I think I was 15 or 16, trick or treating with my little brothers. A guy on a porch told me it was disgraceful to be a teenager trick or treating and asked why I wasn't doing something with a girl instead.

That guy was definitely totally wrong and out of line, but it did make me realize that I don't particularly enjoy going to people's houses and giving them the opportunity to say shit like that. So now I buy candy whenever I want.

Yeah, its too bad that that's always true for every game and not just ~30 AAA year.

Too bad Dave the Diver, Dredge, and Silksong will never get made 😔

Sorry hoss lost my cool won't happen again 😎

Lara Croft has been around since the triangle boobs. There aren't too many other characters that have been in 3D as long as Lara Croft (Mario 64 Was released the same year, but Mario hasn't come as far as Lara Croft has in terms of photorealism). Plus, she's instantly recognizable. Personally, I don't think there's any deeper reason than that.

Is that a real question? Like, what are we even doing here?

The advantage is that game companies are paid by hardware companies to push the boundaries of gamemaking, an art form that many creators enjoy working in and many humans enjoy consuming.

"It's ultimately creating more junk so it's bad" what an absolutely braindead observation. You're gonna log on to a website that's bad for the environment from your phone or tablet or computer that's bad for the environment and talk about how computer hardware is bad for the environment? Are you using gray water to flush your toilet? Are you keeping your showers to 2 minutes, unheated, and using egg whites instead of shampoo? Are you eating only locally grown foods because the real Earth killer is our trillion dollar shopping industry? Hope you don't watch TV or go to movies or have any fun at all while Taylor Swift rents her jet to Elon Musk's 8th kid.

Hey, buddy, Earth is probably over unless we start making some violent changes 30 years ago. Why would you come to a discussion on graphical fidelity to peddle doomer garbage, get a grip.

Is it diminishing returns? Yes, of course.

Is it taxing on your GPU? Absolutely.

But, consider Control.

Control is a game made by the people who made Alan Wake. It's a fun AAA title that is better than it has any right to be. Packed with content. No microtransactions. It has it all. The only reason it's as good as it is? Nvidia paid them a shitload of money to put raytracing in their game to advertise the new (at the time) 20 series cards. Control made money before it even released thanks to GPU manufacturers.

Would the game be as good if it didn't have raytracing? Well, technically yes. You can play it without raytracing and it plays the same. But it wouldn't be as good if Nvidia hadn't paid them, and that means raytracing has to be included.

A lot of these big budget AAA "photorealism" games for PC are funded, at least partially, by Nvidia or AMD. They're the games you'll get for free if you buy their new GPU that month. Consoles are the same way. Did Bloodborne need to have shiny blood effects? Did Spiderman need to look better than real life New York? No, but these games are made to sell hardware, and the tradeoff is that the games don't have to make piles of money (even if some choose to include mtx anyway).

Until GPU manufacturers can find something else to strive for, I think we'll be seeing these incremental increases in graphical fidelity, to our benefit.

I assume that, over time, you've memorized where everything in your living space is. You have some idea of what shape the space around you takes.

Seeing is knowing what shape a space takes without trial and error. The depth of a room or the texture of a couch. Knowing where an item is without having to touch it, or be told where it is.

How it feels... it feels safe. Seeing makes me feel safer. That's the only word that comes to mind.

Seeing Nier Automata on this list makes me think the author hasn't finished it. I'm not sure how you finish a full playthrough and come away with "2B's combat was kind of basic" while ignoring everything else it was doing.