Topic: How important are HD graphics to your enjoyment of a game?

@Ryu_Niiyama Haha, any time!

It's one of those things that you got lucky early on 3D, when they hadn't really figured out how to make cameras imitate normal vision in a 2D format, and as they got better at it, it got worse for you!

Though on the inverse side, with modern games it does provide a way for you to see things simulated more the way others see them via a 2D method that you wouldn't get to experience otherwise, so there's a plus in it for you too. Might be comparatively disorienting, but it does give you that aspect via anatomically simulated 3D that would be physically impossible to experience in real 3D.

I, personally, don't care about "HD Graphics" per se.
I really only care that a game is being displayed at its native resolution.
On a 1080p screen, that's going to mean HD. However, as people have mentioned, 3DS remakes like MM3D look great and aren't anywhere near HD.

I care about HD. I didn't buy a 4K TV so I can play games in SD.

@alasdair91 Of course, the graphics are an important part of being able to enjoy a game. But it's not the MOST important part: that would be the game's mechanics/controls. If these suck, then the game can be the most beautiful game you've ever seen, but it would play like crap, so no way any sane person could enjoy that. And then there's lots of games that rely heavily on the story, so that too is very important.

Graphics are more like the cherry on top, because not everything needs to be 1080p or higher to look good or to be great to play. There's also plenty of art styles that don't really benefit from being in HD.

I also agree with everything that @NEStalgia has said. Having a good TV or screen and besides that some high quality cables/connectors and upscalers or a VGA Box is pretty much essential for enjoying older systems on newer TV's.

So, in answer to your question: "In 2017 who wants to be playing ~720p games on large TVs?"

Me, and millions upon millions of others. I still play games from Atari, Commodore Amiga, Colecovision, NES, SNES, Genesis/Megadrive, PS1, N64, Dreamcast, GameCube, Wii on my 43"Full HD Plasma screen (Panasonic Viera) and all of them look just fine, and sharp, and are still as playable as the first time I've played them. Some 3D graphics haven't aged as good, but even so: I can still play and enjoy them.

A big factor in that is of course also the personal connection/experience you can have with certain games or systems, so a bit of sentiment will also come creeping in, and personally, I also think that age is a factor. I'm almost 47 years old and I've played on nearly all systems and handhelds since the Pong console, which was still on a black&white (and portable) TV, so that also counts for me, and on all these systems, I have my favorite games and to this day, I still like to play them from time to time.

And the lesser graphics don't bother me one bit, because you know that you're playing on an older system, so you know what you're going to get and that is non-HD graphics. But the mechanics/gameplay and story of these games is still very much intact, far as I am concerned.

P.S.

To me, the 3DS is still a great handheld, with some pretty great games that still hold up pretty well today, but if you can't stomach the graphics on the 3DS anymore either, you might want to replace that sentence in your profile where it says: "Love my New 3DS!"

Agreed on solid frame rates, though. Unless you mean that all games should be 60fps, which is entirely unnecessary...

Bright colors are usually boring. Sixth gen realism looks great if the developer gave a damn about the art assets. However, whenever I hear someone talking about 'timeless' art styles or how games have aged I want to puke.

Games — realistic or not — literally, demonstrably do not age. You can put down a controller in 1998 and pick it up again in 2017 and you will be playing the exact same game. It's people's pathetic memories which age. If people were decent they would put that on themselves, but because human beings are raging balls of ego they project that cognitive failure out to the entire rest of the universe. The planet couldn't have rotated, no, the sun must revolve around the Earth. Majora's Mask looks totally different today than when it came out. Totally.

Art design is more important than visual fidelity, although I won't say the latter is unimportant. It just impacts my enjoyment of a game less.

@Haru17 The games look the same, but the way a game's art-style holds up as the years go by is what people mean when they say a game has "aged." Same with the mechanics. "Timeless" games still look and play well twenty years after their release, whereas others do not and are almost painful to play today.

Games with "timeless art styles" are more stylized and as such look comparatively better years on than other games with more realistic art styles, because the standard for "realism" in visual design is always increasing through the years. There's a reason The Wind Waker is still gorgeous and Twilight Princess looks like dogmeat.

Good quality and pleasant graphics are important for me, but the resolution itself does not count that much. When I had the Wii I had an old HD ready tv and Wii games looked rather good in it. I would have wanted the Wii to be in HD more for the Photo channel than the gamesthemselves, that looked really good. But now in my new full HD tv Wii games look rather bad. I remembere there were a lot of great looking games when HD was not the standard too and they would be pleasant today too but not on the televisions we have today.

Played a whole bunch of Bomberman R last night (portable and on TV) and only a few hours in did I remember the resolution/FPS was changed via the patch. Honestly, make good games (I really like Bomberman lol...) and it shouldn't matter what the graphics are like.

I am probably at a tangent, but I really like the look of Wonder Boy TDT and Ultra SF2. I believe there is a real place for classic 2D sprite work getting redrawn HD graphics whilst retaining the playabilty and keeping the 'soul' of the game authentic.

@GrailUK Don't you find the price of Ultra SF2 a bit...extreme? It's $50 over here in Canada and I just can't stomach that. Feels like Capcom is just taking advantage of Switch gamers since they know we're desperate for games.

EDIT: I too am on a purchase spree though and Wonder Boy is my next buy. Already bought Puyo Puyo Tetris and Mario Kart is incoming tomorrow!

@Bender1001 Oh absolutely, price is a horse of a different colour. As the graphic work for SF2 had already been carried out years ago, I am struggling to see how they justify the price tag.

@Ralizah You didn't read my post at all. Y'see, I don't think The Wind Waker looked better than Twilight Princess at any point in time.

You can have an opinion, a preference, but you cannot make the sun revolve around the earth and change finite realities with that opinion. The Wind Waker had and will always have ugly 2D assets for the 'forest' on top of Outset Island and simplistic modeling throughout. Twilight Princess has a lot of finer detail and subtle color work, and those are appreciable regardless of recent lighting advances.

Art direction is a big thing for me. I feel we are in a generation where people can do HD graphics just fine, but a sense of art direction is a necessity

Completely unimportant. 'ECH DEE GAYEMZ' is the biggest gimmick in gaming history, actually I'm just going to say it, graphics are in general. Graphics are dated the moment the game drops. Graphics have always been meant to appeal to a certain type of shallow gamer, usually the masses. Yet time and time again, through out gaming history, successful consoles have proven that graphics do not matter, yet developers and hardware makers still pour millions of dollars into making games 'look better' just for the 'gamers' that praise the graphics when the game first comes out-- just to turn around and snub their nose at it in two years when something prettier comes along.

@Haru17 You apparently didn't read mine. I'm aware of what you think, I just don't agree with you. I never said The Wind Waker was a more visually complex game. Clearly TP has more detailed textures, more complex usage of color, etc. Yet, the general consensus, and I agree with it, is that The Wind Waker is still a visually striking game, whereas TP is butt-ugly. And that all comes down to art design, because, as I said, realistic styles date much more quickly than non-realistic styles. The Wind Waker, in spite of its visual limitations, has a "timeless art style." There's a reason Nintendo only had to slap a new lighting engine onto it to get it to look like a reasonably modern game, whereas they had to do a significant amount of work upgrading textures and whatnot in TPHD to even make it look presentable. Even then, most people I know would say WWHD is significantly easier on the eyes than TPHD, even though the latter clearly had a lot more work put into it.