What in Cred Forums's opinion ruins video games? IMO it's graphics. Developers pay too much attention to graphics...

What in Cred Forums's opinion ruins video games? IMO it's graphics. Developers pay too much attention to graphics, spend too much work and resources into making the game look "good", so other elements are mediocre at best. Well, guess what? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER! Graphics don't matter in most games, like shooters or RPGs. It would if the games were "artistic" and graphics had some artistic purpose. But in most games they don't. MOHAA still represents the chaos of war better than Battlefield Bad Company 666 and Morrowind is still more immersive than Dragon Age Circumcision. Literally no game released since 2010, except Witcher 3, is worth playing. Why? Because they look good and play shit.

Does Cred Forums agree? What is it in your opinion that ruins games nowadays?

Graphics will start having a value for you too when you'll be able to max them out without any repercussion

Disagree. Take MOHAA, which I mentioned in OP, for example. It looks like shit, colors are pale, the whole thing is brown-grey, objects are edgy etc. It actually makes a player immerse more and feel like at war more. It isn't a merry company of friends going to chew some gum, throw in some curse words and kick ass, and come back home before diner. On the other hand those modern Battlefields and CoDs with their bright colors, explosions looking like in Michael Bay's movie and action so quick that you don't have the time to even notice the dead bodies, don't feel like at war at all.

Biggest offenders? Voice acting and celebrity cameos by far.

Elaborate?

>Implying FF12's stage actors didn't take the game from mediocre to at least rather good.

top 5:
5. Forcing mechanics from other genres where they don't belong, specifically Survival/Crafting and RPG mechanics. Probably the single biggest cancer on games right now but doesn't effect me much since I don't play many AAA games.
4. Genres full of lazy clones. JRPGs especially are guilty of this, I play very few of them.
3. Open World games. I've never played one with good combat and I doubt a game like that exists.
2. Like you said OP, games that concentrate on graphics or flavor at the expense of actual gameplay mechanics. There are way too many games that play like this these days and even Nintendo is doing it now with Fire Emblem and Paper Mario.
1. Excessive grinding, the quickest way to ruin a game. I will never touch an MMO because of this.

Maxing them out is cool and all, but the novelty wears off pretty quick when the game is ass. If I wanted to look at pretty shit and be bored I'd go outside.

I didn't say games can't be really good or realistic or whatever without great graphics.
I just said you'll mostly stop having problems with them the moment you get a PC that makes you appreciate good graphics at their best

Limits dialogue and choice variety, takes up a lot of space (this is more a product of laziness and incompetence though), may take a huge amount of budget and resources and feels tacked-on most of the time. Developers simply don't care about mining talents like said, they just slap in the most generic and neutral voices possible instead of using VA to add flavor to a character.

Celebrity cameos are just an unnecessary cancer that takes up too much money and adds fucking nothing.

Gothic was open world and it had bretty gud combat system. Sure, this open world was much smaller than modern ones, and the game itself was smaller, but still.

Maybe open world is not the problem itself? Maybe it's the push to make those worlds too huge and too stuffed with "side activities" and "hidden objects" what's to blame?

Good graphics aren't enough to make a great game =/= games with good graphics are automatically shit

>but all games would be much better if they used the budget for something other than graphics!
So naive user
In most cases, you would just get the same shitty game, but this time with also shitty graphics

This

My point was that poor graphics is sometimes a desirable thing. Sure, sometimes maxing them out is a cool thing, if they add to atmosphere, but it's a rare thing. Only once in my life did I feel the need to max out graphic settings, it was while I was playing STALKER Call of Pripyat. There, indeed, sun rising in swamp in full detail was worth it.

1) Story: Games are better when they don't have a story.
2) Open world: Copied and pasted assets on a heightmap isn't interesting and has no gameplay value
3) Lack of new mechanics over time: The last of us could be a 30 minute game with a 2 hour cutscene. There was no reason for TLOU to have any gameplay when you mastered it within 30 minutes.

>2007 happens
>iphone happens
>millions of people with no business being on the internet now have it in their pocket 24/7
>over the next few years those people start using the internet more and more
>internet becomes massively more lucratice than ever before
>jew sense is tingling
>game advertising ramps up
>more people get into gaming due to advertising and word of mouth on those new social media sites
>instantly become the biggest demographic in the industry
>suits would be retarded NOT to aim for them
>standards had to drop in order to make a product that appeals to the demographic
>focus groups filled with people who don't even know what a controller does become the biggest influence on game design
>budgets explode out of control because rather than making what they want to make, devs have to make the next best thing, which is mainly graphics and VA like mentioned in the thread
>as budgets increase, risk-taking decreases

In short. A fucking huge amount of normalfags with more buying power than any other group.

>this game looks like shit, so it's like real because war was shit too

I'm now convinced good graphics are a disgrace, thanks OP

Story, cutscenes, writing. In-game cutscenes. Unskippable cutscenes.

Extended tutorials fully integrated into the first several hours of the game..

'Open worlds.' Linear level design.

Poorly designed UIs.

Poor optimisation.

The playerbase, the fans, the consumers. The media, the publishers.

>Games are better when they don't have a story
Even the simplest of rivalries adds TONS of layers of hype to a fight. You're simply wrong.

Games are poorly designed today because everyone wants to make a huge open world where you can "do anything." It used to be that someone would come up with a cool gameplay mechanic and then they would build a game around it. Now games are designed with the idea of a setting and plot rather than gameplay.

If you think that, stick to movies. I couldn't give a fuck about a fight if the mechanics aren't interesting. Nobody playing Mario, Sonic, WoW or whatever cares that they're killing a boss for the story, it's the mechanics that matter.

>Now games are designed with the idea of a setting and plot rather than gameplay.
Never thought of it that way but that sounds completely accurate.

Story and good mechanics aren't mutually exclusive you dumb cunt.

Tell me with a straight face DMC3 would've been a better game if it had had absolutely zero story.

>My point is that point graphics are sometime sa desirable thing

Your point was actually the opposite user
>What in Cred Forums's opinion ruins video games? IMO it's graphics

"Poor graphics can be a good thing" is pretty different from "good graphics are ruining videogames" to me

DLC.

Always at your service f a m

Ehat I was trying to suggest is that when you don't have all those fireworks distracting you from real gameplay, you focus more on experience + yeah you're right, war is fucking shit and shitty graphics may sometimes serve as a better medium to show that. What do you think it looked like to WW1 soldiers escaping toxic gas clouds and enemies' bayonets only to get buried alive in mud? Like in Battlefield where you can kump off a jet, shoot a helicopter with an RPG and get back into net? No. It was grey, dark, dirty and not pretty at all.

I don't play faggot chink games sorry.
Also yes they are. If you're playing a game for the story, you're doing it wrong.

I wouldn't say good graphics hurt a game.

In terms of graphics, what really hurts a game imho is bullshit like DOF, lens flare, motion blur, chromatic aberration, all that faggy shit. It seems like some games work really hard to try not to look like a game, and it fails every single time.

ok but u wrong doe

Not him but

>y-yeah mechanics are the most important thing in a game!
>that one among the games with the most refined and complex mechanics of the last 20 years? wont play it ITS NOT FROM EUROPE OR USA

stop embarrassing yourself

>chink shit
>complex
people actually think this? baka

the retards who keep complaining for anything and they can't be happy for a moment of their lives that they are actually having fun or lost in the motion of the interaction.

But the push to make graphics better at expense of gameplay mechanics, story and atmosphere does.

If it was like, a game dev goes to investors and says "I have great idea gib moni" and the investors said "sure bud you can have all the money you want, also take your time, we want your game to be perfect", push for good graphics would not hurt. But that's never the case.

that's a massive generalization, and a shitty one at that. A game can be good and can have good graphics at the same time. I bet all your favorite games from back in the day had cutting-edge graphics for their time.

>What in Cred Forums's opinion ruins video games?
Cred Forums's opinion. Now I can't love any games freely without feeling like a contrarian.

Fuck you Cred Forums

You faggot, the rivalry between Dante and Vergil is what makes their fight so special

It was already God-tier because of the top notch gameplay, but the fact you know what's actually going on between them makes it perfect

Sounds like you never played a game with even remotely relevant story

No, they didn't. Also, if you think modern AAA games can compare to those from befor 2007, well...

That's your opinion, man. Mine is different.

...

>big business and corporate greed, at many levels, from microtransactions, to cut content, to "season pass" etc, the industry naturally gets larger, and so monetary gain becomes a much larger focus.
Sucks, but its is natural, comparably to sports, the larger it becomes, the further away from pure entertainment and more towards capital it becomes.

>if you think modern AAA games can compare to those from befor 2007
Try playing good AAA then

Oh wait, you can't run them

if you think they can't compare, it's because you are a closed-minded luddite who is blinded by nostalgia

>Literally no game released since 2010, except Witcher 3, is worth playing. Why? Because they look good and play shit.

I do agree that the arms race going on in graphics has been hurting gaming significantly even as far back as since the PS1 came out, but your statement above is completely false.

I see your point but I have to quibble; there is no push to make graphics better. The vidya media focusses on graphics now more than ever, sure, but almost no-one actually tries to push the boundaries of established graphical standards.

There is no push to focus game development on graphics at the expense of gameplay. The simple fact is, for the majority of games, the reason the gameplay is shit is because it's designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator; the 'casuals' and 'non-gamers' who the publishers want to sell the game to. Given that, the level of graphics is irrelevant; resources are focussed on providing simple, easily accessible gameplay regardless of the level of graphics.

All the major AAA releases would have shitty gameplay even if the companies put less effort into the graphics. They're deliberately designed that way.

No-one would suggest that Bay's Transformers would have had a good plot and characterisation if only they'd spent less resources on CG; the films would be retarded shit regardless of the graphics. Same goes for most games.

What hurts games in general is the fact the game industry don't do proper market research.
They roll on assumptions and highly biased focus group testing, instead of actually watching what the players have to say on "natural" and making theories, and making low budget test games etc..
Just to give you an idea, the ONLY company that gets casual catering right is rockstar.
And i'm not entirely sure if they do it on purpose or they don't actually know but keep repeating the same formula because it works somehow.

This nigga is Butthurt because Rhodok is literally god tier, what the fuck are you dooooiiiinnnngg. Just train up your crossbow man, get dudes with shields, go to the highest point in the map and watch the enemy get fucking slaughtered. Easy game easy LIFE

>But the push to make graphics better at expense of gameplay mechanics, story and atmosphere does.
For like six fucking years we had the majority of games coming out as multiplats, designed to run on PS3 and/or XB360 first. There was no big compromise for graphics over gameplay during that whole time period; a lot of stuff was just made on Unreal Engine 3 even.

making it a rogue-like. the most garbage tier genre ever, almost as bad as making it a metroidvania

I'll agree to the extent that the 'roguelike-like' or 'roguelite' genre is mostly full of shit.

But I like permadeath.

You got the point

It would be cool to have a game with an actual story (unlike some endless shit like Nu-males Sky), but if character dies, the story ends for him.

>What in Cred Forums's opinion ruins video games?

Bulletsponge enemies or forced mouse acceleration in a first person perspective game.

If something is open world or multiplayer-only it doesn't necessarily ruin a title for me, but I begin adjusting my expectations downwards.

Poor PC optimization can also obviously kill the living fuck out of a seemingly good title.

Heavy Rain?

But yeah. I wonder if there are any games where your character has permadeath but he also has an AI apprentice, so when the PC dies, the player takes over as the apprentice and adds a quest for vengeance on top of whatever the original PC was doing. And then if you don't do well enough to gain a new apprentice, when you die that's a full on 'game over start from the very beginning' scenario, so you'd have to balance pushing forward with the primary objectives with becoming a worthy master in order to attract a new apprentice.

>Heavy Rain
>game

Fair point.

Seemless multiplayer. Name one (1) game that had it and was good. Whenever I hear about a game where you play the campaign and mind your business and then some motherfucker comes out of fucking nowhere and ruins your immersion and progress, I dream of being able to walking into developer's building and slaughtering them all without any legal repercussions.

Reinventing the wheel. Developers spend too much time building each iteration of their game and tools from scratch instead of building a foundation from which they can easily iterate on top of so they don't have to spend all their time on "time to triangle".