It’s creative bankruptcy. Things don’t need to be realistic, it’s called style.
Stuff like Zeno Clash and Dishonored hold up aesthetically because they aren’t going for realism. And I’d take Morrowind’s arthropod bodies back if I could have the moral complexity and ya know, themes back.
This is also why I prefer the San Andreas era GTA, the graphics are cartoony and the gameplay is fun as hell, the hyper realism style they moved to with GTA 5 is so boring and lifeless
It sounds silly, but San Andreas is really underrated. Like I know it’s considered one of the best games of all time, but the writing, the confrontation with racism and the police and the dynamics of gangs….
I mean, most of the time it’s just fun to get 5 stars and enact your own revenge for the MOVE bombing. But that main storyline is so slept on.
Text rendered onto a screen is also graphics.
How many layers can be peeled before it’s not a video game anymore?
I honestly think it would be interesting to play a game by sound alone, where you play as a blind person (maybe Daredevil or Zatoichi or something) and you navigate the world by listening. Ironically, it’d probably need to be on a VR headset so that the game can detect you turning/tilting your head and adjust the stereo balance accordingly.
Maybe Zatoichi would be best, as you could hear an enemy swinging a sword like “SHING” and “SWOOSH” etc, and maybe that would give you enough information to block or dodge. You’d probably also need haptic feedback to tell you when your blade connects.
Maybe there could be graphics, but only to recreate the sense of smell, like the screen is pure black except when you smell something and then a word appears on the screen like “rose” or “blood” etc.
There is some game where you are blind any the only thing you can see is blood from what ever you killed splashed on the walls. Totally forget what it’s called. But yea yours sounds cooler
The flash game The Blind Swordsman does something like this.
Just remove the video part. Now it’s just a “game.”
Oh. Why didn’t I think of that!?
It will also be more accessible to the blind, being audio only.
The deaf? What about them?
There are rumors that the deaf are able to make good use of text based technologies.
The best I can do is send you text via serial port.
As I said, no graphics
I remember people discussing that Dear Esther was not a video game.
Fuck that’s a nice font
Alright we go back to tabletop until the situation improves
It was never about fun. It’s about experiencing the game.
When I read a book, the goal is to have whatever experience the book is going to give me, and leave my own life behind for a while.
Getting lost in a AAA fantasy world with super-high-fidelity graphics is an amazing experience.
Journey the game had extremely great graphics that are also good style and made you get lost in the fantasy and experience.
The character still did not have things like visible strands of individual hair. Realistic does not automatically make it good. It just makes it expensive.
Are you referencing the one by Jenovah Chen, who made Fl0w and Flower? Those two games were so good but I never got to play Journey, is it still ps3 exclusive?
Yes they are the developer. There was a pc release.
Duuuuude I’m going to have to try and pirate or purchase that! And Flower too if that ever got a pc release. Fl0w I still have the freeware version.
Also, it is more expensive on the GPU than it is in terms of creator time.
A creator with experience in making realistic hair using currently available tools, won’t take significantly more time as compared to one with experience in some other art style, making the thing in that art style.
Unless, you manage to get that to run well on a lower powered GPU, in which case, 🚀
Absolutely not, of course it is about having fun.
Are you going to just experience something that makes you feel miserable? Not an unfun moment for catharsis later, but an entire make-you-feel-awful experience?
Getting lost in a fantasy world is about having fun.Horror games exist though. There’s all sorts of indie horror games that pretty much only exist to tell a very bleak and depressing story and then it’s over.
They’re not for everyone, and maybe not even you, but I would say that experiencing those might be enjoyable but not fun.
That’s a good point. They’re tools that help us feel a variety of things.
Games and books are easier to think of as being “fun” in many cases. Listening to music isn’t “fun” in the same sense, but it allows us to feel all kinds of stuff. Makes sense that games and books can be thought of outside the fun paradigm too.
It’s fun to think of yourself, having had those feelings while playing said game/ reading said book.
Counterpoint: RE: 4 was so much fun.
Senua Hellblade is all about experience. A very depressing one as well. And it’s one of the greatest games of all time IMHO. Graphics, sound and story are more important than grinding XP points in ten different ways. People who say otherwise and praise pixelated mess are those who cannot afford to buy high end hardware to play modern games. I get it, RTX5080 is expensive, but no one is judging you for not being able to buy it, so get off your high horse.
It’s like you’ve never played a survival horror game…
Sure, until you inevitably hit a pile of immersion breaking jank.
That’s 3 hairs on the arm you see. Give me my $90
I saw a text based porn game yesterday. Was pretty fun but not much porn.
What’s the fediverse etiquette for “can wet get a link to that?”, but in a way that’s not weirder than this already is…? I’ve made it weird. Maybe it was already weird.
Ok ok, i searched browsing history (you know what i mean…).
Thanks!
I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC
Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.
Lucky for your, there are lots of older games as well as plenty of indie games that focus on gameplay with very limited graphics.
Terraria
I’ll just leave this link to Mindustry here, I guess…?
Back to board games I guess.
The Campaign for North Africa it is, then.
Vintage Story has the graphics of that other voxel graphics based block game. The gameplay is so good that I bought and play VS, and Terraria, but I haven’t ever played more than 30 minutes of the other block game.
Graphics barely matter. Gameplay is king.
Fuck TAA and proprietary TAA. :)
Unpopular opinion but graphics do matter a little bit or at least more than the meme depicts. Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it. I wish things moved between tiles fluidly like in Rimworld instead of it being a slideshow, but I can actually stand to play Dwarf Fortress now. If the only video games that existed were text-based, I’d probably never play video games again. Ps2 era graphics on the other hand, hell yeah. 90s era dos graphics are passable too. But PLEASE no text adventure games.
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it
OBJECTION!!
The ASCII graphics have a charm of its own, even if it skews the horizontal-vertical distances due to characters being 8x12
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it.
Supremely unbased, I still just see elf, dwarf, plump helmet…
There was an excellent text based RPG called Roadwarden that came out the other year. It’s just text and illustrations so thought I’d use this post to mention it.
If small amounts of animation are allowed then WORLD OF HORROR was decent too.
Roadwarden is excellent.
I’ve yet to actually play it, shame on me, but A Blind Legend took an interesting approach to being graphicsless!
Interesting! Added to my wishlist.
Hyperbole and a half style artwork.
I miss her :(
Hope she’s doing ok
Obviously these things are not mutually exclusive. Be a REAL gamer and demand both quality in gameplay and narrative, WITH excellent graphics. You don’t have to settle for less.
