Everyone reading this has been blown away by a game's graphics. Creating photorealistic character near indistinguishable from real people is a mightily impressive point for gaming to reach. We actually reached that point a while ago if you use my mum as the benchmark. She walked past me playing FIFA 2004 one time and asked me why there was football on at this time of day, overlooking the controller I had in my hand and thinking the still-polygonal players were the real deal.
My mum is not the benchmark and gameplay being so good that it looks real is a more recent phenomenon. It's remarkable and when done well, it can certainly add to the overall experience. What I can't get my head around is, regardless of how impressed I am with the graphical quality of a game, that some value realistic appearances over than every other metric we use to judge our enjoyment of games. That some people seem to truly believe a bad game that looks good is better than a good game that looks bad.
My use of the words 'good' and 'bad' is incredibly simplified there, and that's kind of the point. Just because a game doesn't have the polished graphics of a first-party 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation title doesn't mean it is automatically bad. It's some of the baffling opinions on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom that have landed me here again, a topic that has confused me on and off for a while𝕴. However, the bizarre critique of what is objectively one of the best games ever made has finally forced me to get my feelings down on virtual paper𒁃.
Tears of the Kingdom is a giant game squeezed onto a tiny Switch cartridge. The map is massive, it looks fantastic, and there have been minimal issues. That'll happen when a studio can afford toജ polish a game for a full year after it's technically done. Somehow, there are people out there whose jaws didn't hit the floor when they witnessed what Nintendo has pulled off when it comes to how its new Zelda game looks. Instead, they have compared it to games on other platforms that are four years newer than the Switch and occupy seven times the amount of space. Not to mention the additional power they have to pull from on PS5 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series X.
There's this one screenshot from Tears of the Kingdom I've seen every single time someone complains about how it looks. That one of Link looking over a body of water which has a repeating wave pattern. Not only is the screenshot not that bad considering all of the above, but that the same screenshot being used multiple times suggests to me those who have a problem with the game's graphics are struggling to find other examples.
I've seen critique that falls into the same category surrounding 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:AEW Fight Forever. A wrestling game that hasn't even launched at the time of typing this, yet many of you have jumped on what we have been shown so far to point and laugh at how bad it looks. “Hahaha, this looks nothing like WWE 2K23.” Newsflash, that's kind of the point. If you want to play a game that looks like WWE 2K23, I've got a great game just for you, and it rhymes with WWE 2K20-schmee.
More than three years will have passed since AEW first divulged it was working on a game by the time Fight Forever is released. From that point on, Kenny Omega and others who have helped make it a reality have made it abundantly clear its first major video game offering would be an arcade-style title inspired by No Mercy, largely considered to be the best wrestling game of all time to this day yet no one seems to be complaining about its dated graphics. With that in mind, what were you expecting from Fight Forever? Add to that this being AEW's very first game, why on earth would anyone expect it to look like a WWE game developed by a massive studio that exists under the same umbrella as a parent company that owns 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto?
I guess what I ultimately don't understand when it comes to complaints about graphics in games that are either fantastic to play or intentionally don't look photo-realistic is where the bar is. Why are Zelda games getting a hard time but Mario ones aren't? I don't recall 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Odyssey getting slated because its Goombas don't look like the ones you jump on down the park. I also recall 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sonic Mania being celebrated as one of the best Sonic games since the originals. But how can that be when it isn't in 3D and doesn't star what appears to be an actual hedgehog dipped in blue paint?
The key here is there's a difference between bad and unrealistic graphics, and for some reason that line gets blurred at times when it doesn't need to. First-party PS5 games should absolutely be held to a higher standard when it comes to graphics. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2 needs to look visually better than the two games that have come before it. However, to point to it and comment on how much better it looks than Tears of the Kingdom in a derogatory fashion doesn't make sense. Not because it doesn't but because the parameters on which each game should be judged are entirely different.
Fundamentally, it all comes down to what I said at the beginning of this article. I have been playing games for 30 years, and I can't recall a single time where the graphics have prevented me from enjoying a game I love. They'll wow me and may even add to my enjoyment if they're that good, but if the next Sonic game doesn't look like it takes place in Ragnarok's nine realms, that's absolutely fine by me. If it slips back to where the games were pre-168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Frontiers in terms of how good it is across🦩 the board, then we might have a problem.