what a novel concept.
A game with a great story will be boosted by amazing graphics. (RDR2, Cyberpunk).
Great stories will sell well, and sell well for a long time (Mass Effect, Dragon Age)
Great graphics will not be able to make up for a lackluster story (Pick any ubisoft game at random)
I want to add, good graphics doesn’t mean realism. All that you listed (and essentially all AAA) go for realism, because they’ve sold the idea realism is the way it should look. I don’t know about everyone else, but realist art is the least appealing to me. I can appreciate the skill and effort, but I can see better realism in real life. Games should try to be stylistic and intentional. They’re art. They should be creative and not limit themselves to what the real world looks like.
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No shit.
Look at all the highest rated games out there, they mostly all have amazing stories.
Too bad it’s games like Candy Crush that make the most money.
Too bad it’s games like Candy Crush that make the most money.
That’s only because they manipulate human nature via exploiting addiction and gambling habits.
Games execs reading your comment: “yeah, so?”
I read an article years ago, maybe like a decade ago, of some game industry person saying it was a cycle:
Incredible new graphics come out and people will buy the shiny regardless of anything else, then slowly they have to start making actually good games with those graphics to sell, then incredible new graphics come out and you don’t need to bother with story for a while.
This sounds like a shower thought I would have but when someone else says it, it just seems reductive and incorrect. The Germans probably have a word for this phenomenon.
I was just having a discussion with my family about recent union wins in the US, and when something good is a sign of how bad things must be. I suggested that there must be a german word for it, and my sister suggested maybe a chinese saying.
If you like the category of ‘things that sound like german has a word for it’, look into the 4-character chinese sayings called chengyu. One of my favourites is ‘Melon Patch, Under Plum’, meaning something that is completely innocent but should be avoided because it looks really sketchy. Don’t tie your shoes in a melon patch or fix your hat under a plum tree.
If I had to guess, each graphics cycle is a little less dominant than the last. The iterations on graphics are becoming lesser and lesser. A game from 10 years ago is far improved from a game 20 years ago, but not that much worse than a game from last month.
There are moments of awe (imo, especially in VR when a game “nails it”), but we’re pretty desensitized to high-graphics video games of late.
Wow, Sony execs figured out something gamers and devs have been saying for ten years. Really proving why the C-Suite guys get the big bucks.
Translation.
We just fired a bunch of graphic artists
…but hired some AI to generate the story.
Sony just pay your studios and stfu
Lmao, you mean how games used to be before everyone started chasing realism in graphics?
When was this? Even in the 90s, realism chasing was a thing. It’s easier to market graphical fidelity than good writing.
Isn’t Minecraft one of the biggest games on the planet? RimWorld simply awesome. Stardew selling millions…
Chasing top graphics hasn’t always been the route to success.
Of course, but you try justifying an increased budget for writing or a bunch of smaller titles to a publisher whose only qualification is that they have a lot of money.
Or you can go the Todd Howard route and promise endless proc-generated gameplay, so that they barely even have to pay writers, the game will write itself!
Or you can just show them a pretty picture, describe an action sequence that a 13 year old boy would love.
Or even better, you can point to another successful release and just go “Yeah, we’re gonna do that again. It’s 99% done already so we can do it really cheaply”
There was a point in time when better graphics meant progress since the expectation of good story wasn’t there at all.
Super Mario never had a great narrative. Unreal tournament 99 was mostly a tech demo that blew up.
Few games like Baldurs Gate took it and ran, but they’re a few.
Until 2002, narrative wasn’t the key to a great game, and it was already 20 years into the industry
Games like Sam and max, beneath a steelsky, it came from the desert, Dune, Darkseed, there are so many counter examples to your claim
Look at Betrayal At Krondor, amazing story that rivals and beats most fantasy today.
They were chasing realistic graphics at the time, but not graphical realism, such as puddles that react when stepped in, and so forth.
Of course it was due to the limitations back then, so they had to focus on polished gameplay.
Which maybe was a good thing after all…
duuude skyrim has mountains!!!
I habitually avoid anything with a descriptor of immersion / immersive, because IT NEVER IS. It’s a marketing single word used nowadays to convey what used to be called themed.
Did they say “Immersive”? I think this might be the closest they’ve come acknowledging their VR headset in years!
Playstation gets it. I haven’t been disappointed by a Playstation published game yet (Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted, God of War, etc.), unlike Ubisoft games which are abysmal.
Because that’s all the games they have. Imagine they would also suck. People who bought a ps5 would feel even dumber
What your point?
This is not unexpected, Sony games are movie games and they prioritize cinematics over anything else and graphics for the most part have peaked without going full path tracing. Shame they have no good writers at any of their studios anymore.
Immerse us in dlc and micropayments no doubt. We pay for PSN to have multi-player and they kill servers beloved by many. RIP LBP series
