Two words: Avatar budget

I'd settle for simply fun games. Graphics are great, yes, but graphics alone make for a poor experience, in my humble opinion. There are plenty of graphically pleasing movies that bore the hell out of me. The same is true of games. If I simply want realism, I'll look outside.
Give me a compelling story, or interactive moral choices, amazing gameplay, give me the sense of exploring fantastic areas, and I'm pleased with immersing myself in the game.

Graphics can make for a pretty icing on the cake of a video game, but if the cake tastes like S*&t, I won't continue eating it regardless of how pretty it looks.

Just my two cents, user experience may vary*

No. God damn it. Let's stop aiming for some Holy Grail of photo-realism, because it's never going to work. Even Avatar didn't make it out of the uncanny valley. Instead of looking to James Cameron and Michael Bay, let's look to Pixar, a group of peole who actually understand appealing visual design, and more importantly, how to create appealing visual design that works in CG.
Incredibles and Toy Story 3 look infinitely better than Avatar, and no, I'm not talking about some bullshit technological standard of "looks better", I meant it was actually a more visually engaging and appealing film.

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. They could hire about 1,000 programmers to make those graphics and the game could be about 30 minutes long. Unless the publisher decided to raise their budget by an entire order of magnitude, which I think is rather unlikely.

Yuck. I just re-watched Avatar the other day and it already looks dated. I turned it off halfway through because now that the visuals fail to impress there's no reason to put up with a shit retelling of Fern Gully. Not without Tim Curry singing about goo.

I still haven't seen Avatar because from the trailers, it looked really bad.

The man wants games to be like a film that was all style and no substance. What else is there to say?


Also, lol @ CliffyB/jimmyx bromance.

And what would he like us to pay for these games, eh?

We need better software before better hardware, nowadays it seems like the rule is to blame the old hardware to hide the huge lack of creativity in videogames today.

Back in the 80s or even the 90s the developers were there working with the only tools they had, trying to achieve the best software possible. Today they have the technology but that hunger is gone.

Bottom line is: "I can't do this, well I need new hardware"


PS: Avatar must be one of the worst movies of film history.

I'd rather have How to Train Your Dragon-quality graphics for games. Art design trumps reality in my book.

realistically a next gen of consoles wont come near this level of graphics unless its still gonna take some years before the next gen comes out which I dont think is true. I think they are comming out 2013/2014 when they do come out they will most likely not go that far if they even go above the level of graphics high end pc's can produce. because while optimization is not that great on pc due to the inefficiency of direct x and open gl because it needs to run on a lot of hardware. Hardware to produce more than those levels even greatly optimized will still be quite expensive 1 year before those consoles get released( its usually a year from the final hardware to the release of the console). Since I dont expect consoles to go above 600$ at launch which still is quite a lot it will not be able to produce that much more than current high end pc's can (with high end I mean dual 6950 that kind of stuff) they wont come even close to photo realism. yes over its course the graphics will improve but still it wont come close to avatar kind of levels (aweful cliche movie btw)

Ironic to hear this coming from a guy who ditched the one platform that can do high-level graphics (PC) for one that is long obsolete (360).

And no, pushing for that level of graphics would murder the gaming industry, how exactly are all of these developers supposed to fund that shit? The industry is already in trouble because it's reached a point where every dev is having to go to someone like EA or Activision to afford any project, and those guys hate creativity.

Define: good graphics. Dark Souls has really low-res textures, but still looks gorgeous and plays smoothly... save for Blight Town slowdown, which is ass. A lot of games look great with low-res/polys, it's the framerate that needs to be the focus for gaming.

For me: high framerate/good anti-aliasing > high-res textures

Basically, for games and not movies, 60fps or GTFO.

Firing up your projector at home? Oh wow, how first-world a problem can this be? It's such a tragedy that games don't look as good as your $50k overhead HD wall projector that you have in your million-dollar home, cliffyb. Jesus.. every time this douchebro opens his mouth, I want to punch him.

No! NO! BAD CLIFFY B!

I dunno, the games I'm playing at the moment: Forza4 and Dark Souls have some nice graphics. Any increment from here would be evolutionary and I don't want games to start costing $100 each.

I wanted better graphics when I was done with my NES and then I wanted better when I got bored with my SNES and on and on. Why would that change now?

The problem with having that level of graphics in real-time is you also have to have technology capable of rendering it in your living room. We can all afford a $10,000 game console now, can't we people. ...People?

Cliffy B. Blue in the face.

You relise it's not going to net you 11 of out 10 reviews, right Cliffy?

I want Bleszinski to observe a continued silence and I want games that cost less, Avatar grade graphics will not achieve the second and the first is beyond the wills of men or gods.

I'm with Cliffy on this one... Bring on the next generation !!! Meh bode is redeh!!!!

BF3 has shown us that we agree with Cliffy B.

Don't deny yourselves here.

@jimmyx

Gay feelings popping up for your favorite series creator?

I'm sick of hearing people say "I don't want this generation to end, I could buy 360 games for 3 more years." I'm more than ready to see the next generation of graphics and capacity.

That would depend on if pixelated games still would look neat on it!

I don't want hyper-real graphics. Ok, I wouldn't mind a step up from what they are now but I like playing video games not movies. This, to me, sounds like the games-trying-to-be-movies problem. Immersion in a game is one thing but I don't want it to be so real that it ceases to be fun. When I shoot a guy in his head I don't want to feel ill because it looked like it would in real life. Jim did a video on video-game violence and came up with the best argument for it being acceptable; it's so over the top that it can't be taken seriously enough to be real. Realistic graphics combined with the sense of agency that games give you may just stop that from being the case.

Fine Clifford, start digging into your own fortune to support that shit. Avatar looked good, but it still had a fake CGness about it that movies may never get rid of.

Yeah me too.

Pff, im gonna develop a platform which has a resolution of 320x240 with stereo audio, uses flashcards and controllers with 2-6 buttons and call it neo geo 2. The big three can suck it then, YEAH. GO GAMEPLAY! :)

Focus on the gameplay instead of the aesthetics. Tired of that topic already

Did somebody watch escape from planet Earth online?