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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

> Do I really think that BG3 being slightly prettier than, say, Dragon Age / Skyrim / etc made it a more enticing game?

Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me and I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.

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Well this goes to show that, as some other commenter said, the gamer community (whatever that is) is indeed very fragmented.

I routinely re-play games like Diablo 2 or BG1/2 and I couldn't care less about graphics, voice acting or motion capture.

> Absolutely - graphical improvements make the game more immersive for me

Exactly. Graphics are not the end all be all for assessing games, but it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.

Maximal "realism" is neither the only nor even necessarily the best use of that medium.

When did I say anything like that? When did anybody in this thread?

I don't know what these words mean to you vs. what they mean to me. But whatever you call the visual quality that Baldur's Gate 3, CyberPunk 2077, and most flagship AAA titles, etc. are chasing after that makes them have "better graphics" and be "more immersive", whatever that is, is not the only way to paint the medium.

Very successful games are still being made that use sprites, low-res polygons, cel shading, etc. While these techniques still can run into hardware limits, they generally don't benefit from the sort of improvements (and that word is becoming ever more debatable with things like AI frame generation) that make for better looking [whatever that quality is called] games.

Wanting them to look good and saying they look way better on a PC does not mean what you described above.

And not caring as much about those things doesn't mean I don't understand that video games are a visual medium.

This is just one type of graphics. And focusing too heavily on it is not going to be enough to keep the big players in the industry afloat for much longer. Some gamers care--apparently some care a lot--but that isn't translating into enough sales to overcome the bloated costs.

We are really straying from the initial point here IMO

> it’s odd how quickly people handwave away graphics in a visual medium.

There is a difference between graphics as in rendering (i.e. the technical side, how something gets rendered) and graphics as in aesthetics (i.e. visual styles, presentation, etc).

The latter is important for games because it can be used to evoke some feel to the player (e.g. cartoony Mario games or dreadful Silent Hill games). The former however is not important by itself, its importance only comes as means to achieve the latter. When people handwave away graphics in games they handwave the misplaced focus on graphics-as-in-tech, not on graphics-as-in-aesthetics.

For me, the better graphics, mocap etc., the stroger the uncanny valley feeling - i.e. I stop perceiving it as a video game, but instead see it as an incredibly bad movie.

> I don't want to go back and replay the games I spent hundreds of hours in mid two thousands, like say NVN or Icewind Dale (never played BG 2). It's just not the same feeling now that I've played games with incomparable graphics, polished mechanics and movie level voice acting/mocap cutscenes. I even picked up Mass Effect recently out of nostalgia but gave up fast because it just isn't as captivating as it was back when it was peak graphics.

And yet many more have no such issue doing exactly this. Despite having a machine capable of the best graphics at the best resolution, I have exactly zero issues going back and playing older games.

Just in the past month alone with some time off for surgery I played and completed Quake, Heretic and Blood. All easily as good, fun and as compelling as modern titles, if not in some ways better.

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