memes

I've been enjoying the graphics in Satisfactory. Although I believe most of that enjoyment comes from their creativity and art choices rather than technical specs. Factorio is dark, dirty and depressing to represent the reality of mining and manufacturing, but for those same reasons I didn't want to play it. However, Satisfactory's bright and cheerful-looking landscapes, creatures and art drew me in to actually want to pick up the game. Then the juxtaposition of that natural beauty with cutting down trees and machines marring those landscapes spewing pollution was a highly effective choice to drive the same point home. I began to notice my GPU fan was spinning up and I dropped the framerate until it wasn't. And I've made other greener choices in my life as well, just because I played a game.

EDIT: fix typo

Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??

I mean yes? Certainly I can put another 1000+ hours into a game from 10 years ago or 15 years ago, but people aren't playing those games any longer, and those who do in a team setting are so far beyond anything a casual player can do it's not even close to being remotely fun. LAN parties were amazing, but they existed because most of us didn't have incredibly fast internet and we wanted to show off the PCs that we had cobbled together.

These days it's easy to fire up Discord or whatever chat you want to use, play a new game with your friends that looks great, that plays well (enough), and then you can buy a new game. I'd rather play Doom Dark Ages over the original Doom. Or to go to the 10-15 years ago metric, I would much rather play Doom Dark Ages over Doom 3. But hey, when Doom 3 came out, this exact same conversation was happening, because Doom 3 wasn't easy to run.

Are you genuinely having more fun now than with good games from 10years ago? Even 15years ago??

On the contrary, I'm still playing those games sometimes. At the moment it's Need for Speed: Most Wanted from 2005.

And recently indie games are growing in popularity, those are often quite simple visually, or go for a retro style. Megabonk for example, or Mewgenics or Slay the Spire 2.

This has nothing to do with quality of enjoyment but access to it.

Requirements are not marketing. They are mechanical limitations specified by the developers. That's the difference between "Minimum" and "Recommended". We are talking about the minimum requirements here.

I’ve been a pretty avid gamer for most of my life, not really the guy who goes out to buy the absolute latest and greatest graphics card but let’s say I’ve been playing most games between medium and high settings most of the time.

For about a year or two now I’ve just stopped. I’ll play some og doom, Klondike, worms,…when I have 0 energy and some time to piss away. But honestly, even that has become less and less.

Probably age, but also, it’s a drag getting into gaming. Create 5 accounts, sacrifice your privacy and your soul. Learn these super weird controls that you’ll never need again, grind 3 weeks away or spend half a months pay,…

Mfr I just wanted 10 minutes of fragging.

Maybe that's the silver lining. If AI companies are the main customers of GPUs, not us, then they won't need to keep up-selling us every year with nonsense.

Back in the 90s, most people didn't have PCs because they were PC gamers. They just played games on their normal PC, and game devs tried to make games that would run on anything. If the average person has old hardware, then game devs will be incentivized to build to that.

Because it looks like this whole requirements thing is pure marketing, and studios needing to keep selling: “Look, shinier graphics that will make the previous generation of games you loved and found incredibly sharp and detailed when theé came out look mild and of bad quality now!”

This is exactly what's happening. Its been going on for a long time, and is in some ways holding back the industry from progressing in other areas, such as new and innovative forms of actually interacting with game worlds and their narratives.

I'd personally say once 3D graphics were able to represent things without it looking abstract from too few polygons (say, around 2006 or so?), the medium could've slowed down the pace of graphical advancements significantly, and the industry would've benefited enormously.

Modern indie games that do not have AAA budgets for graphics instead have focused on unique and attractive art-styles, sometimes with retro aesthetics, and are generally able to create far more compelling experiences due to the lack of emphasis on graphics.

Graphics, I think the most fun I had was PS one, SNES and NES era with a little in PS2 era and the last of it was the Batman arkham games. Not much has sparked true joy since.

The developers are noticing and indie is going retro. Free and paid games are adopting the simpler 3D models and 2D sprites, imposing artificial limitations to have to deal with, intentionally creating developmental challenges that will manifest as stylistic choices later.

It is working.

Back in the thick of it, it was easy to get sucked into the hype when game graphics tech was progressing so quickly...

These days I mainly emulate older games. Fun games are fun.

my favorite multiplayer experience was Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64 with the Teddiz and the refugee Squirrelz. Blowing the heads off nazi teddy bears and watching foam shoot out their necks like blood was so fun.