It’s like a rewiring through new experience. Back in the day games were improving in looks and gameplay rapidly. Then the latter started deteriorating for many big studio titles.
You tell me some new AAAA Ubisoft game is coming out and my gag reflex starts to tingle.
A new pixel graphic indie title with great reviews? Sign me up.
The fruit that was once sweet has become poison.
I’m there with you, but a little worried that AI pixel slop is coming to ruin it.
Retro gaming has become my jam, but I’m also rapidly approaching 50 and have an 8y/o that likes to learn my old games with me for now. So I’m gonna enjoy that while we can.
My nieces’ favorite video game of all time is dead or alive 3 on the original Xbox. There’s a switch with new games and fancier graphics connected to an OLED tv but at the end of the day they just want to kick people as simply as possible. Old ass console connected to an old tv in a guest room.
Nobody is better at sniffing out what’s actually fun than kids. They might get tricked by marketing here and there but once they get their hands on things it’s a simple process for them. Does this spark joy?
Yeah, I feel like humanity should’ve figured out sooner that reality does not have great gameplay… 🫠
i mean, yeah it does. you just gotta figure out not only finding and maintaing relationships with compatible partners (both tasks difficulty: S)
Really I just want one thing. The same thing every gamer wants. To escape to the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
TO…SPEEESSS!
I present to you: loot boxes. And gacha.
To escape to the ONE. PLACE. UN. CORRUPTED! BY! CAPITALISM!
You should play World of Workcraft for like 40 hours a week.
Maybe you’ll be invited to heroic raids then!
Not mythic, that’s for the 200 hours per week players.
hard pass. did that for 25 years i cant remember anymore before my body broke
The reasons for adult you playing games younger you played are:
- They remind you of your youth. This happens when you get old enough to notice your youth is gone before you could even take full advantage of it.
- They don’t require a subscription and they don’t disappear when the publisher pulls the plug.
- They’re more fun.
All of the above
I still stand by the whole “Glorious PC gaming master race!!!” Circlejerk had a profoundly negative impact on video games, as for about 10 years the mainstream gaming community seemed to only give a shit about frame rates and resolutions and Devs where happy to just focus on that instead of making their games fun to play or have interesting stories.
Unfortunately, I’d have to agree with you. I recently got told by my brother that he a late thirties piss ant, thinks my 1440p 144hz monitor is shit compared to his 4k 260hz. Piss ant plays only dota. Only game he plays is dota. FUCKING DOTA. he is fucking herald 3. It’s like he is bottom 20%, he lives life in 30 fps and thinkshe can get use from 260hz.
I don’t even want to know what the price tag on his monitor / TV was.
Eh, I think that’s more of a business thing. Numbers are something execs can compare on spreadsheet. Putting more budget into making number go up is something execs will do. Creativity can’t be quantified as anything other than risk.
Of course anyone that likes video games knows making the same game over and over just with more pixels is boring. But how can you explain that in the form of a spreadsheet?
Of course anyone that likes video games knows making the same game over and over just with more pixels is boring
I wouldn’t be so confident in your average video game consumer. How many “HD Remake” games sold like hotcakes?
Stories?! In MY games?! We have AI for that at home.
do you even raytrace lol
/s
If youre my age, then games were advancing in graphic fidelity at the same rate as getting better and more in depth. Devs were able to learn from eachother on what makes a game great. Then the horse dlc happened, and suddenly devs could only make games that could be chopped up into pieces and sold as an al a carte game instead of the 7 course meals they had been making.
And even with that chopped up BS, they’re still not as in-depth as games were just kinda starting to get.
In most games I find no matter how good the static assets look, the animations immediately break the illusion of ‘realism’.
One recent exception to this were some of the cutscenes in Expedition 33, the facial mocap was very on-point and, even though the game isn’t anywhere close to photorealistic, it felt close to watching real actors perform a scene.
good graphics have replaced good art direction and style
I was interested in realistic graphics more when there was rapid progress being made with every iteration, because the technology was cool and impressive, but now there seems to be increasingly diminishing returns with only marginal improvements year on year, and they just increase in bloat and can’t afford to be niche. I look more for interesting and inventive gameplay these days, and indy/small budget games are where it’s at. I started gaming in the 8 bit era, btw.
I wanted photo realistic games when I was younger, and now I get to enjoy playing them. I also enjoy playing 2d games. It turns out fidelity is just an artistic choice which does little to predict the quality of a game 🙄
Also has to be said that 2D vs. 3D is basically just different genres, because it affects gameplay so much. Someone who only plays 3D games misses out on a whole bunch of variety.
I exclusively play 2.5D, to get the best of both worlds.
Never liked photorealistic games for some reason, my brain’s perception just filters it out past the first few minutes looking at effects.
With some modern photo-realistic games I can’t even discern anything on screen: it’s so much detail that my brain becomes overwhelmed :P
The new Doom is literally unplayable for me because of that (and the music).
i do think that cartoon-style games (like this) are more immersive in general.
For me immersion depends more on sound design than on visuals.
Infra Arcana, the game that looks like this (screenshot’s not mine):

It is among the most immersive horror experiences for me. I still clearly remember walking down a long empty corridor, stumbling upon a door at the end of it, and when I approached the door something behind it started banging - it was so fucking scary!
Well, it does just look like more of that reality, you can find outside. It’s kind of inherently boring.
Partly because games are so inefficient these days that we have no choice. Looking at you, Unity and Unreal
Nooooooooo, you’re just envious because you don’t have a RTX 5090 that only costs 15k dollars and needs to generate fake frames at 400*300 to maintain a stable 60FPS
/s
I’ve been playing the older Ys games. Ys seven and back. These games are great. I didn’t play a single Ys game until last year. No nostalgia for them. Practically no JRPG nostalgia either as I was a Diablo/Baldurs Gate type gamer 20+ years ago. Now I’m eating up all these old JRPG games
deleted by creator
Something about this series where the games seem budget for their era but has great polish. Good music. The stories are fun entertaining adventures. The characters are lovable. Gameplay is fun to me and iove the music. I’m impressed with how the games on PC have ultrawide support. Eventually I’ll get to 8-10 where everyone hypes up 8 as best in series. And all the modern games are easy enough for pretty much anyone to run on cheap hardware. Great series
Until it can be actually photo-realistic and cross the uncanny valley, it’s best to just have a stylized aesthetic anyway.
No, you must be angry about “DEI-chins” and “uglified women” instead, then demand that all female characters must be like Eve from Stellar Blade! /j
ASCII NetHack FTW

holy shit I feel personally identified
Imma go get drunk
@!!!
I’ve never ascended, only descended to my inevitable grave…
My IRL gravestone will read simply:
YASD
Mine will read “You have died of dysentery”.
I stopped being a graphics whore around the mid PS2 era, mostly because my computer couldn’t run the more realistic games like GTA Vice City 😁
I unironically love seeing newer indies with PS1/N64 style 3D graphics
I love it too, Dusk being one of my favorites. My only complaints with modern PS1/PSX aesthetic 3D graphics (as I often see on reddit):
- overly exagerrated vertex wobble (the only time i really noticed that was quake 2 animations on a high-res monitor)
- low polygon count, but modern effects (soft shadows, god rays, etc)













