I mean, look at Nintendo. Obviously aggressive legal tactics aside, they make some damn fun games because they know that gameplay matters more than graphics.
Visuals are very important in games, but Nintendo pursues clear and readable designs. Their games are easy to look at, and they age more gracefully than games pursuing realism.
The few times they've pursued more gritty realism (Twilight Princess, for example) are all the times that haven't aged as well.
Twilight Princess came out after Wind Waker, but Wind Waker obviously aged far better.
Oh don't dismiss that they're also graphics and programming wizards. They don't work with the cutting edge, but they run circles around anyone on the lower end, making games look and run better on potato hardware is no easy feat.
I'd argue the optimization required to make something like that happen is significantly more skillful than all of the crap AAA stuff that takes 250gb and requires shader compilations every boot.
What a group of Wizards. Xenoblade games are great jrpgs but i just cant get over how bad they look at times and performance is often times horrendous. This is only good as long as you don't care.
I blame Toyota for how poorly my Chevy ran.
Xenoblade
The Xenoblade series is made by a developer that is owned by Nintendo. If Nintendo doesn't want people to rag on their products, they should make them better.
Your ability to connect disconnected concepts is legendary. Good luck with your life lol
Does Microsoft make Halo? Halo's developer is owned by Microsoft, just as Xenoblade's developer is owned by Nintendo.
Breath of the wild is a technical masterpiece though. The way that they’ve managed to do lights, shadows, LODs, distant effects. And they’ve managed to add even more to ToTK, plus physics based audio, plus physics objects interacting better than any modern AAA game on “big” consoles. They squeezed every last bit of performance that switch could provide to make these games look as good as humanly possible.
They work with what they have in terms of hardware, and care a lot about gameplay, but they also do invest heavily into graphics and other technical aspects of their games.
A lot of comments in this thread are really talking about visual design rather than graphics, strictly speaking, although the two are related.
Visual design is what gives a game a visual identity. The level of graphical fidelity and realism that's achievable plays into what the design may be, although it's not a direct correlation.
I do think there is a trend for higher and high visual fidelity to result in games with more bland visual design. That's probably because realism comes with artistic restrictions, and development time is going to be sucked away from doing creative art to supporting realism.
My subjective opinion is that for first person games, we long ago hit the point of diminishing returns with something like the Source engine. Sure there was plenty to improve on from there (even games on Source like HL2 have gotten updates so they don't look like they did back in the day), but the engine was realistic enough. Faces moved like faces and communicated emotion. Objects looked like objects.
Things should have and have improved since then, but really graphical improvements should have been the sideshow to gameplay and good visual design.
I don't need a game where I can see the individual follicles on a character's face. I don't need subsurface light diffusion on skin. I won't notice any of that in the heat of gameplay, but only in cutscenes. With such high fidelity game developers are more and more forcing me to watch cutscenes or "play" sections that may as well be cutscenes.
I don't want all that. I want good visual design. I want creatively made worlds in games. I want interesting looking characters. I want gameplay where I can read at a glance what is happening. None of that requires high fidelity.
Eh. I want hyper realistic graphics, but I also want a solid story and good gameplay mechanics. If hyper realistic graphics took a backseat to story and mechanics I'd be just as annoyed as a focus on hyper realistic graphics over story and mechanics.
Edit: Generally speaking, of course. There's quite a few modern games with non-realistic graphics I enjoy, but I'm always waiting for that next hyper realistic game to push the boundaries.
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