Any of you feel like we’ve become so fixated on graphics and perfomance to the point where the actual game part of a video game is often overlooked, or at least underemphasized? I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I come across on social media regarding gaming is about resolution, ray tracing, DLSS/FSR, frame rates, frame time, CPU and GPU untilization, and all of that stuff, and I’m honestly sick of it! I mean performance markers have always been discussed when it comes to PC gaming, but now even console gaming is getting this treatment! Don’t you miss the days when you just installed the game and just played it? I know I do. What do you think?
To me it sounds more like the social media algorithms put you into the “gaming tech” corner so that’s all you see. Indie gaming is huge and not at all about graphics. Look at the currently popular games on Steam and a ton of them are technologically very basic.
Also don’t forget retro games.
Even new games can be run on midrange hardware if you don’t crank up the settings.
People want big numbers and companies watch to sell the latest stuff. No one gives a platform for advocating low budgets, cheaper hardware and patient gaming.
I feel it’s a bit like any hobby. You’d see casual film enjoyers and then those who refuse to watch unless it’s a bluray on their 4k Dolby Vision TV with 1000 nits OLED brightness. There are some who just enjoy listening to music on their airpod knockoffs by streaming on YouTube music and then there are those who buy $500 headphones with high quality gold plated aux wire and a custom DAC and use some obscure format to really enjoy music. There are some who enjoy team sports and then there are those who know personal routine of each player and the wetness of the grass or the year of the ball’s manufacturing and its impact on throw.
It’s a spectrum.
You may as well have typed this in 2009 or 2015.
It used to be that people argued that it’s worth getting the new game console because “better graphics”. The console wars hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just expanded.
In any case, in regards to just installing a game and playing it, no, not really. When I was playing games in college in 2012 it was still a time when you would open a game and go to the settings menu to adjust settings.
Sometimes it was just turning off motion blur, but there was always settings to change to try to reach a stable 60FPS.
Nothing changed, it just expanded. Now instead of 60FPS it’s a variable 60-240FPS. Instead of just 720p-1080p resolution, unless it’s portable, it’s 1080p minimum otherwise variable up to 4k. Instead of “maxing out” we now have raytracing which pushes software further than our hardware is capable.
These aren’t bad things, they’re just now 1) slightly marketed, 2) more well known in the social sphere. There isn’t anything stopping you from opening up the game and going right away, and there’s nothing stopping other people from wondering about frame timings and other technical details.
Sure, focusing on the little things like that can take away from the wider experience, but people pursue things for different reasons. When I got Cyberpunk 2077 I knew that there were issues under the hood, but my experience with the game at launch was also pretty much perfect because I was focused on different things. I personally don’t think a dip here and there is worth fretting over, but some people it ruins the game for them. Other people just like knowing that they’re taking full advantage of their hardware, hence figuring out the utilization of their components.
There’s one last aspect not mentioned. Architectures. 10 years ago games would just boot up and run… But what about games from 10 years before then? Most players not on consoles were having to do weird CPU timing shenanigans to be able to boot up a game from (now 20) years ago. We’re in the same boat now with emulation, which while emulation is faring better, X360/PS3 generation games that had PC ports are starting to have issues on modern Windows. Even just 5 or 6 years ago games like Sleeping Dogs wouldn’t play nice on modern PC’s, so there’s a whole extra aspect of tinkering on PC that hasn’t even been touched on.
All this to say, we are in the same boat we’ve always been in. The only difference is that social media now has more knowledge about these aspects of gaming so it’s being focused on more.
The one thing I do agree with though is that this is all part of software development. Making users need better hardware, intentional or not, is pretty crazy. The fact that consoles themselves now have Quality vs Performance modes is also crazy. But, I will never say no to more options. I actually think it’s wrong that the console version of games often are missing settings adjustments, when the PC counterpart has full control. I understand when it’s to keep performance at an acceptable level, but it can be annoying.
all I come across on social media regarding gaming is about resolution, ray tracing, DLSS/FSR, frame rates, frame time, CPU and GPU untilization, and all of that stuff,
That’s because those are measurable factors in a game, things that can be objectively measured. “Fun” and “playability” though are subjective, so a journalist has a harder time telling you if a game will work for you.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, old games were just as fucking janky on release, and most of them took years of modders fixing all those issues for them to get better.
Fallout 1 & 2 - janky on release
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 - janky on release
Morrowind - janky on release
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Chernobyl - janky on release
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 - janky on release
All of these were capable of being installed and “just playing” them on release. There were countless bugs and janky behavior and that’s normal and we’re now spoiled by day 1 patches. STALKER 2 has been out a month and has had three major patches for bug fixes. STALKER Call of Chernobyl probably could have used the same but in 2007 the infrastructure to push quick updates just wasn’t there yet. Steam had only released by Valve in late 2003, roughly three and a half years earlier.
I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn’t really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).
I feel like I might get a ton of downvotes for this, but I kind of disagree. Maybe when it comes to things like texture detail, we certainly don’t need every single hair on Roach modeled with full physics or anything.
That’s only a subset of what constitutes graphics in a game though. I think that while it is computationally expensive, the improvements in lighting that we’re seeing contribute to making graphics more realistic and do matter.
I get that people meme on Ray Tracing and the whole RTX On thing, but lighting techniques like Path Tracing, Global Illumination, and Dynamic Illumination are just as much a generational shift as physics was in HL2. Output resolution and texture resolution got pushed to a point where any further gains are marginal improvements at best. Physics is getting to that point, although there’s still room for improvement. Look at how well the finals handles destruction physics, or the ballistics models used in Arma 3. Lighting is the next thing being refined, and it has a ways to go. I’d bet that in 10 years full, real time, dynamic, ray traced lighting will be taken for granted, and we’ll be arguing whether there’s any value or added realism benefit to increasing the number of individual rays cast by each light source, or how many bounces they take. I’d also not be surprised if people were memeing about RTX Sound On at that point and saying that game audio peaked with HRTF or Spatial Audio.
