Game On: Video games don’t need to look realistic
In the past few years, I’ve become increasingly annoyed by the ever-slowing trickle of new video game releases. I can appreciate studios delaying their products so they’re not bug-riddled messes at launch, but a cursory glance at game development history reveals hundreds of excellent, timeless titles that took two years or fewer to develop – from inception to the shipped product.
So, what changed? Graphics and animations are the primary culprits. They are more detailed, fine-tuned and often much more realistic today compared to just a decade or two ago. Some of these games are a sight to behold – Metro Exodus, Cyberpunk 2077 and the Last of Us Part II almost look like live-action movies.
Things have come a long way in just a few decades. And while photorealistic video games have their place, I’m not thrilled by the idea of such meticulous detailing becoming commonplace or something that’s always expected. Good graphics don’t make a good game.
I’m probably jaded partially because of the way Sonic the Hedgehog – a series I grew up on – has gone downhill over the years. The first few games each took mere months to create from start to finish and are often considered the apex of the series. They were 2D side-scrollers with vibrant and imaginative graphics, but they weren’t mind-blowing, and they weren’t realistic.
Compare that to the painfully mediocre Sonic Forces, a 2017 title that took almost four years to develop. The graphics clearly took a lot of time and effort, and the massive levels and variety of options available for custom character are a testament to that.
But it doesn’t matter much when the game itself just isn’t fun, and knowing fans had to wait four years between mainline titles for such a boring experience is downright painful. Instead, the platformer that grabbed all my attention around that time was Celeste, an indie title made by fewer than a dozen young developers.
It’s a pixelated 2D game with vibrant visuals, sprinkled with particle effects and all sorts of intricate little touches that make the game pop despite its blocky appearance. Mixed with buttery smooth gameplay and a surprisingly solid story, the minimalist graphical approach doesn’t hold the game back but instead gives it unique charm for a 2018 title.
While most people were understandably fawning over Myst’s impressive attempt at photorealism for years after its 1991 release, as a young child I had eyes for another Cyan effort – Cosmic Osmo, a goofy one-bit point-and-click game that was so immersive and smart I found myself forgetting it was in black and white.
Spokane’s little collection of geniuses at Cyan managed to create the illusion of shading and gradients by using interlaced patterns with only black-and-white pixels. Cyan worked with what they had on Macintosh computers in 1989, and the result was stunning at the time and still looks good today.
Sometimes, working within constraints can bear unexpected fruit, and Cosmic Osmo’s uniqueness to this day is testament to that. A part of me misses those technical constraints because it forced developers to get clever. It even went beyond graphics and nudged programmers to optimize games efficiently.
If you’re wondering why split-screen couch co-op has gone out of fashion, it’s because, in recent years many developers just haven’t bothered to make things run smoothly enough for hardware to render the game from two to four different angles.
Most people have also embraced digital game ownership, so developers don’t always work within reasonable memory constraints to squeeze a game onto a single disc. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is around 200 gigabytes now – for comparison, PlayStation 1 games had to fit on a 700-megabyte disc.
So, your average PS1 game 20 years ago was 1/286 the size of 2019’s Call of Duty release. It’s disappointing to see increasingly massive development teams take more and more time to create video games with the ultimate payoff being more realistic graphics at the expense of clever and better-optimized gameplay.
But I’m hopeful that creators and gamers alike will begin to see past the hype and remember that while good graphics can enhance an already-good game, there’s no sense in polishing a dud.
Riordan Zentler can be reached at riordanzentler@gmail.com.