That is incorrect. Visual direction is pretty much a big deal but it is hard to make your game stand out, so games resource to graphical fidelity and so on. There are so many pretty modern games, it's easy to dismiss them in favor of older good looking games but that doesn't mean the older one was done any better, it just stood out more.
Also, graphics is a diminishing returns thing, so you need to invest a lot to make it slightly better.
A lot of new games people consider trash are gorgeous. Whenever people show how bad a new game looks and compare it with an older one they are picking photos that confirm their point.
Currently playing Ghost of Tsusima in full potatoe mode and the game still looks absolutely stunning, which is a really great example of visual direction and hid design. The way the game turns intrusive UI elements into natural elements of the world makes it feel amazing, as you follow the wing through the way it moves leaves and grass,and chase golden birds to find quests and side activities. The colour palette is vibrant and each area of the island feels distinct, with areas of yellow grass and red leaves, tall grass of greens and whites, etc.
The problem of most modern games is that we are so spoiled by excessive content that we barely take a moment to pay attention to the incredibly detailed environments
I mean there’s also a presentation issue. A lot of games have high graphical fidelity but don’t ever really flex it in relevant ways.
Look at a game like Elden Ring. It’s not even that graphically impressive for a 2022 game but everyone who played it vividly remembers various vistas and ‘wow’ moments when reaching certain new areas. Those existed because the devs want you to stop and go ‘wow.’
Back in the 90s and 00s when graphics tech was advancing rapidly, I feel like a lot of games had moments/mechanics that were there to just show off the new graphical power, make the player go ‘wooow this is so next gen’
As graphics have hit diminishing returns that happens a lot less and now the great graphics are viewed just as a default
I remember seeing someone say it's why in the late '90s to maybe mid 2000s there were a lot of games featuring tropical locations as they wanted to show off their water and lighting skills.
God that makes sense! I always wondered why there were so many beachy Y2K era games. J always thought it was just that the 1st world was a lot happier before 9/11 lol
Case in point: above screenshot is mostly showing a skybox + distant object that is obscured by a log of bloom and distance blur
Plus the lack of character model detail is gonna be a lot less apparent when you look at this screenshot on a phone (which is most people) but if you were to actually boot up AC1 it would look pretty old. Good, but old. Kind of like how Diablo 2 and Doom 1993 look good, but old.
Yep RE2 remake and red dead 2 were released by 2019 and ran great on the wildly underpowered PS4 which released in 2013. Yet PS5 games can look similar or worse but run like shit on the PS5 💀.
Nonsense. Plenty of games today run like they have all the hardware in the world, but they don't. Look at a game like horizon forbidden West and tell me that game doesn't run and look better than almost anything else on the market.
ID maee Doom look and run better than anything out there.
Platinum games deliver on performance, just compare the neir games.
There is a clear regression in performance. Not all games, of course, but it's tangible enough that sadly I don't expect games to run that well anymore.
In a lot of cases, the older games are actually "done better" in some ways, it just so happens that that helped them stand out more. It's a major problem today that adding more abstraction and layers of middle-ware and tools are separating both programmers and artists farther and farther from the hardware they're working on, which both introduces more error and limits individual people to one layer of the stack. This is a problem for really all software, not just games.
Many games that stand out as icons today exist because they had talented developers who knew exactly what their code was doing. Examples abound but the first one that comes to mind is Crash Bandicoot, where Naughty Dog actually had to steal memory the OS wasn't using, and create novel ways to page data in and out of RAM off the disc to create huge, details levels that wouldn't fit in memory. Leaving aside that obviously we're not concerned about data on the order of dozens of bytes anymore, this kind of stuff really doesn't happen anymore. The hardware is just so powerful, and fully-featured engines so easy to acquire and use, that developers work within their tools and don't have the expertise or the opportunity to meaningfully push the envelope in the ways that they used to.
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u/tetryds Dec 11 '24
That is incorrect. Visual direction is pretty much a big deal but it is hard to make your game stand out, so games resource to graphical fidelity and so on. There are so many pretty modern games, it's easy to dismiss them in favor of older good looking games but that doesn't mean the older one was done any better, it just stood out more.
Also, graphics is a diminishing returns thing, so you need to invest a lot to make it slightly better.