I’ve never been the kind of person to pay attention to techn༒ical specs or things like frames per second. I grew up in a Mac-only household, which meant most of my gaming took place on consoles, where settings are easily standardised and I didn’t have to spend an hour tweaking loads of stuff to work perfectly on whatever I was playing on. Even after getting my first PC last year, I haven’t been very interested in fiddling with my settings to get the best graphic output or the best performance. I don’t consider ray tracing or any similar functions to be crucial to my enjoyment of a game. I’m far more interested in actually playing them.
Of course, I’m not ignorant to the fact that there are lots of people who care about these things and consider them important to their love for video games. The frames per second debate is a whole thing that I don’t want to get into because my colleagues already have, with Features Editor Eric Switzer saying that it does matter to people who are sensitive to it and Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley saying that even though it matters to some people, most people 𝕴who care aren’t actually affected by it. Digital Foundry wouldn’t have the influence it has if p🦂eople didn’t care about specs and getting into the nitty-gritty of how a game performs. It’s nerd shit, which I love, but it’s just not the specific kind of nerd shit I care about.
This focus on visuals, though, has led game developers to strive for more and more realistic graphics as the benchmark of what a current-gen game should be. When they show off new tech, it’s almost always in the context of ‘hey, look how realistic our characters look!’. I can’t help but think of the Hellblade 2 showcase at GDC 2023, when Ninja Theory said they were “pushing the boundaries of realtime facial animation” and showed the audience a shockingly lifelike animation of Senua. Stacey wrote a piece saying that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:not every game has to push boundariesౠ and I have to agree. Studios are striving towards the wrong thing entirely – graphics are already, broadly, very good. Nobody needs photorealistic graphics. I do not need to be playing a game and marveling the whole time at how much it looks like a film.
And gamers agree. The success of Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3, the two highest-rated games of 2023 on Metacritic, are games that aren’t focusing on photorealism, but systems. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:As my colleague Andrew King wrote, both TotK and BG3 give you a ton of abilities and set you loose into their respective world to do basically whatever you want. These games are fun and critically acclaimed not because they look incredible – Tears of the Kingdom, in particular, can look shitty because it’s giving up graphical fidelity to run on a 2017 handheld console – but because they let you do shit no other game lets you do. You can solve a p🀅uzzle in as many ways as you can imagine, and that’s extremely cool.
Nobody is out here writing treatises about how good either of these games look, despite the fact that Baldur’s Gate 3 does look pretty good. Gamers know these games aren’t notable because of their visual aesthetics, but the way they play. When we say we want innovation, we don’t mean we want games indistinguishable from movies, we want games that 168澳⛦洲幸运5开奖网:make us wonder how the hell they were even made. We want games that accommodate our every bizarre impulse, to the point where we ask ourselves how the deve🎐lopers could possibly have known people would try that. I don’t give a shit about video game charac✨ters that look like real people, I want games that let me do what I want.