Photo-realistic Graphics lead to decline in RPGs?

[Azdul]

Sometimes realistic depiction of gameplay system would make it immediately obvious how stupid it is. Missing point-blank shots in Xcom or early Civilization RNG combat comes to mind.

Sometimes gameplay is designed in a way that realistic visual feedback would be completely unreadable. So rainbow puke on the screen with hundreds of icons and floating numbers is the only possible choice.

And only in very rare cases gameplay is solid, but the author is insane, and it takes hundreds of people to convince him that colored circles is not a better choice than drawing little people.

 

[Jasede]

We have this topic every ten years, just try to find the old thread from 2009 or so.
Typical newfag, endlessly discussing old things...

 

[Butter]

Graphics of any kind were a decline for RPGs.

 

[undecaf]

Having to read walls of text is so 1980s.

More compact presentation is often (not always) better than walls. Like keywords and max 5 line responses.

 

[mondblut]

I can't play RPGs without voice acting. Having to read walls of text is so 1980s. Welcome to the 2020s you ludites.

You must be 14. In 1980s, you had to read walls of text in accompanying journal.

 

[Jasede]

When I was young reading the manual, guidebook or paragraph book was the best part of the game. Really got your imagination going. And thanks to the kindled imagination, the actual graphic fidelity was completely unimportant. Wireframe or pixels, it all looked great in the mind.
The human brain is great at patterns and at inference. When fidelity is not there, it fills in the blanks. And it does this favorably.

This means a high fidelity game will have less blanks filled in - but reality is never as good as your imagination, because in your imagination, it's not true to life, but rather, better than life, and hence superior.

 

[Serus]

Did using stones and fire lead to a decline?

No. But (as example) television might have.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Well ok. But i dont think there is that genre. Maybe some car racing game with realistic damage model. But even there there are never explosions? You would think in games at least explosions would look great by now. But they are all kind of lame and have no effect on the environment.

Most race sims i know don't bother with any extensive damage model, they at best just put some change is texture and the like, if at all. Project Cars had the best damage system i've seen recently and it's not that complex either.

It's just not a priority for people who play those games.

With that said, i already mentioned that 9/11 is the reason Microsoft doesn't bother with that anymore. I remember in the older flight simulator they actually removed crash animations after 9/11. Retarded boomers are to blame i guess. What you DID get on a lot of add on aircrafts was system failures. Those are much more meaningful to players of those type of games than some crash animation.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

With racing games, part of the reason why they don't model damage so well is that they usually have deals with the manufacturers of the vehicles. They're not keen on seeing their vehicles ripped apart and they certainly won't be keen on Youtube videos of their cars getting ripped to shreds.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Kingdom come was well received and it's probably the most photorealistic rpg released so far.

 

[Funposter]

MGS3 looked great in 2004, and it looks great in 2020.

MGS3 looked and ran like total fucking dogshit on its native hardware in 2004, just like every other PS2 game.

 

[MasterofThunder]

This video largely sums up my position on this topic. "Photorealism" is a tired meme, and has been a contributing factor in the decline of video games in general, not just RPGs. The more realistic you want something to look, the more resources and money you have to dedicate to the project. Let's not pretend that massive development teams and outsourcing happened by accident, or for no good reason. Making photorealistic stuff takes time, a lot of time. It wasn't until recently that technology such as photogrammetry and other middleware technologies came about to make the process feasible. But despite that, the result is legions of identical-looking titles more bland and forgettable than the last. EVERY developer is chasing the realism train and have been since the dawn of the PS4 generation. We've seen title after title come and go, and they all start to blur into each other. They all use scanned assets, they all use Unreal Engine, and they cost each developer tens of millions and over 4+ years to produce.

And not only is photorealism just plain boring, but it's borderline dystopic. Is it any wonder the (((elites))) are promoting VR and metaverse shit just as real-time rendering is beginning to look truly realistic?. I do not want to promote this uncanny shit.

 

[Eisen]

This video largely sums up my position on this topic. "Photorealism" is a tired meme, and has been a contributing factor in the decline of video games in general, not just RPGs. The more realistic you want something to look, the more resources and money you have to dedicate to the project. Let's not pretend that massive development teams and outsourcing happened by accident, or for no good reason. Making photorealistic stuff takes time, a lot of time. It wasn't until recently that technology such as photogrammetry and other middleware technologies came about to make the process feasible. But despite that, the result is legions of identical-looking titles more bland and forgettable than the last. EVERY developer is chasing the realism train and have been since the dawn of the PS4 generation. We've seen title after title come and go, and they all start to blur into each other. They all use scanned assets, they all use Unreal Engine, and they cost each developer tens of millions and over 4+ years to produce.

And not only is photorealism just plain boring, but it's borderline dystopic. Is it any wonder the (((elites))) are promoting VR and metaverse shit just as real-time rendering is beginning to look truly realistic?. I do not want to promote this uncanny shit.

Cool vid but his voice is annoying

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Actually photorealism is what saved gaming so far. If you put so much resources and money in the pursuit of photorealism, you have less money to spare to implement mandatory online, microtransactions, et simila.

 

[Bohrain]

Masterofthunder summed it well. Going for photorealistic style automatically means investing a lot of resources to asset pipeline and that alone makes game development more expensive and time consuming. This was not the case when even highest budget and fidelity games took 2-3 years to develop, but I don't think this has been the reality for well over a decade now. But now games are more similar to films in a sense that high budget titles play it extremely safe in terms of content. And photorealistic style tends to age badly, it feels to me that if the artstyle incorporates shape, value, form and colour harmony well you don't really need fidelity past what PS3 era hardware could output.

 

[luj1]

Of course that better graphics lead to decline in gamplay

That is not even questionable

Just like voice acting, etc.

 

[Iucounu]

Graphics whoring is of course pushed by video card vendors. But I'm not sure it must lead to decline due to limited AAA budgets, since I assume Nvidia sponsors the development of graphically demanding AAA titles. Perhaps Nvidia even wants such games to have good gameplay and writing as well? Making a game both graphically demanding and fun to play would only sell more GPUs.

 

[0sacred]

Graphics of any kind were a decline for RPGs.

We got some very pretty older games though. I wouldn't want to miss the VGA age. Actually, RPG's up to the early 2000's looked very good. Art direction but also the individual quality of the graphics. I don't know what happened then, but the graphics seemed to take a nosedive along with the gameplay, rather than being prettier but dumber, they got ugly and dumb. Someone should look into what happened to the great artists in this genre.

 

[Chippy]

Yeah, I'd say that and the need for full voice acting led to a decline.

I'd say it was totally down to lack of writing talent. They might have blown the budget on voicing every word, which probably meant having to hire the lower labour voice actors, but it might have mitigtaged the decline if they had held onto the great writers.

Of which there were not even a handfull.

 

[MasterofThunder]

Graphics whoring is of course pushed by video card vendors. But I'm not sure it must lead to decline due to limited AAA budgets, since I assume Nvidia sponsors the development of graphically demanding AAA titles. Perhaps Nvidia even wants such games to have good gameplay and writing as well? Making a game both graphically demanding and fun to play would only sell more GPUs.

Nvidia stopped caring about video games years ago. They're more into servers and creepy dystopian AI projects now.

 

[SmoothPimp]

Video games instead of prayers lead to decline of Western civilization.

 

[Jaesun]

Video games instead of prayers lead to decline of Western civilization.

Just for you: https://www.thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/

 

[Tyranicon]

Photorealistic graphics in RPGs

Meanwhile RPGs:

I can't think of a single modern RPG with graphics approaching anywhere near photorealistic, unless you're saying that word with a very broad definition.

 

[MerchantKing]

AAA "rpgs": 120 GB thanks to graphics and 150+ hours of shitty cutscenes. Graphics and Bioware were a mistake. Voice acting was also a mistake.

 

[MerchantKing]

This video largely sums up my position on this topic. "Photorealism" is a tired meme, and has been a contributing factor in the decline of video games in general, not just RPGs. The more realistic you want something to look, the more resources and money you have to dedicate to the project. Let's not pretend that massive development teams and outsourcing happened by accident, or for no good reason. Making photorealistic stuff takes time, a lot of time. It wasn't until recently that technology such as photogrammetry and other middleware technologies came about to make the process feasible. But despite that, the result is legions of identical-looking titles more bland and forgettable than the last. EVERY developer is chasing the realism train and have been since the dawn of the PS4 generation. We've seen title after title come and go, and they all start to blur into each other. They all use scanned assets, they all use Unreal Engine, and they cost each developer tens of millions and over 4+ years to produce.

And not only is photorealism just plain boring, but it's borderline dystopic. Is it any wonder the (((elites))) are promoting VR and metaverse shit just as real-time rendering is beginning to look truly realistic?. I do not want to promote this uncanny shit.

Cool vid but his voice is annoying

I thought his voice was fine and reminded me of a soft spoken elderly Gnome.