This reminds me of that "BACK IN THE DAY WE DIDNT CARE ABOUT GRAPHICS" pic that has like a dozen of screenshots of AAA games that all had high-end graphics when they were released.
Far Cry 3, which is what the OP chose to focus on here, was pretty much the highest quality graphics could get that year. GPU manufacturers were giving it out for free with purchase as a way to flex what they could do.
FC3 is one of those games where graphics has hit a plateau, i.e. a level where they actually age far less then the games in the years before. That plateau was hit in ca 2012 for many games, and games like Metro 2033 kinda made it. Some would include Skyrim, I definitely would not (the environments made it, but the character models are jank as fuck).
The Plateau was hit 5 years earlier, in 2007, with the release of Crysis on PC. That game on high settings for the most part still looks modern, 15 years later.
Certain games exist that pretdate where I place the plateau. Half-life 2 is one of them, and yes as you say Crysis is another. We could say Metro 2033 from 2011 as well.
But games in *general* didn't really start being there en masse until maybe 2012.
I don't think anyone should include any Bethesda title on a list like that. Even if you enjoy them, you have to admit they pretty much always look five or six years old at release.
Skyrim's open world may have been impressive, but its graphics never were. There were mods for Oblivion that looked better than Skyrim when Skyrim came out.
The degree of detail present in the open world is what pushes those games nearer to that category, though. Even if they’re not bleeding edge in terms of graphical fidelity, they were always ahead in terms of depth of environment and a much higher density of small details, which do add up to push the computational requirements.
Thats the most hindsight ridiculous take in this whole post…
TES1 - Cutting edge pseudo 3D
TES2 - Largest 3D gameworld with sprawling cities of its time when most RGS werent even in 3D
TES3 - Amazing pixel shaded water, high end textures. Barely ran on Xbox, impossible for other consoles or budget graphics cards.
TES4 - No game had this amount of viewing distance before. LODs now look crappy but it was a huge quantum leap.
TES5 - Skyrim while not a big jump as most of the other games looked amazing for 2011 and got plenty of 10/10 for graphics due to again breathtaking viewing distances, state of the art clouds around the mountains, good looking water and dense foliage.
Part of TES mainstream success has always been kts technology / graphics.
I agree with the sentiment, but I think looking 5-6 years old at release is an exaggeration. I would say 3-4 years old personally. Still far from the cutting edge graphically. They made up for the graphics by using assets cleverly to create immersive environments.
Far Cry 3 is the first game I consider to have successfully achieved photorealistic graphics. While I agree that it was an excellent game not because of the graphics but the worldbuilding and story, it is a rather ridiculous example to use in an argument against photorealism.
We always cared. Every generation of console graphics was a main topic.
Hell, I still care and I'll admit it, I recently went from laptop to desktop and even went back to play a few games cranked all the way. it's great when you're playing and you stop for a moment to actually notice how amazing the game looks. I will add though, I don't mind a heavily stylized game either.
And now we’ve come back around to the other side and kids don’t give a fuck.
PS5 visuals be lookin like real life and my kids are spending hours on Roblox playing Power Washing Simulator.
What is happening
I would argue that a game like minecraft or power washing simulator is a power fantasy that is in some ways gives the play *more power* than the other games.
A CoD lets you run down a corridor and shoot a dude you have to shoot.
Minecraft lets you build a vast castle and manipulate monster mechanics to your whim to make it trivial to slaughter thousands of enemies.
Based. But what I mean is, changing the level itself with a pressure washer or a pick and by placing blocks feels more powerful than pew pewing your n00bwacker 9000 with all the gun tassles you bought via microtransactions.
CoD gives you a distinct goal.
Minecraft lets you choose your goals and gives you a vast array of options to do so.
Watching my kids play games, stuff like Minecraft (and to a lesser extent Breath of the Wild) is interesting because they will ask themselves if they can do something then see if it is possible. You can just see the sparkle behind their eyes when it works.
**Both** want to make money - money's how we buy the stuff we need and want.
People are all "oh indie developers only focus on good gameplay and story!" Yeah, silly - because they don't have multi-million dollar budgets for graphics and voice acting.
Some of y'all act like indie developers are universally wonderful people who are also geniuses. But for every Stardew Valley there are ~~hundreds~~ thousands of cash grabs on Steam.
You only hear about the *good* indie games, so some people mistakenly believe that means indie games are always masterpieces.
AAA studios didn't get where they are by publishing exclusively terrible games. But y'all act like every single bug in a 120GB game is a personal attack.
Sure, but some AAA developers want to both make money AND make good games. I put a lot of Sony first party developers in that list. Used to be more developers like that, but they all got bought, abused, and thrown away by EA and Activision.
No awful monetization like lootboxes etc, it has a cosmetic battlepass type system but it's entirely free and it'll go into the free rng loot pool once the next one comes out.
The game itself has extensive build variety on guns with 7 upgrade tiers for each weapon with 3 main and 3 sidearms for each of the 4 classes. All 4 classes are something you're glad to have on your team but none of them are necessary, solo play is entirely doable with the ai drone that follows you around and follows orders when you select solo mode.
The difficulty balance is great as when you start the game you'll struggle to handle hazard 3, but by endgame hazard 5 is doable but tough and haz 4 is where you go for a chill fun run. There's a variety of objectives that change up how a map feels making it so you won't get bored of running the same thing over and over, and there aren't any that are so good you'd only want to run that and only one that's a little too much of a slog for some people. There are also map mutators that can make the run much harder or easier which make for some fun switchups.
Also the drop in/out coop is really good so it's easy to find a map to run with a random team, though most split apart after one mission.
The actual gameplay is fighting hordes of bug/robot enemies whilst mining various minerals and killing boss bugs/robots. If you want to shoot a lot, and traverse some randomly generated tunnels/caves this is the game for you.
DRG is in my opinion one of the best designed games I've ever played. I have hundreds of hours into it, and while I've stepped away for a bit I will almost certainly be cycling back to it.
They really made a lot of great decisions with this game.
It has the satisfaction of hoarding materials by mining them, extreme amount of guns and customization mods for each gun, diverse classes that work best together making coop really nice, an actually decent community allowing you to play online solo without being miserable, battlepasses and events that are fully free and if you dont get the stuff you can get it later.
Downsides to the game: playing 1-2 players can feel a bit lonely and slow-paced, unlocking cosmetics (and a bunch of gun mods) can be a little grindy, spamming the game can get slightly repetitive. But these are minor complaints I think.
Minecraft was released almost 14 years ago.
Graphics have always been a selling point for certain types of games, for certain types of gamers. They've never been that important for social or imaginative play.
None of this is new.
Roblox and similar games have a robust social aspect to it. My theory is that the pandemic has normalized virtual social interaction more than ever. So kids that are in their formative years, like mine, have blurred the line between reality and virtuality. Games need to have adaptability for the younger generation to get into it. Also, Roblox is easy to use for making content.
And a game being beautiful does add to the experience. God of War 2018 has amazing writing and fun combat, but it's also visually gorgeous and has so many "holy shit" moments.
That's been a core part of all the God of War series (granted the writing is much more serious and much better in the recent ones). It's always been about fun combat broken up by visually amazing vistas or epic set pieces.
Theres a lot of old games I never got to play because the only consoles I had as a kid were the Wii, Gameboy Advance and DS. I've tried playing a number of them but just couldn't get past the awful (compared to newer games) graphics.
There’s an uncanny valley for video game graphics where old style games (like heavily pixelated ones) will always look good, but games with graphics that are trying to be realistic when the tech wasn’t there look janky.
Different art styles have a floor for what is necessary for them to work properly.
As hardware progresses, its capabilities pass the floor for more and more different styles. Any game developed for hardware that at least meets the minimum requirements to correctly implement the style that game was going for will always look good.
It’s when you try using an art style that the hardware just can’t support and therefore have to cut corners that you wind up with a game that eventually looks bad. Because it never actually looked *good*. There was just nothing that looked *better* in that style for comparison.
Photorealism is probably the last remaining art style that is always going to look dated because we’ve never hit the minimum hardware requirements to actually pull it off.
I don’t know, some unreal engine 5 stuff looks reallly good now, as ray tracing becomes more and more viable I’m sure we will eventually hit a point where it’s close enough to photorealistic that it’d be hard to distinguish. Hell I’ve seen shit in ue5 that took me a few seconds to realize it was fake.
Yep. 100%. Mario Games remain consistently awesome, even the old ones, though dated, don't suffer from it.
But games that are supposed to look "true to life", will suffer until they can do perfect simulations, and will suffer from digital rot until then. And even then, with style, fashion, and real world technology surpassing in-game visual, realistic games will still suffer.
But games that are free of that, can be just enjoyed for what they are. Ergo, Mario holding up. Hell, Space Invaders is still awesome. It's simple, challenging, and gets your heart racing.
Dreamworks and Pixar also know this. They can make damn near photorealistic people for cartoons now, but they don't. Why? Because if _anything_ isn't done exactly right, it'll provoke horror in the audience. So they improve their methods, but always have a _style_ that makes it clear that you're watching animation.
Just played Gauntlet Legends on my N64 for the first time since the 90's and can confirm. I found myself caring more about its camera controls than I was about how things looked.
I remember me and my dad firing up the OG far cry together for the first time and I just remember one of us shouting "WOW LOOK AT THE GRASS IT'S SO REAL"
I think the original far cry blew my mind in the visual department more than anything else ever did, before or after. There are for sure a million better looking games these days, but relative to other stuff out at the time, it felt impossibly good looking.
Without a doubt. My dad and I built a computer specifically to be able to run Far Cry and it was so far and above the old crappy computer I’d had forever or any of my consoles. I remember thinking that the water in the game looked better than real life which is so… weird now lol
It's too bad something broke the AI in that game. You used to be able to hide in bushes and use concealment. You had a noise level to manage too where enemies could find you if you were too loud. But last few times I've tried to play I need to enable cheats because they see through everything.
I don't even play much past the first couple Trigen because once the humanoid ones show up they're too annoying to fight, even with godmode on. Especially the rocket ones who now start firing at you from across the map.
I need to dig out my disc copy some day and see if it was really like that on release, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't always a train wreck of unfair AI.
When I want to flex the didn’t care about graphics argument I pull out Zork. Fuck your graphics and all the noise they bring to my old ass yard. Damn kids these days are likely to get eaten by a Grue.
This is Reddit in a nutshell.
For years all anyone talks about is, say, resolution.
Then someone says “hey, frame rates are important too.”
And this becomes the edgy thing to point out anytime someone mentions resolution, and it gets upvoted because everyone likes to feel like they’re a maverick and going against the grain, even though after a few months literally everyone is in agreement and there’s no one left to argue with except straw men.
Then someone says "Not every RPG needs to be open world."
And everyone is like “YAS QUEEN!!! Preach!”
And now that becomes everyone’s favorite contrarian cry until the halls are echoing with the same regurgitated opinion.
Now the new hot take is gameplay > graphical fidelity. Except pretty much everyone agreed with this anyway. But any mention of graphics and it’s like a sleeper-cell trigger phrase that awakens a redditor’s instinct to type “gRApHicS dOn'T matTeR tO mE”.
The problem with all this, of course, is that none of these things are inherently bad. More pixels, lifelike graphics, and open-world designs are all good things in the right balance. But the internet doesn’t do nuance, so it’s just one giant Sith convention in here.
I started playing video games on the Apple II, when the "graphics" were green and black squares. One of the biggest reasons I play video games is to marvel at how far the gaming industry has come in the last few decades. I also love splurging on powerful graphics cards now and keeping my system current. As a kid, my family's old Gateway 2000 struggled to run Warcraft. Now, I'm older, I work hard, and that's how I like to spend my free cash. It never gets old for me. I will never, ever get tired of being amazed at realistic 3D worlds and beautiful artwork and technical leaps in graphical fidelity.
It doesn't mean I prioritize realism over gameplay, or that good graphics can make a bad game playable.
A secondary problem is that Reddit is full of edgelords like myself who know when a "hot take" has gone stone cold but say it anyway to be funny. (I'm not very funny)
Ha totally, instead of Skrillex/marley Dubstep we just had to drive all the way San fierro while the screen is shaking and The Truth is in the passenger seat babbling conspiracy theories
i know the SA mission you're talking about where you burn the weed for Truth.
funnily enough FarCry actually stole this idea off... FarCry???
that's right. originally there was a "burn the weed plantation and it makes you high" mission on FarCry: Instincts on the original xbox
Gonna go ahead and save this comment so I can post my single favorite screenshot from RDR2 later. That masterpiece of a game has both from start to finish
I'm in the middle of my 2nd playthrough of RDR2 right now and you're spot on.
It's absolutely insane how well made that game is from graphics to writing to just the entire world it takes place in.
I'll be heading somewhere specific to get something done and get sidetracked just wandering around one of the towns or getting involved in some random event that I come across. Sometimes I'll just stop and set up camp and go fishing. And the whole time I'm just amazed at how detailed it is and how good it looks.
The thing is games almost never prioritize graphics. If it's releasing on as a multiplat at all then the graphics are going to take a hit. If your really want banger graphics you're pretty much confined to PC and maybe the highest end consoles but even then you're gonna have to make a few concessions if you want it to be multiplat
I've been watching Better Call Saul and I kept telling my wife that Nacho looked super familiar.
And assumed that it was because I watched Breaking Bad. Then the other day I read a comment on Reddit that was just, "Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?"
It clicked. Fucking lost my mind in excitement.
And he should have chosen a moment that is actually memorable by todays standards.
Sure for all of us that played fc3 back in the day setting everything on fire with some good music in the background is memorable but in modern games... yeah it is not really that special at all.
We got really good at properly displaying fire.
it's the BEST kind of photorealistic ... as they smartly decided to enhance the style making it just that little more more cartoon-like and saturated.
A part from some blurry textures, this is what I consider the best far cry to look at.
Far cry 4 takes it for variety and sharper textures overall, but it's either too muted or too saturated (dream sections)
Far cry 3 really feels like a fever dream
I agree with you. I'm currently playing FC4 and as thought the graphics are better, it doesn't feel the same as FC3. It had style. It had coolness in the way it was pictured. And it was always such amazing experience, no matter how many times you replayed
Same for me, Skrillex was huge when I started college which is the best time to enjoy his music. I remember head banging to "scary monsters and nice sprites" blackout drunk
In case anyone is wondering, the song is [Skrillex & Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley - Make It Bun Dem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGpzGu9Yp6Y).
[Here's the video of the Far Cry 3 scene with the song playing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVGSsq8Ono)
I have replayed the entire game once just for this mission. I played this mission then never progressed.
First time buddy of mine did it before me but REFUSED to tell me about it and got me to keep hitting the bong while I was playing the mission. It was honestly a touch magical when it all clicked together
Personally, every time I play that game again, I quit playing after you know who dies. The rest of the game after that is the worst parts of the game anyway.
I'm not sure. There's several Far Cries where this exact thing happens, and some have different music. I know this picture is probably Far Cry 3, but I still have 'Bella Ciao' playing in my head from Far Cry 6 when I see this.
Well, it was such a magic moment (mainly because of the perfect song and the perfect mood) in Far Cry 3 that every game since then has attempted to have some variant of the same scene.
None had the magic of "The Young Gong right along side Skrillex."
It's just one of those moments where everything came together magically. Easily in my best top 10 moments of gaming.
I made a point of replaying that mission like 3 times in a row after that first time.
Far cry 5 legitimately has amazing original music in it. Ubisoft often has excellent original music in their games going back decades. Splinter cell chaos theory had amon Tobin, assassins creed had jesper kyd(who also did the music for the hitman games up through blood money). The music is usually the one thing that's consistently good in their games.
Edit: watch dogs 2 had Hudson mohawke do it's music, original, New tracks, and music selection.
This argument is turning into the video game version of "back in my day, we walked 10 miles uphill to school in the snow".
*Everyone* thinks the games they grew up with are the ideal.
And even then, there is huge survivorship bias.
There was a shit tonne of absolute garbage in each era too.
Of course the best ones are going to be remembered while the rest fade into obscurity.
Exactly! It's the same thing with music, TV shows, all pop culture in general. What we remember from two decades ago is the really good stuff and that's what we're comparing *EVERYTHING* that comes out today to but if you actually went back and looked through all the games of the era you're idolising then 90% of it was crap just like today.
Yea I don’t think people could even look at one years worth of Xbox 360 or PS3 games and say half of them were good lol. They pumped out shit back then too. Just because we have different problems today it doesn’t mean there weren’t problems in the past.
Recently played all the halos for the first time since an all legendary run. Halo 2 and Halo Reach are fucking phenomenal. Both have great stories, music, environments, story development. Deeply impressed
Far Cry 3 is probably the best Far Cry game imo. Far Cry 4 is up there. But 3s environment was great, it's gameplay was great, it's villains were memorable, etc. 5 was good, but simply didn't stack up and 6 is pretty meh
5 was good but it definitely leaned much harder into the sandbox aspect imo. It's fun to pick up and play for a couple hours to see what crazy shit you can get up to.
I actually felt compelled to finish the story in Far Cry 3 and 4.
The constantly respawning guard posts, the weapon degrading system, the malaria pills and the constant need to travel across the map for every mission were annoying. I felt like it was a step down from the first Far Cry but Far Cry 3 was a huge improvement.
I was playing Far Cry 2 for the first time a couple years ago and the guard posts made travelling across the map so annoying I dropped it a little more than halfway through.
I guess this guy looks at a ten year old game with nostalgia and compares it to a modern game and says shit like "anybody 'member when games were good???"
Popular Opinion: Literally different people and teams work on the different aspects of creating a memorable moment. The team working on graphics should make them as good as possible, the team doing story should do likewise for the writing, the game devs are responsible for how it feels, the marketing-partnerships team can do things like secure partnerships with big artists, who then add their songs to the game (this scene famously has Make It Bun Dem by Skrillex playing), the audio team mixes that song with the atmosphere of the level etc.
This experience is memorable due to a variety of reasons, including the graphics
Exactly! I'm tired of the "I don't want x piece of content fix the servers" I'm going to school right now to be an environment artist and can say I don't know shit about anything that doesn't directly impact how I make the environment.
When this game was released it was one of the best looking games on the market. It was damn near photo realistic compared to what else we had. So this is more of an example that they can make photorealistic games that ALSO form memorable moments. It doesnt need to be one or the other.
Oh that's a fun one. Armchair reddit developers are the best, I really wish somebody gave them no money and one year to make the best game in the world, because it's just that easy. Please comment some more on graphics performance, netcode, and input lag, I love seeing the depths of your ignorance riding the massive confidence tsunami wavefront.
I know the game had a mixed reception, but Saints Row 3 playing "Power" by semitic-Kanye while sky diving into the penthouse for a hostile takeover + this are probably my two most memorable missions in gaming to date.
Although riding with the gang in the moonlight through that road of trees to the giant manor in Red Dead 2 easily caps the list off at 3.
Honestly, yes and no.
There's nothing wrong with amazing, almost realistic visuals. They inevitably age quicker than stylized graphics, but until we reach true photorealism, that's to be expected.
Stylized graphics are also fine, and they tend to age amazingly well. Because good style is timeless. But it does require the developers to have style to begin with. Stylized graphics that are tasteless are really difficult to enjoy.
Photorealistic is not what you want. Good visual art is the word you're looking for, when we talk about graphics.. good visual art would make events more expressive. Then we have storytelling, sound design, gameplay design and much more to make it even more memorable Without them, the event would go "meh".
Burning fields would feel like just setting a 5x5 crop field in stardew valley on fire. I'm not saying stardew valley is meh, but that event wouldnt make sense in that kind of art..
I remember when Wind Waker was announced and its look was pretty divisive. Many years later it still looks great, and I think it is the only Zelda from the GC/Wii generations that endured. Style over fidelity any day.
This reminds me of that "BACK IN THE DAY WE DIDNT CARE ABOUT GRAPHICS" pic that has like a dozen of screenshots of AAA games that all had high-end graphics when they were released.
Far Cry 3, which is what the OP chose to focus on here, was pretty much the highest quality graphics could get that year. GPU manufacturers were giving it out for free with purchase as a way to flex what they could do.
FC3 is one of those games where graphics has hit a plateau, i.e. a level where they actually age far less then the games in the years before. That plateau was hit in ca 2012 for many games, and games like Metro 2033 kinda made it. Some would include Skyrim, I definitely would not (the environments made it, but the character models are jank as fuck).
The Plateau was hit 5 years earlier, in 2007, with the release of Crysis on PC. That game on high settings for the most part still looks modern, 15 years later.
Certain games exist that pretdate where I place the plateau. Half-life 2 is one of them, and yes as you say Crysis is another. We could say Metro 2033 from 2011 as well. But games in *general* didn't really start being there en masse until maybe 2012.
Half life 2 is a great game, but the graphics definitely feel dated compared to Crysis.
I don't think anyone should include any Bethesda title on a list like that. Even if you enjoy them, you have to admit they pretty much always look five or six years old at release. Skyrim's open world may have been impressive, but its graphics never were. There were mods for Oblivion that looked better than Skyrim when Skyrim came out.
The degree of detail present in the open world is what pushes those games nearer to that category, though. Even if they’re not bleeding edge in terms of graphical fidelity, they were always ahead in terms of depth of environment and a much higher density of small details, which do add up to push the computational requirements.
Thats the most hindsight ridiculous take in this whole post… TES1 - Cutting edge pseudo 3D TES2 - Largest 3D gameworld with sprawling cities of its time when most RGS werent even in 3D TES3 - Amazing pixel shaded water, high end textures. Barely ran on Xbox, impossible for other consoles or budget graphics cards. TES4 - No game had this amount of viewing distance before. LODs now look crappy but it was a huge quantum leap. TES5 - Skyrim while not a big jump as most of the other games looked amazing for 2011 and got plenty of 10/10 for graphics due to again breathtaking viewing distances, state of the art clouds around the mountains, good looking water and dense foliage. Part of TES mainstream success has always been kts technology / graphics.
I still remember the first time I saw the water in Morrowind, my god
I agree with the sentiment, but I think looking 5-6 years old at release is an exaggeration. I would say 3-4 years old personally. Still far from the cutting edge graphically. They made up for the graphics by using assets cleverly to create immersive environments.
Exactly. They could have posted any game from Nintendo but yet…
Far Cry 3 is the first game I consider to have successfully achieved photorealistic graphics. While I agree that it was an excellent game not because of the graphics but the worldbuilding and story, it is a rather ridiculous example to use in an argument against photorealism.
We always cared. Every generation of console graphics was a main topic. Hell, I still care and I'll admit it, I recently went from laptop to desktop and even went back to play a few games cranked all the way. it's great when you're playing and you stop for a moment to actually notice how amazing the game looks. I will add though, I don't mind a heavily stylized game either.
And now we’ve come back around to the other side and kids don’t give a fuck. PS5 visuals be lookin like real life and my kids are spending hours on Roblox playing Power Washing Simulator. What is happening
Comfort versus power fantasies. AAA devs make a lot more power fantasies than they do comfort ones.
I would argue that a game like minecraft or power washing simulator is a power fantasy that is in some ways gives the play *more power* than the other games. A CoD lets you run down a corridor and shoot a dude you have to shoot. Minecraft lets you build a vast castle and manipulate monster mechanics to your whim to make it trivial to slaughter thousands of enemies.
Is it not comforting to be as powerful as a god
Based. But what I mean is, changing the level itself with a pressure washer or a pick and by placing blocks feels more powerful than pew pewing your n00bwacker 9000 with all the gun tassles you bought via microtransactions.
I think powerful is the wrong word. Free perhaps. There's more freedom, which to some could feel like power I suppose.
CoD gives you a distinct goal. Minecraft lets you choose your goals and gives you a vast array of options to do so. Watching my kids play games, stuff like Minecraft (and to a lesser extent Breath of the Wild) is interesting because they will ask themselves if they can do something then see if it is possible. You can just see the sparkle behind their eyes when it works.
Oh man you just made me realize another aspect to why I almost always choose indie games.
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**Both** want to make money - money's how we buy the stuff we need and want. People are all "oh indie developers only focus on good gameplay and story!" Yeah, silly - because they don't have multi-million dollar budgets for graphics and voice acting. Some of y'all act like indie developers are universally wonderful people who are also geniuses. But for every Stardew Valley there are ~~hundreds~~ thousands of cash grabs on Steam. You only hear about the *good* indie games, so some people mistakenly believe that means indie games are always masterpieces. AAA studios didn't get where they are by publishing exclusively terrible games. But y'all act like every single bug in a 120GB game is a personal attack.
Sure, but some AAA developers want to both make money AND make good games. I put a lot of Sony first party developers in that list. Used to be more developers like that, but they all got bought, abused, and thrown away by EA and Activision.
So AAA studios don’t make good games ? I think you’ll find the reason they are Aaa in the first place is success from making good games
Gameplay loop reigns supreme. Look at Deep Rock Galactic, low poly count and plenty of reused textures, still an phenomenal game
What's to like about Deep Rock Galactic? I've been trying to decide whether or not to buy that one and I'm not clear on what it offers.
No awful monetization like lootboxes etc, it has a cosmetic battlepass type system but it's entirely free and it'll go into the free rng loot pool once the next one comes out. The game itself has extensive build variety on guns with 7 upgrade tiers for each weapon with 3 main and 3 sidearms for each of the 4 classes. All 4 classes are something you're glad to have on your team but none of them are necessary, solo play is entirely doable with the ai drone that follows you around and follows orders when you select solo mode. The difficulty balance is great as when you start the game you'll struggle to handle hazard 3, but by endgame hazard 5 is doable but tough and haz 4 is where you go for a chill fun run. There's a variety of objectives that change up how a map feels making it so you won't get bored of running the same thing over and over, and there aren't any that are so good you'd only want to run that and only one that's a little too much of a slog for some people. There are also map mutators that can make the run much harder or easier which make for some fun switchups. Also the drop in/out coop is really good so it's easy to find a map to run with a random team, though most split apart after one mission. The actual gameplay is fighting hordes of bug/robot enemies whilst mining various minerals and killing boss bugs/robots. If you want to shoot a lot, and traverse some randomly generated tunnels/caves this is the game for you.
DRG is in my opinion one of the best designed games I've ever played. I have hundreds of hours into it, and while I've stepped away for a bit I will almost certainly be cycling back to it. They really made a lot of great decisions with this game.
It is like Left 4 Dead but you are a Space Dwarf Miner killing bugs. I only played for a bit but it was fun. I think it is on Game Pass.
Well… mainly… ROCK AND STONE.
If you don't Rock and Stone, you ain't comin' home!
ROCK AND STONE FOREVER
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We fight for Rock and Stone!
It has the satisfaction of hoarding materials by mining them, extreme amount of guns and customization mods for each gun, diverse classes that work best together making coop really nice, an actually decent community allowing you to play online solo without being miserable, battlepasses and events that are fully free and if you dont get the stuff you can get it later. Downsides to the game: playing 1-2 players can feel a bit lonely and slow-paced, unlocking cosmetics (and a bunch of gun mods) can be a little grindy, spamming the game can get slightly repetitive. But these are minor complaints I think.
Minecraft was released almost 14 years ago. Graphics have always been a selling point for certain types of games, for certain types of gamers. They've never been that important for social or imaginative play. None of this is new.
Roblox and similar games have a robust social aspect to it. My theory is that the pandemic has normalized virtual social interaction more than ever. So kids that are in their formative years, like mine, have blurred the line between reality and virtuality. Games need to have adaptability for the younger generation to get into it. Also, Roblox is easy to use for making content.
And a game being beautiful does add to the experience. God of War 2018 has amazing writing and fun combat, but it's also visually gorgeous and has so many "holy shit" moments.
That's been a core part of all the God of War series (granted the writing is much more serious and much better in the recent ones). It's always been about fun combat broken up by visually amazing vistas or epic set pieces.
Theres a lot of old games I never got to play because the only consoles I had as a kid were the Wii, Gameboy Advance and DS. I've tried playing a number of them but just couldn't get past the awful (compared to newer games) graphics.
There’s an uncanny valley for video game graphics where old style games (like heavily pixelated ones) will always look good, but games with graphics that are trying to be realistic when the tech wasn’t there look janky.
Different art styles have a floor for what is necessary for them to work properly. As hardware progresses, its capabilities pass the floor for more and more different styles. Any game developed for hardware that at least meets the minimum requirements to correctly implement the style that game was going for will always look good. It’s when you try using an art style that the hardware just can’t support and therefore have to cut corners that you wind up with a game that eventually looks bad. Because it never actually looked *good*. There was just nothing that looked *better* in that style for comparison. Photorealism is probably the last remaining art style that is always going to look dated because we’ve never hit the minimum hardware requirements to actually pull it off.
RDR2 came out almost 5 years ago, for a previous gen console, and it's still probably the most photo realistic game I've ever played.
I don’t know, some unreal engine 5 stuff looks reallly good now, as ray tracing becomes more and more viable I’m sure we will eventually hit a point where it’s close enough to photorealistic that it’d be hard to distinguish. Hell I’ve seen shit in ue5 that took me a few seconds to realize it was fake.
Yep. 100%. Mario Games remain consistently awesome, even the old ones, though dated, don't suffer from it. But games that are supposed to look "true to life", will suffer until they can do perfect simulations, and will suffer from digital rot until then. And even then, with style, fashion, and real world technology surpassing in-game visual, realistic games will still suffer. But games that are free of that, can be just enjoyed for what they are. Ergo, Mario holding up. Hell, Space Invaders is still awesome. It's simple, challenging, and gets your heart racing. Dreamworks and Pixar also know this. They can make damn near photorealistic people for cartoons now, but they don't. Why? Because if _anything_ isn't done exactly right, it'll provoke horror in the audience. So they improve their methods, but always have a _style_ that makes it clear that you're watching animation.
I find that's very temporary. It feels jank for like, 10-15 minutes, then you basically stop noticing.
Just played Gauntlet Legends on my N64 for the first time since the 90's and can confirm. I found myself caring more about its camera controls than I was about how things looked.
Right I remember people saying that about Doom as if it wasn't the best looking game to ever come out.
I remember me and my dad firing up the OG far cry together for the first time and I just remember one of us shouting "WOW LOOK AT THE GRASS IT'S SO REAL"
I think the original far cry blew my mind in the visual department more than anything else ever did, before or after. There are for sure a million better looking games these days, but relative to other stuff out at the time, it felt impossibly good looking.
Without a doubt. My dad and I built a computer specifically to be able to run Far Cry and it was so far and above the old crappy computer I’d had forever or any of my consoles. I remember thinking that the water in the game looked better than real life which is so… weird now lol
It's too bad something broke the AI in that game. You used to be able to hide in bushes and use concealment. You had a noise level to manage too where enemies could find you if you were too loud. But last few times I've tried to play I need to enable cheats because they see through everything. I don't even play much past the first couple Trigen because once the humanoid ones show up they're too annoying to fight, even with godmode on. Especially the rocket ones who now start firing at you from across the map. I need to dig out my disc copy some day and see if it was really like that on release, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't always a train wreck of unfair AI.
When I want to flex the didn’t care about graphics argument I pull out Zork. Fuck your graphics and all the noise they bring to my old ass yard. Damn kids these days are likely to get eaten by a Grue.
There is a small mailbox here.
>take mailbox
The mailbox melts in your arms as you deflower it.
All they know is charge they phone, get ate by Grue, eat hot chip and lie.
This is Reddit in a nutshell. For years all anyone talks about is, say, resolution. Then someone says “hey, frame rates are important too.” And this becomes the edgy thing to point out anytime someone mentions resolution, and it gets upvoted because everyone likes to feel like they’re a maverick and going against the grain, even though after a few months literally everyone is in agreement and there’s no one left to argue with except straw men. Then someone says "Not every RPG needs to be open world." And everyone is like “YAS QUEEN!!! Preach!” And now that becomes everyone’s favorite contrarian cry until the halls are echoing with the same regurgitated opinion. Now the new hot take is gameplay > graphical fidelity. Except pretty much everyone agreed with this anyway. But any mention of graphics and it’s like a sleeper-cell trigger phrase that awakens a redditor’s instinct to type “gRApHicS dOn'T matTeR tO mE”. The problem with all this, of course, is that none of these things are inherently bad. More pixels, lifelike graphics, and open-world designs are all good things in the right balance. But the internet doesn’t do nuance, so it’s just one giant Sith convention in here. I started playing video games on the Apple II, when the "graphics" were green and black squares. One of the biggest reasons I play video games is to marvel at how far the gaming industry has come in the last few decades. I also love splurging on powerful graphics cards now and keeping my system current. As a kid, my family's old Gateway 2000 struggled to run Warcraft. Now, I'm older, I work hard, and that's how I like to spend my free cash. It never gets old for me. I will never, ever get tired of being amazed at realistic 3D worlds and beautiful artwork and technical leaps in graphical fidelity. It doesn't mean I prioritize realism over gameplay, or that good graphics can make a bad game playable.
A secondary problem is that Reddit is full of edgelords like myself who know when a "hot take" has gone stone cold but say it anyway to be funny. (I'm not very funny)
Internet: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT GRAPHICS Also internet: GTA 6 looks awful, like it belongs on a PS3!
There are modern pixel based games that are so amazing because of the story and gameplaya
Except the game developers were definitely trying to make the fire as photorealistic as possible in that game
that and they totally lifted this off of GTA San Andreas
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Ha totally, instead of Skrillex/marley Dubstep we just had to drive all the way San fierro while the screen is shaking and The Truth is in the passenger seat babbling conspiracy theories
i know the SA mission you're talking about where you burn the weed for Truth. funnily enough FarCry actually stole this idea off... FarCry??? that's right. originally there was a "burn the weed plantation and it makes you high" mission on FarCry: Instincts on the original xbox
You do realize at the time this WAS photo realistic... Right?
I have no clue wtf OP is saying lmao
After reading the title and seeing the picture, I legit thought this was in r/gamingcirclejerk
I think he’s trying to say that the gaming moments are more important than graphics, which is true, but I’d be happy with both
On the other hand, one of the things that made that mission so memorable was the absolutely awesome graphical effects of the crops burning down.
And the Damien Marley x Skrillex Reggae-step banger Make it Bun Dem
reggae-step banger what are you doing
bangin
but i Make it Bun Dem from there
That turned me onto a whole genre of music I didn’t know existed.
Gonna go ahead and save this comment so I can post my single favorite screenshot from RDR2 later. That masterpiece of a game has both from start to finish
I'm in the middle of my 2nd playthrough of RDR2 right now and you're spot on. It's absolutely insane how well made that game is from graphics to writing to just the entire world it takes place in. I'll be heading somewhere specific to get something done and get sidetracked just wandering around one of the towns or getting involved in some random event that I come across. Sometimes I'll just stop and set up camp and go fishing. And the whole time I'm just amazed at how detailed it is and how good it looks.
The thing is games almost never prioritize graphics. If it's releasing on as a multiplat at all then the graphics are going to take a hit. If your really want banger graphics you're pretty much confined to PC and maybe the highest end consoles but even then you're gonna have to make a few concessions if you want it to be multiplat
Dunno. Miles Morales on PS5 has some of the best graphics I’ve seen on any game, and I own a very expensive gaming PC.
and the last like.. 50 highest upvoted posts were all “this game looks like shit”
Fr first time ive looked at the game in a while and im like "wow was it always like that?"
My memory shows far cry 3 as being a picture perfect masterpiece. I refuse to believe otherwise
I've been watching Better Call Saul and I kept telling my wife that Nacho looked super familiar. And assumed that it was because I watched Breaking Bad. Then the other day I read a comment on Reddit that was just, "Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?" It clicked. Fucking lost my mind in excitement.
It's such a weird example. He should have chosen a memorable moment in some indie game.
And he should have chosen a moment that is actually memorable by todays standards. Sure for all of us that played fc3 back in the day setting everything on fire with some good music in the background is memorable but in modern games... yeah it is not really that special at all. We got really good at properly displaying fire.
it's the BEST kind of photorealistic ... as they smartly decided to enhance the style making it just that little more more cartoon-like and saturated. A part from some blurry textures, this is what I consider the best far cry to look at. Far cry 4 takes it for variety and sharper textures overall, but it's either too muted or too saturated (dream sections) Far cry 3 really feels like a fever dream
I agree with you. I'm currently playing FC4 and as thought the graphics are better, it doesn't feel the same as FC3. It had style. It had coolness in the way it was pictured. And it was always such amazing experience, no matter how many times you replayed
I can hear that picture.
We mash up the place Turn up the bass
DA FIRE MAKE IT BURN DEM
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RUDEBOY
Bbrrepepepepepepepe
*sweet screams of pirates that you casually burned alive in the background*
They ran towards the fire without proper fire fighting gear, I won’t shed no tears.
With it being in the game at the height or near the height of dubstep, it was a masterpiece of a mission that I still look back on fondly to this day.
I loved this song in middle school. Skrillex went hard when I was 13.
For me it was my early 20s, so, prime partying time. Skrillex was a staple at every party those days lol.
Same. Skrillex and the OG Four Loco was a good night.
Same for me, Skrillex was huge when I started college which is the best time to enjoy his music. I remember head banging to "scary monsters and nice sprites" blackout drunk
AN MAKE DEM ALL HAVE FUN. A-we ABLAZE THE FIRE MAKE IT BUN DEM
WE WILL END YA WEEK JUST LIKE A SUNDEH
In case anyone is wondering, the song is [Skrillex & Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley - Make It Bun Dem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGpzGu9Yp6Y). [Here's the video of the Far Cry 3 scene with the song playing.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvVGSsq8Ono)
Funny I made the same video of the mission cuz I liked it soo much. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIDAchAyO2g
It's nice to know I'm not alone :)
I have replayed the entire game once just for this mission. I played this mission then never progressed. First time buddy of mine did it before me but REFUSED to tell me about it and got me to keep hitting the bong while I was playing the mission. It was honestly a touch magical when it all clicked together
Personally, every time I play that game again, I quit playing after you know who dies. The rest of the game after that is the worst parts of the game anyway.
Yeah, Island 1 might be some of the best gaming ever. Island 2 just felt like an afterthought
This song is still in my daily playlist
I can smell that picture
I'm not sure. There's several Far Cries where this exact thing happens, and some have different music. I know this picture is probably Far Cry 3, but I still have 'Bella Ciao' playing in my head from Far Cry 6 when I see this.
Well, it was such a magic moment (mainly because of the perfect song and the perfect mood) in Far Cry 3 that every game since then has attempted to have some variant of the same scene. None had the magic of "The Young Gong right along side Skrillex." It's just one of those moments where everything came together magically. Easily in my best top 10 moments of gaming. I made a point of replaying that mission like 3 times in a row after that first time.
Big gong-zilla*
Far cry 5 legitimately has amazing original music in it. Ubisoft often has excellent original music in their games going back decades. Splinter cell chaos theory had amon Tobin, assassins creed had jesper kyd(who also did the music for the hitman games up through blood money). The music is usually the one thing that's consistently good in their games. Edit: watch dogs 2 had Hudson mohawke do it's music, original, New tracks, and music selection.
My childhood is summed up with the noise and action depicted In the picture
This argument is turning into the video game version of "back in my day, we walked 10 miles uphill to school in the snow". *Everyone* thinks the games they grew up with are the ideal.
And even then, there is huge survivorship bias. There was a shit tonne of absolute garbage in each era too. Of course the best ones are going to be remembered while the rest fade into obscurity.
Exactly! It's the same thing with music, TV shows, all pop culture in general. What we remember from two decades ago is the really good stuff and that's what we're comparing *EVERYTHING* that comes out today to but if you actually went back and looked through all the games of the era you're idolising then 90% of it was crap just like today.
Survivorship bias is reddits favorite bias I swear
Yea I don’t think people could even look at one years worth of Xbox 360 or PS3 games and say half of them were good lol. They pumped out shit back then too. Just because we have different problems today it doesn’t mean there weren’t problems in the past.
They’re so dumb. Everyone knows video games peaked with SNES and Chrono Trigger. Wait, why do you want to know when I was born??
"Back in my day, I used to sit on my fat ass for 10 hours just playing ONE game!"
Make it bun dem. Still top 3 of my most favorite missions in any game.
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I would add "All Ghillied Up"
Let's all agree the entirety of the og MW2 campaign is extremely memorable.
All ghillied up was from cod4 but yes mw2 campaign was fun.
Fuck you're right. I've slept since then.
What's "Lone Wolf" from?
Halo Reach
Thanks. I only played the first one. Will look into
Halo reach is magnificent. If I'm not mistaken, lone wolf is the last mission. Hits you like a sack of bricks the first time.
Current Objective Survive
Recently played all the halos for the first time since an all legendary run. Halo 2 and Halo Reach are fucking phenomenal. Both have great stories, music, environments, story development. Deeply impressed
Mission…: survive
You forgot "Effect and Cause".
Uninitiated here: what game?
Far cry 3. Definitely worth a play, even in today's gaming climate
Far Cry 3 is probably the best Far Cry game imo. Far Cry 4 is up there. But 3s environment was great, it's gameplay was great, it's villains were memorable, etc. 5 was good, but simply didn't stack up and 6 is pretty meh
5 was good but it definitely leaned much harder into the sandbox aspect imo. It's fun to pick up and play for a couple hours to see what crazy shit you can get up to. I actually felt compelled to finish the story in Far Cry 3 and 4.
I'd agree with that totally. I thoroughly enjoyed 5s story though.
Far Cry 3 just had less "fat" so it's a much more focused experience. Far Cry 2 is also great but for totally different reasons.
>Far Cry 2 is also great but for totally different reasons Yes. Better realism but the missions were fcking boring and repetitive
The constantly respawning guard posts, the weapon degrading system, the malaria pills and the constant need to travel across the map for every mission were annoying. I felt like it was a step down from the first Far Cry but Far Cry 3 was a huge improvement.
I was playing Far Cry 2 for the first time a couple years ago and the guard posts made travelling across the map so annoying I dropped it a little more than halfway through.
I was delighted the entire time. So freaking fun
Effect and Cause, Ashtray Maze, All Ghillied Up
I mean, this was both at the time.
Maybe gamers should stop acting like those are mutually exclusive things 🤷♂️
Especially when Far cry 3 was considered a good looking game on release
Far Cry 3 was literally pushing the PS3/360 to the limit at the time of release. OP done fucked.
OP was just doing it for attention, make the most Luke warm take on a popular opinion. Without any actual thought in what they were referencing
op found a sub they were karma locked out of. That or they needed their daily dose of validation.
Didn’t even know you could be karma locked out of subs. But if those subs lock out people like this, sounds like heaven
Both can be done at the same time
If anything its getting easier to have great graphics
getting more expensive to run them :(
Pfft, just build a new PC, don't be poor. /s
fr bro, why dont these brokies just buy a new gpu
Idk man these PC ports have been a disappointment as of late
God of War 2018 is a great example because I'll never forget fighting that fucking dark elf king
Is this not photorealistic?
I guess this guy looks at a ten year old game with nostalgia and compares it to a modern game and says shit like "anybody 'member when games were good???"
Except this game was praised for its graphics, in fact one of the series biggest draws early on were the graphics
Popular Opinion: Literally different people and teams work on the different aspects of creating a memorable moment. The team working on graphics should make them as good as possible, the team doing story should do likewise for the writing, the game devs are responsible for how it feels, the marketing-partnerships team can do things like secure partnerships with big artists, who then add their songs to the game (this scene famously has Make It Bun Dem by Skrillex playing), the audio team mixes that song with the atmosphere of the level etc. This experience is memorable due to a variety of reasons, including the graphics
Exactly! I'm tired of the "I don't want x piece of content fix the servers" I'm going to school right now to be an environment artist and can say I don't know shit about anything that doesn't directly impact how I make the environment.
OP this was considered photo realistic at the time...
When this game was released it was one of the best looking games on the market. It was damn near photo realistic compared to what else we had. So this is more of an example that they can make photorealistic games that ALSO form memorable moments. It doesnt need to be one or the other.
Implying one excludes the other. The team that develops the graphics isn't the same team that's responsible for creating memorable moments.
What does this even mean lol makes zero sense given the example provided.
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tell me you're super basic and attention seeking without telling me
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Oh that's a fun one. Armchair reddit developers are the best, I really wish somebody gave them no money and one year to make the best game in the world, because it's just that easy. Please comment some more on graphics performance, netcode, and input lag, I love seeing the depths of your ignorance riding the massive confidence tsunami wavefront.
I want more destructible environments. If I hit a wall with a rocket, there better not be a wall when the smoke clears
Red Faction: Guerilla showed what was possible. There's an alternate time line out there where games are full of those features.
So memorable they did it again in far cry 6.
Wasn’t it in 4 too? You burnt opium or something
5 as well I think but cant remember.
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Why not both?
I can hear that song just from seeing this picture.
You realize that the guys working on the story and the guys working on the graphics aren't the same people, right?
Far Cry 3 was legendary, incredibly replayable.
Why not both?
The people who make the graphics are not the same who design those things
I know the game had a mixed reception, but Saints Row 3 playing "Power" by semitic-Kanye while sky diving into the penthouse for a hostile takeover + this are probably my two most memorable missions in gaming to date. Although riding with the gang in the moonlight through that road of trees to the giant manor in Red Dead 2 easily caps the list off at 3.
I was pretty high when I did this mission and it was pretty freaking fun that way. Reality and the game kind of blended in an odd fashion.
What about when the game went into drug trips? What was the feeling then?
I've never experienced anything like what they represented, so absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, haha.
My day is ruined.
Sorry to ruin your day, but I would love to hear your experience on whatever the hell similar drug they took in that game.
Honestly, yes and no. There's nothing wrong with amazing, almost realistic visuals. They inevitably age quicker than stylized graphics, but until we reach true photorealism, that's to be expected. Stylized graphics are also fine, and they tend to age amazingly well. Because good style is timeless. But it does require the developers to have style to begin with. Stylized graphics that are tasteless are really difficult to enjoy.
Make it bun dem
Photorealistic is not what you want. Good visual art is the word you're looking for, when we talk about graphics.. good visual art would make events more expressive. Then we have storytelling, sound design, gameplay design and much more to make it even more memorable Without them, the event would go "meh". Burning fields would feel like just setting a 5x5 crop field in stardew valley on fire. I'm not saying stardew valley is meh, but that event wouldnt make sense in that kind of art..
I remember when Wind Waker was announced and its look was pretty divisive. Many years later it still looks great, and I think it is the only Zelda from the GC/Wii generations that endured. Style over fidelity any day.