Video game graphics look more realistic than ever, but that comes at a great cost to the people making games—and the games themselves. Are we missing the sweet spot of graphics? Can we find it again?
Microsoft just did another massive round of layoffs at Xbox. This time I won’t even mention the exact date or jobs affected, because it’ll probably be true whether you read this upon publication or after. This is just what the company does now. A reason often cited for these layoffs is the rising cost of AAA games, which is naturally tied to making them look as realistic as possible. Better graphics naturally cost more to achieve, but I think all the layoffs are more likely related to the megacorps’ inability to manage their talent. Still, this discourse opens the door to a question I’d like to put to consumers: would you be ok with graphics looking technically worse?
I grew up using video games as an escape from real life. Not because I had a bad childhood, but because I had too regular of one, especially when compared to what I could encounter in games. I also grew up in a marvelous time when I’d see the release of mind-blowing titles nearly every month, and they were much cheaper to make.
Today’s industry is ruled by the belief that AAA games need to look incredibly realistic. A AAA’s need for high-fidelity graphics serves as a pitfall that makes most games look both too alike and highly reminiscent of our boring lives.
Another problem with making everything look too realistic is the massive amount of extra work you’ll have to do to create realistic interactions with the environment, objects, and people from your game worlds, which causes newer and visually more realistic games like Red Dead Redemption 2, a game often used favorably in comparisons with more modern games, to actually play in a way that’s both less fun and less realistic than the original.
A recent social media comment that stayed with me was about how when someone’s talking about modern Rockstar games, it’s always about how realistic they are, never about how much fun. I agree, and it turns out even that realism is often surface-level. Also, and I understand how wild this might sound, but am I the only one who actually prefers the mix between realism and a stylized, almost painted look of RDR over the full-on realism of the sequel?
And there are many possible examples, but I think it’s best if we stick to the biggest of the biggest in the AAA arena. Even though it’s not as fun as Halo 3, and thus immediately an inferior title, do you really need anything that looks better than Halo 4, a game that did actually run on the Xbox 360?
And in case you’re a high-res purist finding this post beyond preposterous so far, I’ll do you one better. I’ll be more than satisfied with anything that looks nearly as good as Silent Hill 3.
And yeah, that’s from the PlayStation 2.
No wonder Star Wars Galaxies‘ creative director, Raph Koster, said recently that the next new big platform “needs to have shitty graphics.” At this point, I seriously hope that more than a few studios have taken notice of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s success. It’s the rare game that managed to achieve high graphical fidelity without compromising an artistic vision that sets it apart from the rest—and did it all for a relatively very low budget of just $10 million.
