Basically Gray Zone. Great game, but even on my i9-12900K, 3080Ti, 128GB DDR5 I have to play it on low settings. Like I’d be happy if they just ratcheted down the graphics quality because the gameplay is great.
That’s probably due to optimization rather than graphics alone.
As a game dev who’s making a better game with worse graphics - i think people who say this are in the minority, unfortunately.
this is such a
messamazing collection of ideas!I advertised it in a group of kids I know that love this kind of shit, hope it helps :)
I mean this with the greatest respect, I’m not making a judgement on the gameplay.
But there’s a whole spectrum between Roblox and the latest Quadruple A™ that all consist of “worse graphics”
White letters on light brown wood texture (trailer on steam at 0:07). Also, the big “Press E to talk” looks heinous. Plus you don’t have full control over where it appears, at one point in the trailer (0:42), it’s on white background. Going by the trailer, you’re trying to make the game look like the product of a inexperienced amateur, while the game itself is actually a subversive masterpiece, similar to the doom mod “MyHouse.wad”. Hats off to you if you manage to pull it off, but if not, you’ll have fallen flat on your face. Metaphorically, of course.
As inflation continues to outpace wages, surely more people will start preferring this. $1000 for a gpu is a joke. If I ever develop an indie game my target system is going to be like, a 1.6ghz core i3 and garden variety basic opengl capable graphics card.
There are constant high end GPU shortages, $1,000 is too cheap.
idk, maybe we need to figure out how to get by with basic laptop opengl graphics. An Intel HD 4000 would have been a groundbreaking graphics card in 2005 but today you can barely run a unity project with one. More serious effort needs to go into optimization and efficiency I think and if that means everything has to have 2005 era graphics (which aren’t even that bad) then that’s what has to be done.
Making your own game engine an using open source 3d engine then filling in the rest is too much work for most indie devs but as enshitification continues this will eventually stop being the case. Tux kart was made this way and it can run on a potato.
No one wants to play potato games. And this is evident by the shortage of high end GPUs. People want better graphics and people have the money for GPUs. If you check Steam stats, then the top 15 cards are all 3060, 4060, 3070, 4070, and 3080. Steam has 132m active monthly users and 2% of their users have 3080 cards. That’s over 2.6m people with a high end card.
There are only 0.2% of Intel HD 4000 users. When you combine all the mid and high end GPU users it becomes obvious that there’s absolutely no point making games for Intel HD 4000.
Personally I’d prefer if games used more stylized graphics like pixel art or hand drawn stuff. That’s not worse in graphical quality but better imho while not needing a supercomputer to run. Spiritfarer is still one of the prettiest games I have played and it runs on the switch.
Going with stylized graphics instead of trying to do photorealism also makes the game age way more gracefully. Bastion for example still looks amazing while there’s a reason Oblivion npcs are a meme.
Chasing photorealism has been unsustainable since before MW2 came out. You could see where that line was headed. The answer has always been procedural artwork - not randomized, just rule-based. Even if an entire desert gets away with four textures for sand, those shouldn’t be hand-drawn and manually-approved bitmaps. They should not be fixed-resolution. Let the machine generate them at whatever level of detail you need. Define what it’s supposed to look like.
This is how that “Doom 3 on a floppy disk” game, .kkreiger, worked. It weighs 96 KB. It doesn’t look like Descent. It has oodles of textures and smooth models. Blowing a few megabytes on that kind of content is a lot easier than cramming things down and a lot cheaper than mastering five hundred compressed six-channel bitmaps. Even if every rivet on a metal panel was drawn by hand with a circle tool, ship that tool, so that no matter how closely the player looks, those rivets stay circular.
You can draw rust and have it be less shiny because that’s how rust is defined - and have that same smear of rust look a little bit different every time it appears, tiled across a whole battleship. Every bullet ding and cement crack can become utterly unremarkable by being completely unique and razor-sharp at macro-lens distances. You don’t hire a thousand artists to manage one tree each, you hire a handful of maniacs who can define: wood. Sapling, tree, log, plank, chair, wood. Hand that to a dozen artists and watch them crank out a whole bespoke forest in an afternoon.
How do you think modern games are made? Procedural generation is used all over the place to create materials and entire landscapes.
But never ships clientside.
These tools have been grudgingly adopted, but only to make ‘let’s hire ten thousand artists for a decade!’ accomplish some ridiculous goal, as measured in archaic compressed textures and static models. The closest we came was “tessellation” as a buzzword for cranking polycount in post. And it somehow fucked up both visuals and performance. Nowadays Unreal 5 brags about its ability to render zillion-polygon Mudbox meshes at sensible framerates, rather than letting artists do pseudo-NURBS shit on models that don’t have a polycount. And no bespoke game seems ready to scale to 32K, or zoom in on a square inch of carpet without seeing texels, even though we’ve had this tech for umpteen years and a texture atlas is not novel.
Budgets keep going up and dev cycles keep getting longer and it’s never because making A Game is getting any harder.
You propose an interesting approach. I just wonder how the individual streaks of different rust interact with typical graphics pipelines. You can certainly ship a generator, but then for rasterizing the image the texture still has to be generated and shipped off to GPU memory to be used in shaders, won’t you blow through VRAM limits or shader cache limits by having no texture reuse anywhere?
Any game with texture pop-in is already handling more data than you have space. “Rage” famously had unique textures across the entire world… and infamously streamed them from DVD, with the dumbest logic for loading and unloading. You could wait for everything to load, turn around, and it would all be blurry again.
Anyway if you’re rendering ten zillion copies of something way out in the distance, those can all be the same. It will not matter whether they’re high-res or unique when they’re eight pixels across. As Nvidia said: if you’re not cheating, you’re just not trying.
I thought this right before I tried to play the really old pokemons again. And very quickly went back to new pokemons.
To be fair those had worse gameplay too
I think everything after Gen 1 holds up pretty well, even if it’s a little rough. And once they figured out the physical/special split in Gen 4 they basically just published the same game over and over again with slightly different gimmicks and stories.
Quality of life has improved pretty significantly, the formula has stayed the same, and now there are more Pokemon with more unique properties. It was linear in just about every direction until the latest switch games.
I mean Abiotic Factor just released to early access and that one looks like a GoldSRC game.
!patientgamers would agree and so do I
Yup, most of the games I play are either indies or older games. I don’t care much about graphics, I care about gameplay and story, and modern AAA games often lack in both.
After watching the Fallout series, I had the itch again so I fired up Fallout 3. I immediately fell in love with that older Bethesda-style dialogue, with so much to discuss and so many skill checks throughout… But the more I played, the more I realized how absurdly easy and jam-packed the game was with weapons, chems, and ammunition. I installed a couple of mods to improve the difficulty and scarcity of items, but it wasn’t enough. Something was missing. I realized that after having played through Fallout 1 a few years ago, my beloved Fallout 3 no longer quite scratched the itch. So I fired up Fallout 2, and I’ve fallen in love with that little game again. I love the slower pace of it all. I love inspecting every little detail of the environment, and the assortment of skills available at my fingertips to apply to my surroundings like a Swiss army knife, if I have the aptitude, of course… (Perhapsh I should join the mage’s college in Winterhold)
Now, I have no hate here for Fallout 3, because the flaws I pointed out above are not why I enjoyed the game in the past. It’s the atmosphere of the DC ruins, the satisfaction of taking shots and exploding heads in VATS, and the haunting melodies of Galaxy News Radio echoing softly from my wrist. I just have to figure out how to make it play a bit more like the classic entries. I want to leave the Super Duper Mart without combat armor, 40 stimpaks, and damn near every weapon in the game.
If you liked Fallout 1 and 2 you’ll probably like NV too. It has a far slower pace than 3, and has a much bigger emphasis on writing and player choice than 3 and 4.
I could never get into 3 or 4 personally, but have always loved 1, 2, and NV.
I liked New Vegas quite a lot. I remember not liking it as much as 3 at the time, but looking back years later with a different perspective (and after playing Fallout 1), I appreciate and vibe with it a lot more and can’t wait to play it again… Heavily modded… With Survival Mode on.
funny how the first time i played fo3 i struggled to kill fire ants because i ran out of ammo for every weapon amd only had melee weapons
now when i fire it up i know so much of what to do that i am practically unstoppable
the survival mode in fo4 is actually quite a challenge though, thats fun to play (unless i die after not finding a bed for hours, then it sucks😂)
Fallout 2 really is the best game not just in the West-coast saga but the entire series.
I’ve only ever made it roughly 8 hours in, so I have the entire game ahead of me now that I’m starting anew. I’m super stoked.
gimme games like Oblivion. Shove starfield up your ass!
I don’t even understand what Star Field is supposed to be. And I don’t think Bethesda know either. It’s basically what No Man’s Sky used to be before they fixed it, yet somehow worse.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5. Which would have worked better with the limitations of the engine as well.
After that they could have taken their time to reskill their staff on either a new engine of their own or just a off the shelf option.
Given the fact they knew that fallout TV series was coming out, I do find it a bit baffling that they didn’t just make fallout 5
I’m pretty sure the TV show began development in 2022, four years after Starfield was announced in 2018.
2 years to go from pre-production to complete release, and with extensive special effects requirements as well. Na, It may have begun prep work in 2022 but it’s been known about longer than that. Pre-production takes a very long time, you have to scout locations, you have to hold auditions, you have to work out schedules, you have to work out your set design and your costume, you have to get the script written. There’s a lot before anyone shouts action.
Also that would have been a fair amount of time before that where the studio and Bethesda were negotiating the IP license.
Also I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid got in a way of all of that as well. So we really could be looking at 2019 or even 2018 is a start date so it’s entirely believable that they weren’t that far through production and giving the problems that they would have found by then, they really should have switched gears.
I won’t lie, they pulled the wool over my eyes with Starfield. I kept waiting for that moment where they brought it all together and suddenly it would be a great game. I was shook when the credits rolled and I hadn’t yet found the fun part.
Modern Quality of Life settings, novel features, styled to look seamless with itself, optimal usage of resources so the experience is only about the content and not the settings.
The problem with that is the back catalogue of games that developers have to compete with. There already are better games with worse graphics, the big studios aren’t going to risk competing in that crowded market that already has its crowned victors.
Then just browser itch.io for games
There’s room for both things. Call of duty sells a bazillion copies, and while I have zero interest in that kind of game, I don’t hate that it exists.
I like that it exists because it keeps the CoD players playing CoD and not ruining other games’ lobbies.
You are a wise gamer.
Games were better when graphics were secondary
I’d love to upvote this more than once. What’s the point of all those super high quality graphics if the core gameplay hasn’t advanced in the slightest 🙄
AAA studios
Best I can do is predatory monetization and half-baked dlc. Also, now the Eula prohibit you from making unflattering comparisons to that one game Larian made
One of my favourite games was Operation Flash Point Dragon Rising on Xbox 360.
Graphics were terrible then but the gameplay was amazing.
I go back today and still play it, unfortunately the AI hasn’t kept up and you can exploit it rather easily.
