Topic: How Graphically impressive do you want your videogames to be?

To me it comes down to three factors:

Has the effort put into graphics either taken from time better spent on mechanics, story etc or being used to try to hide the other shortcomings of the game?

Are the graphics a distraction from the game itself? Does photo realism really improve a game when something more stylised would better serve it?

Most importantly of all: do the graphics suit the game, even if they are far from groundbreaking?

Think of Zelda: Wind waker; back in the early 2000s when it was revealed there was a major stink raised by some fans that it wasn’t the more mature version shown at Spaceworld 2000. People complained that it looked like a cartoon or for children.

However, time has shown that it has aged superbly (the HD remake on Wii U was nice but unnecessary in terms of the graphics). Furthermore, the graphics, as simple as they were, suited the game perfectly. So graphics should serve the game and enhance the experience but not be the sole reason to play or enjoy a game.

Tldr; as long as there is a balance between looks and performance, suit the game itself and are not being used as a crutch for other failings in the game graphics are not all that important.

@Gamecuber
wind waker is another example of one of those games where i feel the aesthetics are great and have aged fantastically, i absolutely love how that game looks.

i feel like quite a few of GC era Nintendo games still hold up well, there was something distinct about how the games looked.

I only care if the game is good.

@Mgalens I agree. First party games such as Smash bro’s melee, Mario kart double dash and second party games like Starfox adventures and Metroid prime still look great today and are just as playable. Certain third party games like the resident evil games are superb too.

@Tendo64 also are they talking about graphics or resolution? It’s the same graphics on a Switch or Xbox but the Xbox can probably pump out better resolutions etc

Gameplay > graphic fidelity, most of the time. The only exceptions are visual novels or artsy fartsy games where gameplay takes a backseat to the developer attempting to tell a story in addition to some visual panache. I enjoy DoA Xtreme 3, it's a wonderful piece of eye candy, but I would never recommend it. On the other hand, Undertale is a visually antiquated piece of art, one that I recommend to unknowing rpg fans at every opportunity.

Frankly, graphics are my least concern when it comes to games. If there's no substance to the gameplay, then I don't care how pretty a game is, I won't be playing it. To put it another way, good gameplay never becomes outdated.

Gameplay over everything else, but if we are just talking the visuals... art design over graphical fidelity. You can make great looking games with low hardware requirements with the appropriate art design. Nintendo does a really good job at this with their 1st party titles. Blizzard has always been really good at this trick, as well. Their PC games are always built to run on a really wide range of hardware specs compared to other AAA games, and they look great across all of them because they allow for it in the art design. This obviously ends up resulting in a fair bit of abstraction or cartoony-ness, but I prefer that look over attempts at realism, personally. Too many developers take the approach of designing art only for the higher end devices and then just fuzzing it up on the low end and calling it a day. I honestly can't play any of the AAA Switch ports for this reason, there's nothing uglier to me than a game that was designed for a higher end machine trying its best to run on a lower end one.

As great as pretty graphics can be, they are no substitute for fluid gameplay. I'll take 60 FPS over amazing graphics any day of the week.

Good graphics are nice and can help me enjoy a game more but I'll play any game no matter what it looks like as long as it's fun. Frame rate doesn't really matter to me either (within reason), I can barely tell the distance between 60 and 30 fps anyway.

I'm not against 30fps so long as games can maintain it consistently. The problem is that it's become somewhat synonymous with games that hover around that mark, but frequently drop below it, stutter or freeze. However, locked 30 is a whole different experience to games that are just floating free around the same. Even some very twitchy genres can work well with it.

That said, a solid 60 always beats a solid 30 and the upper limit on frame rates is surprisingly high. Play games at 120 for a while and I guarantee that you'll notice the difference when you go down to 60, let alone 30.

Graphics help make a game more immersive. I’m all for better graphics. Pixar like in the case of Nintendo.

Ive started to notice how better graphics can improve gameplay and allow for a more immersive experience. I would say it's probably a resolution and FPS thing rather than actual graphics. Ori looks stunning on any system for example.

I was recently playing re-core on my Series X and decided to carry on playing in bed so took the memory card up and carried on playing on the bedroom Series S and I found it really jarring dropping from 4k resolution to 1080p.

I have also found myself addicted to Paladins after being talked into downloading it by guys in my gaming Community. It's a really fun hero shooter so I thought I would download it on my switch as it has crossplay and it is like playing a completely different game on switch, I find it really difficult to make out enemies and the blurriness and low frame rate gave me motion sickness so I just deleted it.
The same thing happened with Immortals FR, I couldn't play it on switch due to the motion blur making me feel nauseous yet I've absolutely loved playing it on Xbox and have no issues.

I have always been about gameplay and the look of a game may impress me from time to time but it would not be a deciding factor in buying a game.

This always brings me back to my opinion that Microsoft and Sony are forcing the industry in the wrong direction, increasing the production costs for games makers by making the process long winded on the basis of having to put things a few hairs popping out of someone's nostril. I would rather they spent more time on making the experience more enjoyable.

Now we have to put up with repetitive AAA titles that can trust the product to give them return for the time and effort of putting those hairs in that nostril, or rakes of indie games that all too often copy successful formats from other games, or just look the same as each other.

But fortunately I can still find enough things I like in that mix.

@Mountain_Man don't agree that good gameplay do not age. NES platformers were a good standard at the time but I do consider them pretty much unplayable when compared with 16bit

Yeah. I'll admit, I'm a sucker for 3D things. Shame it never caught on, but like you pointed out, it technically lives on through Virtual reality headsets. So i geuss the 3D Fad of a decade ago wasn't for nothing.

Regarding the fifth Paragraph; I Guess i agree with you. It's strange how that is, isn't it? How sometimes the lower end port is more impressive then the native normal versions on other systems. Perhaps it's because unlike the more powerful systems you actually need to try to get the game on the system. This of course leads into a topic about how restricted creators need to be to make good things, but that's a topic for another discussion.

As long as the game doesn't look like it was made by a drunk kid playing around with Play-Doh, I'm not too picky with the look of video games.

This is actually a nice chance for me to say something i was thinking about saying, though it is a tough topic to talk about, isn't it? Yes, all that bonus realism is annoying and makes making things way more annoying then it's worth, but sometimes even the details on a character and/or environment can tell more about something then just saying it outright. Uncharted 4 leaps to mind; look closely around the third half of the game at Nathan Drake and you can see the bruise from before is still there (Talking about why the bruise is there would be spoiler territory.) In the realm of items, The paper you find for notes is old and wrinkled, but you can see how it's survived after all these years.
The human element to make all this happen is no doubt debatable, but i just feel like i have to mention it once in a while. There can be all kinds of details that one would not normally point out that could say a lot about something or someone. But i still also find myself wondering if it's really worth it when it comes time to tone it down for lower end hardware.

There's a difference between good gameplay, and a game that you might enjoy in the moment. There are a lot of games that I absolutely loved from years ago, but to try and play them today is a chore, which means they didn't actually have good gameplay. Now other games, I can play them years later and enjoy them just as much as I did the first time I played them.