As video games develop more and more over the years, companies have been making them more and more realistic-looking. I can guess this is related to expectations, but am I the only one who doesn’t care about graphics? We could be using the same processing power to store worlds that have as much exploration potential as the Earth itself if we weren’t afraid to save on processing power by going back to 8-bit.
I care – all else held equal, I’d rather have snazzier graphics – but I feel like there’s pretty strongly diminishing returns.
And because resources are finite, all else isn’t held equal. You’re giving up time spent working on gameplay or whatever to stick fancier graphic assets in.
Some of my favorite games don’t have much by way of graphics.
I do kind of wish that I could get upscaled versions of a number of games that I enjoy with low-resolution pixel graphics, though – I’d like “high-resolution DLC” to be a thing for successful games like that. Think Caves of Qud or something like that. IIRC Cave Story did that, along with a handful of other games. Would like to have higher-res versions of Balatro. Same for Noita, though there I guess the resolution hooks into the game mechanics, so have to be careful how to deal with that.
I’ve also seen some games with untextured polygons that have worked out pretty well. Star Fox for the Super Nintendo and Avara and Flying Nightmares for the classic Mac came from an era when texturing wasn’t always possible. Carrier Command 2 is much newer, and uses only limited texturing.
Minecraft went a long way with very technically-limited graphics.
There are a lot of good roguelikes that just use text.
Same. Most of the games I like are enjoyable due to the game mechanics. I can attest a Pokémon game for example could even be HTML (the old, old Pokémon MMORPG’s were like this) and still be enjoyable, since it’s at heart about strategy (hence why the TCG exists).
Balatro is a perfect example of a game that I don’t think would benefit at all from better graphics. It’s the gameplay that matters.
That’s not how game design works. The people who work on the gameplay and level design and dialog are not the same people who work on the graphics. Sure, making the game prettier takes more time, but it has no effect on how long the rest of the game takes to be built. And lower-quality assets can be used in the interim for things like scripting animations, with higher quality assets swapped in later.
Sure, the same people can’t work on the different aspects, but budget for more designers who spend longer making more detailed graphics could be spent on other departments that do affect gameplay.
You could hire more game devs if that money wasn’t spent on excessive prettiness.
And keep in mind, there’s as much cost in an organization for management overhead, if not more.