Years ago the Dreamcast came out and dropped a big load on the N64 and PS1 in terms of graphics, and it was blatantly obvious in game after game. Compared to Madden on the Playstation, NFL 2K on the DC practically looked like real life (RIP NFL 2K series). I wanted a Dreamcast just so I could look at how awesome everything was (I had about zero dollars, so I didn't get one). Graphics just haven't felt like a difference-maker in years. I'm not blind. I can tell the difference between Battlefield V and Battlefield 1942. But I haven't said that heart-pounding, jaw-dropping I CAN'T BELIEVE A COMPUTER RENDERED THIS feeling since probably around 2007 or 2008. That's almost a decade and a half ago. The top game right now is I think Fortnite, which looks like it was made for an iPhone. Minecraft was pretty huge, too, and it looked like something made for a DOS PC. Do you know what the #1 game on Steam is? Counter-Strike: GO, which is a billion years old and looked dated the day it came out. But a million people are playing it this moment. I had a PS4, but the graphics were a big yawner. It's not like I was coming from a high-end PC. But man, there were an awful lot of cross-gen games. Rockstar is still milking GTAV for cash! I guess it was cool that the games all had gamma-correct lighting and ran in true HD. I guess. Yawn. I The last game I played on PS4 was Black Ops 4, which looked like dogshit compared to games a decade older than it due to Treyarch apparently hiring 8th-graders to do the visual design. I guess the big thing now is that 3080 card. Cyberpunk 2077 sure does look somewhat different with raytracing on! Wow! There's no point to buying a PS5 or Xbox...whatever. X? Series X? X Series X Mark X? They can render at 4K, while my 3-year-old PC kinda struggles, but so what? What do they really offer? Virtually all the games come out on every platform any more. Even many "exclusives" like Horizon Zero Dawn and Forza are on PC now. Part of this is me getting older, as I'm turning 40 this year. I'm basically a different person from the retard-slap-fight days of PVC. But if you look at the market trend, it's not just me. CS: GO came out in 2012. It's gonna turn 9 years old soon. Do you know what game was 9 years old when the PS3 launched? Quake. The first one.
Yeah I think graphics reached a point where they are basically good enough somewhere around 2006-2008. I haven't been really wowed by the graphics in a game in years. I find hardware upgrades annoying at this point. I find myself wishing developers would just optimize their stuff to run well on existing hardware. Also agree about raytracing. Can't tell much of a difference with it turned on. nVidia is hyping the shit out of a minor feature not many games even support to try to sell video cards. G-sync is another minor feature they've hyped to hell and back. CSGO remains popular because of the gameplay. Two decades later you won't find a more balanced, polished multiplayer shooter than Counter-strike. The best games of this last generation were Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal IMO. And it's because they nailed the gameplay. Graphics are good enough and at this point I care way more about gameplay.
social games are pretty much where the market is at now. also, the kids that are driving the market watch streamers/YouTubers so whatever they play is what becomes popular. among us, valorant, and cod warzone are the other ones not mentioned. high end machines still have a place for the people that don't care about these games and just want the immersive AAA experience
Our generation lived through a time where generation graphic improvement occurred regularly and we expected that someday we'd reach gaming nirvana. These newer generations weren't part of the race and don't get excited about improvements. I showed my son Team Fortress 2 and he though it sucked. He then begged for me to get him Ravenfield which looks like Counter Strike 1.6 with red/blue skin hax. I think khaid is right. People just play whatever games the Internet influencers are pushing, and that's usually social games designed to run on as many platforms as possible.
I was actually surprised at how little raytracing mattered. Existing lighting engines are basically a hodge-podge of techniques, but it turns out that all those put together actually do such a good job that a unified, physically correct model really is not going to blow your mind. Basically, game graphics now are where movie special effects were 15 years ago. They just stopped mattering. The thing that really struck me was when I got a PS4 and Killzone: Shadowfall at launch. The game somehow managed to look uglier than Killzone 3. Sure, you could enumrate all the things KZ:SF was doing that would melt a PS#. But it didn't matter. KZ3 managed to be better-looking somehow. I've never, ever felt like that at a console launch. Whether we are talking Tekken Tag Tournament, Mario 64, Tomb Raider, Super Mario World...a new console gen's launch title always blew away the previous gen. Nobody played Halo for the first time and said, "Yeah, I mean, I can see it has bump-mapping and stuff, but it really doesn't look that much better than Perfect Dark." I mostly play ancient games on GoG (currently playing Wing Commander 1) and some Modern Warfare. That stupid game takes over 200 GB because of the mtx.
Out of curiosity, what did Iwata predict? (and who is Iwata for that matter, I'm guessing a former Nintendo exec or something like that?). It's kind of interesting for me to read this, I don't really agree with the sentiment. I can think of a couple of games I've played in the past year that absolutely wow'd me in terms of graphics and audio. The ones that immediately come to mind are Returnal, Resident Evil Village, Doom Eternal, Devil May Cry 5, Shadow of Tomb Raider and Hitman 3. I also don't really agree with the sentiment that the new consoles don't offer anything new, but perhaps that's a different conversation entirely. I might agree a bit with the notion that games made in the last roughly 5-6 years still look really good now, Witcher 3 specifically comes to mind or say Rise of the Tomb Raider or Doom 2016, these are 5-6 years old now, and have benefitted from being very cutting edge at the time (Witcher 3 could barely run on high end PCs on high settings at its launch, but nowadays hardware is a lot better). But games from 2007? They looked great at the time, but I wouldn't call them outstanding anymore by a long shot. As for popular games being older games like CounterStrike and MineCraft, I don't see what relevance that really has. They're a different audience entirely in my mind. It's not like people are going to stop playing/buying single player RPGs just because they're not as popular as CounterStrike or Fortnite.
Something something graphics don’t matter anymore. He said a lot of things, may he Rest In Peace. Isn’t Witcher 3 on Switch? But then again people can’t buy graphics cards because they are sold out… by crypto miners and scalpers so who knows? It’s been a decade since I looked at sales numbers. I feel like we are at the cable tv point in gaming. Used to be three channels, now there’s something for everyone. People will still make face melting graphics for shooters and sports games. They will also make weird little rogue-lites with sprites. The kids seem to love the battle royale types as much as Minecraft. The population can support it all right now.
I'm more interested in getting my old games running, and the pc does that for me including emulating PS3 and 360 games. I think it's just too expensive and takes too long to make an AAA games using today's graphics standards. Sent from my ASUS_I001DC using Tapatalk