I wonder if this is likely to become a trend in the gen Zs? In the off chance I accidentally g*me, I next any game resembling the art style of common pay to win games and sometimes even next any game where the graphics look “too good”.
Because you know they’re going to be endless fountains of “oh it looks like you need to buy gems” diarrhea.
As a natural evolution of this, retro games have a known history of being good, and new games with retro style graphics are kind of like boring green colored frogs. You know they’re safe because they don’t have all the wacky cartoony colors of the poison frogs.
If you need one more excuse, retro games imply better battery/thermals.
“Bad graphics” as a term should only refer to graphics that are difficult to visually interpret within the game design, or graphics that are simply too bland/uninspired to look visually interesting. Metal Gear Solid 1 doesn’t have “bad graphics” because I can still visually distinguish what I’m looking at and they don’t interfere with gameplay. Silent Hill doesn’t have bad graphics because it has interesting design.
The recent Gotham Knights game has bad graphics because despite the game’s attempt at realistic, compelling visuals, they come up very flat and weak in comparison to previous Batman Arkham games. Fortnite has bad graphics because it looks like a bland corporate cartoon mess.
Maybe some younger folk have a hard time interpreting what things in early 3D graphics are supposed to be? Or they have a harder time understanding the visual clues? I’d think the main difference would be gameplay design quirks in older games, not just the graphics, but things like figuring out where you’re supposed to go without things like quest trackers or compass markers. Quality of life stuff like that seems like a bigger distinction between older and modern games than just visuals.
Heck I play new games with bad graphics.
I know the PS1 retro aesthetic is kind of overplayed in indie games right now, but some of them are actually really nice looking. They’re still low poly, but typically slightly higher poly and with higher quality textures than old consoles could actually handle, so they look like what I remember games from the time looking like, rather than how shitty they actually looked.
There are plenty that do a sloppy job of it, but with the right art-style and good texturing, that stuff can actually look really nice, and nostalgically soothing to old knobs like me who remember it from our younger days.
I wish they’d tone down the PS1 floating point polygon jittering effects “for authenticity” though. Game developers back in the day were aware of the jitter and tried to build environments and scenes to mitigate it the best they could. Adding in graphical effects for the fun of it that contribute to eyestrain is literally the opposite of authenticity in this case.
Even though I started playing games on the PS1, I’m not huge on the retro low poly look. I just don’t think late 90s early 3D graphics have aged well at all, and that includes PC games as well. I have no trouble playing games from the era, but to deliberately emulate the look when it’s so clearly a compromise doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
Emulate the look and feel of PS2 games instead. Give me a game that looks like MGS3 :pingu-horny:
