Photo-realistic Graphics lead to decline in RPGs?

[111111111]

As technology progressed throughout the years, gamers thirst for better graphics increased by several magnitude. Naturally, game devs began to cater to these, colloquially termed, 'graphics whores' by pushing the boundaries by creating better and better games in a photo-realistic style. Rpg devs were not immune to this trend and went along with this. We can see this influence in the RPG sphere by isometric styled games falling out of favor and giving rise to the huge popularity of Bioware, TES etc. Regardless of how these games are viewed in the Codexian perspective, I would say it's fair to say that they were commercially successful and popular.


However the problem with transitioning to more and more photo-realistic graphics is the production cost of games began to skyrocket. When the budget for a single title is at a set amount and creation of graphical assets keeps eating a bigger portion of the pie, something has got to give. What was lost is the attention given to game-play, story, mechanics etc. We can see now that to make games more profitable, they are even being seperated into chunks of DLC, MTX and other shenanigans to keep making bigger profits.

I do think this argument totally is missing a lot of factors that occured in the industry between 2003-2014 but I do think that the trend of photo-realism and increasing production costs did lead to companies and executives making slimy movies that do not benefit the customer.

 

[V_K]

Rhuantavan, I think he's coming for you.

 

[madhouse]

Did using stones and fire lead to a decline?

 

[Jackpot]

Voice acting is far more harmful to RPGs than good graphics.
Also, graphics whoring isn't responsible for isometric games falling out of favor. Action games naturally appeal to a wider audience than games based on tabletop RPG rules.

 

[Sinatar]

As budgets go up so does the need to sell more copies to make back your money. The more copies you need to sell the wider the audience you need to reach. The wider the audience you need to reach the dumber your game has to be.

So in a nutshell.

Yes.

 

[Tenebris]

Yeah, I'd say that and the need for full voice acting led to a decline.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Arguably the budget for good gameplay design is much much smaller compared to the rest of a video games (graphics as you said, sound design, etc).

Simpler gameplay and game design is just consequences of game moving forward from entertainment enjoyed by neckbreads to a mainstream one. Nobody want to play a game that feels like excel sheet or what not in case of RPG. Nobody, until recently, would want to play overly complex or difficult game.

Take Elder Scrolls for example. It is entirely possible and probably not hard just to maintain Morrowind system for Oblivion and SKyrim. The decision to make the system simpler lies not to save cost but to appeal to wider audience, a.k.a streamlining.

Game that's popular to begin with such as Action Games, simulations, etc doesn't suffer from this due to the genre already being popular to begin with. Action games, shooting games for example maintain their core gameplay without much simplification even with much better graphics. (you can argue having crosshair is decline for FPS).

 

[gurugeorge]

As technology progressed throughout the years, gamers thirst for better graphics increased by several magnitude. Naturally, game devs began to cater to these, colloquially termed, 'graphics whores' by pushing the boundaries by creating better and better games in a photo-realistic style. Rpg devs were not immune to this trend and went along with this. We can see this influence in the RPG sphere by isometric styled games falling out of favor and giving rise to the huge popularity of Bioware, TES etc. Regardless of how these games are viewed in the Codexian perspective, I would say it's fair to say that they were commercially successful and popular.


However the problem with transitioning to more and more photo-realistic graphics is the production cost of games began to skyrocket. When the budget for a single title is at a set amount and creation of graphical assets keeps eating a bigger portion of the pie, something has got to give. What was lost is the attention given to game-play, story, mechanics etc. We can see now that to make games more profitable, they are even being seperated into chunks of DLC, MTX and other shenanigans to keep making bigger profits.

I do think this argument totally is missing a lot of factors that occured in the industry between 2003-2014 but I do think that the trend of photo-realism and increasing production costs did lead to companies and executives making slimy movies that do not benefit the customer.

I dunno, when you read about the development of old games, graphics was the big time/energy hog for them too. It think it's more or less stayed at the same proportion tbh, maybe a bit more but not enough to cause the kind of effect you're talking about.

If one were to pin down anything that photorealism has made worse it's how games are more difficult to "read" graphically. When you have a few simple sprites and block coloured backgrounds, it's easier for the brain to parse the field of battle quickly. Move on to the middling level of graphics of the mid 90s to mid Noughties, it's the same. But now, when everything looks some shade of brown, I think it's a harder and more tiring task for the brain to quickly see what's going on.

But even that problem can be solved by good art design. The kludge that developers seem to use these days is the ugly, heavy outlining that's so common (I particularly hate white outlining), but I think as time goes on this problem will be solved more intelligently and holistically.

Ideally what you want is sufficient possibility of detail so you can zoom in on your characters occasionally and get immersed in the detail of them, but in the big picture when you're in combat, you want the art design, the colouring and shaping of things, to be such that the realism doesn't interfere with the brain's ability to see what's going on without having to squint, search, etc. That's a creative challenge, but it's surely doable.

 

[mondblut]

Thanks, captain.

Who would have thought that you could have had a lot more interactivity in a game if not for the need to painstakingly animate every fart (and also sync that animation to every other animation it might coincide with).

 

[cretin]

Putting all the blame on consoomers and graphics seems a bit of a cop out for the industry. Fact of the matter is dumber games are easier to make. Doesnt require much brain power or risk, you pretty much just reuse design templates that have already been done before and then get the art cucks to do something vaguely different.

 

[Tavernking]

I can't imagine a photorealistic turn-based game. It'll look like a bunch of larpers. My brain won't be able to accept that they're just standing around waiting for their 'turn' when their friends are dying and so on.

 

[Kaivokz]

I can't imagine a photorealistic turn-based game.

RTwP, phase-based or simultaneous resolution is the answer.

Japs did something like it two decades ago with Grandia 2; units simultaneously move around the field, turns are on independent timers, actions can be interrupted or delayed if countered at the right time, different actions put you back farther on the meter, etc. A photo-realistic game with that combat system would be pretty cool.

 

[Takamori]

Nah, decline is a cultural+market demographic thing, will sound like a communard but its the truth.
Too many people entered the hobby (RPGs and video games), and the profile of this public the brunt of the consumer base is people that don't want to be challenged, read and think too much in their entertainment. Companies will seek money, making us grognard the old consumer base a niche market, so that slot is occupied by Indies and that will rely on world economics, for example why you see so many people saying that US market is pure decline? Because usually you are working a shitty job, praying to not get sick because if you get whatever ailment you are fucked. So less people wanting to take risks so that leave the few indies in US vulnerable to whatever thing that has an agenda so thats why so many cucked devs, because if the indie market was huge people wouldnt not give a shit to whatever agenda people want to force upon not enough resources to buy or influence everyone.
And that answer why slavs do nice things? Its not as expensive to live + culture makes then take more risks and of course there is no click there wanting to influence game production as much. So to end this long ass post, graphics ain't the issue, culture and economics is always the issue.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Action games, shooting games for example maintain their core gameplay without much simplification even with much better graphics.

Wrong. FPS games experienced as much decline as RPGs in mid 2000-s, and it's very similar: simplification, accent on graphics and cutscenes instead of gameplay.

 

[JarlFrank]

Did using stones and fire lead to a decline?

The agricultural revolution and its consequences were a desaster for the human race.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Did using stones and fire lead to a decline?

Games of old were like lighting a Camel with a simple match. Modern games are like lighting counterfeit Liggett Ducat with a golden Zippo.

 

[mondblut]

So to end this long ass post, graphics ain't the issue, culture and economics is always the issue.

Everything you said about the consumers is true, but it doesn't cancel the fact that the need to "show don't tell" has dramatically limited the options and bloated their costs.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

So to end this long ass post, graphics ain't the issue, culture and economics is always the issue.

Everything you said about the consumers is true, but it doesn't cancel the fact that the need to "show don't tell" has dramatically limited the options and bloated their costs.

But once again the cost of gameplay design is much smaller than the graphics etc.

The reason for simplification is not to make budget for graphics and VO, the reason for simplification is because it is what will sells the most and appeal to largest audience.

The "Souls-like" genre for example is genre that thrives for having a relatively complex gameplay compared to most modern game at that time. THe games can still have pretty good graphics without sacrificing anything.

EDIT: I find people's idea that video games will be good again if we go back to 8 bit graphics or clunky shit 3D of early 3D is ridiculous. The fact that Indie and AA games that becomes Codex darling usually has shit graphics/voice-works is consequences of them not having budget to afford anything better (and in part cashing on oldfags nostalgia tinted glasses). It's a matter of economy and risk taken by the studio. AAA studio doesn't make simple gameplay because they don't have the budget, but because for a long while, simple and accessible with booming graphics is selling point of the mainstream.

 

[Whiny-Butthurt-Liberal]

Photo-realistic graphics lead to a decline in everything.

 

[Eisen]

Decline in videogames started when the first videogame was created

 

[Poseidon00]

Yes.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

How to set gamma in Witcher 3 by the way ?

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Yesterday's photo-realism is today's jank. It's only a problem if you can't afford it. Culling your creative vision to accommodate it in the budget or to appeal to a wide base suggests that the developer can't afford it.

 

[mondblut]

EDIT: I find people's idea that video games will be good again if we go back to 8 bit graphics or clunky shit 3D of early 3D is ridiculous. The fact that Indie and AA games that becomes Codex darling usually has shit graphics/voice-works is consequences of them not having budget to afford anything better (and in part cashing on oldfags nostalgia tinted glasses). It's a matter of economy and risk taken by the studio. AAA studio doesn't make simple gameplay because they don't have the budget, but because for a long while, simple and accessible with booming graphics is selling point of the mainstream.

Does Morrowind lack wall climbing that Daggerfall had because climbing is teh hard for the console peasants (who grew on platformers and tomb raider), or because it required additional animations and having to somehow marry those animations with all those building models?

There is no action that cannot be done with a popup menu and a line of text, but modern mainstream games cannot allow the luxury of doing it this way.

 

[a Goat]

People say the same about all sorts of genres, it's related but it's not just that. It's a matter of how business is being done. Gaming became kind of like Hollywood, where the best RoI is in the very big productions. Companies, all of them will eventually grow big enough to either be bought out by publicly traded company or enter the stock market themselves, then it's the board of investors that starts dictating what games are you making, decline is therefore just an arc in a life of a game development studio. Now normally you'd have smaller, privately owned companies entering the fray, but with a choke on marketing and distribution as it existed in 2005 or even 2010, this just wasn't happening, and where it was it was rather meh.
Overtime however, internet speeds were getting better, payment options became streamlined, the inertia just stopped and digital distribution became big. Traditional marketing in days of youtube(kickstarter is also, ironically, preorder and marketing platform more than anything else) etc. is also much less important and as such the niche genres just boomed. We can argue about quality of modern retro-cRPG's, sure, but if you think of our choice now and our choice in 2009, then it suddenly starts looking pretty fucking good. When your best hope for the future "core" CRPG's is sequel to Drakensang you know it's bad, nowadays it's much better.