendo are basically the only people who held out against in game spending, for which I salute them.

I spent a few years in and around the industry and there was so much insanity around the need for in game monetization that it just made things much worse.

And because the game studios didn't care about it, none of the money stuff worked, making executives even more upset.

All to catch some vision of F2P money which is an entirely different business that these companies couldn't possibly support.

It's very sad for the industry overall (this particular decision is MS killing stuff off because the margins aren't good enough to funnel more cash into GPU gods).

[johnnyanmac]

Nintendp dabbled briefly with it. But they know their audience and very much did not want to risk any PR hit by associating too closely with the typical gacha/lootbox model. They saw the Roblox/Fortnite smoke long before most of the industry and turned off very quickly.

But there's one specific statistic to why Nintendo can keep doing what it does in a way no one else can: 98% retention rate. You get into Nintendo and you basically never leave. Even for Japan, that's well above the 70% retention rate you'd expect. Keeping that kind of institutional knowledge for an entire career makes them really good at what they do, and the unfortunate decades of Japan's economy meant they were less tempted by amassing huge loans or risks on experimental stuff.

Maybe they didn't become trillionaires, but it means they amassed a huge war chest and can weather storms that US companies are currently in the middle of.

[kridsdale1]

Apple has similar retention. Almost all the senior leaders were ICs or low level managers there 20 to 30 years ago.

[ravenstine]

There's a lot I don't like about Nintendo, but the one thing I admire about them is they understand that fancy cinematic graphics aren't what make a great game.

[mathgeek]

There are many great quotes by Nintendo folks about this approach. One of my favorites:

> I like to think of it like buying a car. Admit it. Your left brain looks at a vehicle in terms of the numbers. What's the horsepower? The towing capacity? The 0-60? That's our competitor's approach. But your right brain is different. There's only one question out there: sitting behind the wheel, where will this baby take me? In other words, do you want to go just a little bit faster, down the same streets you've always driven, or down a new road, to places you've never seen before? That's the difference with Nintendo DS.

[tracker1]

Absolutely... They've been able to make a lot of games just fun even if the graphics aren't stellar. To this day, I wish they'd have released a Wii Sports Golf as a separate title with several courses.

[YackerLose]

Tomodachi Life sounds like The Sims but with rounded corners.

[kipchak]

There's a bit of Mad Libs in there as well, you can for example add your own conversation topics or draw your own food items or pets which the characters will then talk to each other about.

[boca_honey]

Nintendo is great for children, yes. I wish there were something like them for a more mature audience.

[kridsdale1]

What does this mean exactly? Because Mature games are designed to appeal to 14 year old boys.

Are you referring to some kind of David Lynch of gaming?

[boca_honey]

Yeah, I don't mean "mature" in the sense of the rating system, which does in fact mean "made for 14-year-old boys."

I don't like or understand David Lynch, but you get what I'm trying to say. There is no one in the video game landscape doing something similar to what Welles or Kurosawa did in cinema, or what Yorgos Lanthimos and Ari Aster are doing now (or Matt Reeves and Guillermo del Toro, if you're not into arthouse stuff).

Every time someone argues about this, they cite the same old examples (Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, some narrative indie game)... but those examples usually lack in gameplay, which is, in my opinion, the most important part of what makes a video game its own medium.

I hope to see in my lifetime someone do to video games what the French did to cinema in the 50s and the Americans did in the 60s: graduating the medium from a disposable entertainment artifact into an art form for the ages. The medium is still young, it's not impossible.

[rocketvole]

I feel like these games exist- they just aren't popular, or are typically subpar in one way or another. The problem is that I feel like video games have become like music- there is innovation happening in genres, but there are so many and have fragmented off so much that I cant really recommend to you a game I find to be genius because there's a good chance that you can't appreciate the gameplay. That's not a knock on you or anyone else as a gamer.

[kanwisher]

like story driven games that Sony is famous for. Imagine a Spiderman, a last of us, or Uncharted. Large story driven games largely for older 30-40 year old market

[mlrtime]

Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll... not quite 14 but close.

[mvdtnz]

> Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics

Could have fooled me. I haven't seen a meaningful improvement in game graphics for at least a decade.

[Cthulhu_]

There's improvement in tech - check out the Unreal Engine's tech demos for example - but that doesn't really translate into visible end results because one, modern hardware can't handle all the bells and whistles, and two, when you're playing it all just blends into the background, and composition/art direction trumps details and fidelity every day of the week.

That said, the tech isn't wasted, it's also used in film graphics and animations and the like. And photo mode, where games can open up all the registers because framerate isn't as important then.

But yeah. Unreal tech demos, or if you have a PS5, there's a free tech demo called The Matrix Awakens that showcases advancements from a few years ago (heck it's been 4 years already).

[ColdStream]

We are well into the diminishing returns era now. It not done via better art designs, now you have to push significantly significantly harder to get improved results via brute forcing it.

I am very cautiously optimistic about this. It seems there has been a lot of tooling change over to integrate ray/path tracing into systems.

Once this becomes a little more ubiquitous we might start to see some decent stuff but so far it has been 7-8 years since the first ray tracing hardware came along and it is still far from implemented consistently.

[tracker1]

I think there's a lot of room to grow in terms of ray/path tracing, etc... but I think it's studios and not real-time gaming that will really see the benefits near term. Bamers Nexus did an interview with a new Graphics MFG that's working more into that direction, but their near term focus is the professional space.

[monkpit]

> gotcha

Gacha?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game

[Cthulhu_]

They're the same picture

[throwaway894345]

I’ve been saying this for 20 years. I care much less if the game is visually stunning than if the core game is fun. It could be a paintball themed FPS for all I care as long as the core mechanics are fun and the story is engaging, I care very little. Also, good graphics don’t have to be hardware intensive—not everything needs to seem photorealistic.

[account42]

Cutting edge graphics can even be actively detrimental to a game by lowering performance and limiting game design.

[rawbot]

> limiting game design

It's what RPG players have been saying all this time about voice-overs.

It is sold as an accomplishment, but it limits the scope and writing of a game.

[Cthulhu_]

It's... odd that while Steam is the biggest PC gaming platform and the biggest platform for new, unique, interesting games ever, Microsoft isn't investing more in the people developing games for it. Microsoft can use it to filter out the slop, make offers to the best games, offer help with porting to consoles, and (probably most importantly) offer to put them into the xbox live program, because the xbox live subscription is xbox's biggest source of recurring revenue.

Access to Steam's library for a fixed monthly price would be huge. Actually I'm surprised Steam/Valve isn't offering that yet, it'd be huge, and for their new consoles it would be a perfect fit.

[freedomben]

> Access to Steam's library for a fixed monthly price would be huge. Actually I'm surprised Steam/Valve isn't offering that yet, it'd be huge, and for their new consoles it would be a perfect fit.

As a consumer, I really hope they never do that. I hate subscriptions and strongly prefer to just buy games. Once there's a subscription option, I would imagine the great sales would get significanty watered down. If you're a game seller and you can get that sweet sweet recurring revenue, it's too strong a temptation. We've seen that story play out time and time again in SaaS (and even some desktop applications now).

[muyuu]

you don't get the insane profit margins they want without those predatory practices, not in this industry and if you do it's a one-off and not something you can do every fiscal year

[soulofmischief]

I do still play a good bit of Black Ops II Zombies... which came out in 2012. Treyarch took notice, and the last CoD was a crappy attempt to cash in on the fact that the last good CoD game was over a decade ago.

A few great games I've played in the last 8 years, about the span of a generation, a mix of AAA and indie:

- Red Dead Redemption 2 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1174180/Red_Dead_Redempti...

- Cyberpunk 2077 https://www.gog.com/en/game/cyberpunk_2077

- Supraworld https://store.steampowered.com/app/1869290/Supraworld/

- Outer Wilds https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/

- Mini the Hollower https://www.gog.com/en/game/mina_the_hollower

- Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo https://store.steampowered.com/app/2870350/Pipistrello_and_t...

- Shadows over Loathing https://store.steampowered.com/app/1939160/Shadows_Over_Loat...

- Animal Well https://store.steampowered.com/app/813230/ANIMAL_WELL/

- Dwarf Fortress https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

- EMUUROM https://store.steampowered.com/app/1634360/EMUUROM/

- Dispatch https://store.steampowered.com/app/2592160/Dispatch/

- MOUSE: P.I. For Hire https://store.steampowered.com/app/2416450/MOUSE_PI_For_Hire...

- Split Fiction https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001120/Split_Fiction/

- Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles https://store.steampowered.com/app/1004640/FINAL_FANTASY_TAC...

If you want to see what modern AAA gaming should be and haven't already played it, I highly recommend Cyberpunk 2077. It's not perfect, mostly due to time constraints, but it excels in most categories, and it looks and plays great. No microtransactions, no DRM and the one DLC is very good. It's on sale for $18 on GOG. No DRM should be enough reason to signal to the market to produce more games like this. Also, the developer owns the GOG storefront and so 100% of your profits go directly to them.

I also cannot recommend Supraworld enough to anyone who likes classic 3D platforming and puzzle games such as Portal or Antichamber. Supraworld has ruined other platformers for me. The developer, David Munich, is a puzzle maestro who has already put out other successful games such as notpron https://notpron.com/ and Supraland. His philosophy for puzzle design is going to influence the genre for decades to come.

And of course, if you haven't played Red Dead Redemption 2 already, it's a bonafide masterpiece, deserving of 10/10. The game is an absolute behemoth in terms of development/marketing costs and profit, and is just a sight to behold. I know it borders on last-gen because it came out in 2018, but the ninth-generation of consoles was where it found its home, since the eight generation could barely handle it. Dan Houser left Rockstar after finishing this game due to being a 50-year-old man completely exhausted from inflated development cycles, so this might be the best game Rockstar will ever make.

Of course I could go on to recommend dozens of other memorable recent indie games, but I definitely think AAA has mostly stagnated. Cyberpunk 2077 initially released 6 years ago. Red Dead Redemption 2, the modern gold standard, released 8 years ago. I have heard great things about Clair Obscur, but I haven't given it a chance. There are some worthwhile remasters, like the Shadowman remaster and upcoming Thief Gold remaster done by the Kick brothers at Nightdive Studios, or the recent Final Fantasy Tactics remaster.

Game production could stop today and I'd probably be good for the rest of my life. There's still such a vast back catalogue even after playing all of the classics. With development cycles for groundbreaking AAA titles closing in on a decade and production costs surpassing half a billion, I get a sense that a mature ecosystem of AI-augmented tooling is what might end up bringing some sanity back to this business.

I'll also point out that in the 80s, AAA video games have been $40-70 since the 80's. If the price of games had gone up with inflation, we'd be paying $100-150 per AAA game, there would be more money in the industry and ideally better salaries and working conditions across the board. As consumers, we need to stop and analyze the perverse incentives driving this market and figure out how to have better dialogue with developers so that we can come to an agreement on more realistic prices but less anti-consumer bullshit.

[MYEUHD]

> Also, the [Cyberpunk 2077] developer owns the GOG storefront and so 100% of your profits go directly to them.

That's no longer the case since a few months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46422412

[soulofmischief]

Thanks for sharing that, I had no idea Michał bought it out! Before clicking your link I was worried it was going to be private equity.

I can live with the cut just going to Michał, but it was cool that for a while you could purchase a AAA game with no microtransactions or DRM on a storefront where 100% of proceeds fed back into the same studio not just publishing the game, but developing it. To me that was a huge selling point of CP77 among all the others.