> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.