I want fidelity, crisp frames, with a cool art style, not some jank and blurry attempt at "realism". Ban TAA, ban ML upscaling, ban frame generation. Ban AAA.
(All the best games are indie games)
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Why the hate against TAA?
TAA can be fine when implemented well. Temporal information can be very useful for adding more detail over multiple frames that couldn't be obtained without doing more samples every frame.
However, when done poorly it makes things blurry as you move the camera. The information needs to be correctly adjusted for camera movements or it smears all over the screen. It's also made worse with things like rain drop effects and things like that.
TAA is useful. It's just too many games just enable it and it without knowing how to use it well and it just degrades the image.
Do you have an example of a game using TAA correctly? Because so far, all the games I've played with TAA on are blurry.
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It's completely shit, it's like covering your monitor in vaseline. All games with deferred rendering should use SMAA.
I recently upgraded my computer with the best possible components, and it makes me so mad that games look worse than they did when I put my last pc together. What’s the point of bothering with graphics at all if you’re going to add a smear filter.
Indie games out here killing it with pixel art.
Because the bigger games are made as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The now so popular UE5 just enables this practice, because it allows an easy avenue to "realistic" looking games with all the fancy lighting. Quick to put together, but in the end, you get a poor performing blurry mess. And a happy nvidia, because you slapped their dlss bullshit on it. So thats the new trend.
If we consider a game as a cake, I think of the graphics as its frostings. Sure, it could make the game look very good, but won't do shit if the base of the cake is crap.
i'd consider realistic graphics as fondant, sure you can create amazing visuals with it... but that thing is barely edible. give me some buttercream (stylised graphics) instead
One of the things I liked about Blizzard was that they never tried to use fondant. It was all buttercream...
Until Activision made them start mixing fiberglass into the frosting to cut costs
As Alton Brown said, "Cake is only the delivery system for frosting."
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I can't handle getting addicted to Nethack again at this point in time
It’s still great. Like old school Civilization, or even older Zork
I did a lot of stuff in the first Zork (kill the troll, solve the maze, open the gates of hell, etc), but I never quite figured out how I was supposed to win.
They had to start putting graphics in their games before I could beat them.
Hitchhikers Guide was even worse.
Fuck the babble fish puzzle.
Plus getting a third of the way into the game and if you didn't take the junk mail at the beginning you have to restart.
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It’s creative bankruptcy. Things don’t need to be realistic, it’s called style.
Stuff like Zeno Clash and Dishonored hold up aesthetically because they aren’t going for realism. And I’d take Morrowind’s arthropod bodies back if I could have the moral complexity and ya know, themes back.
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Just don't understand people looking at screenshots and gameplay videos and commenting on how the shadows on some background detail look slightly better with the FSSMGXTR scaling setting turned to BBXT5 instead of HAMndX3.
I remember people discussing hardware and one of the best advice comments I've ever seen was:
"Turn off that little FPS counter and just enjoy the damn game."
People get so wrapped up in the hardware hobby they forget why they care in the first place, which would be fine if it wasn't just fuelled by hardware marketing to make everyone else feel like they're "missing out."
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It's the same mindset as people who overclock or tune their cars
And then they complain that their framerate is too low, causing flickering or lag apparently but it causes blurring instead which they do with motion blur effect already. 🤪
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Does ASCII art count? Dwarf Fortress, MUDs, etc. are great fun.
Text rendered onto a screen is also graphics.
How many layers can be peeled before it's not a video game anymore?
I honestly think it would be interesting to play a game by sound alone, where you play as a blind person (maybe Daredevil or Zatoichi or something) and you navigate the world by listening. Ironically, it'd probably need to be on a VR headset so that the game can detect you turning/tilting your head and adjust the stereo balance accordingly.
Maybe Zatoichi would be best, as you could hear an enemy swinging a sword like "SHING" and "SWOOSH" etc, and maybe that would give you enough information to block or dodge. You'd probably also need haptic feedback to tell you when your blade connects.
Maybe there could be graphics, but only to recreate the sense of smell, like the screen is pure black except when you smell something and then a word appears on the screen like "rose" or "blood" etc.
There is some game where you are blind any the only thing you can see is blood from what ever you killed splashed on the walls. Totally forget what it's called. But yea yours sounds cooler
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I saw a text based porn game yesterday. Was pretty fun but not much porn.
What's the fediverse etiquette for "can wet get a link to that?", but in a way that's not weirder than this already is...? I've made it weird. Maybe it was already weird.
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That's 3 hairs on the arm you see. Give me my $90
It was never about fun. It's about experiencing the game.
When I read a book, the goal is to have whatever experience the book is going to give me, and leave my own life behind for a while.
Getting lost in a AAA fantasy world with super-high-fidelity graphics is an amazing experience.
Journey the game had extremely great graphics that are also good style and made you get lost in the fantasy and experience.
The character still did not have things like visible strands of individual hair. Realistic does not automatically make it good. It just makes it expensive.
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I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC
Lucky for your, there are lots of older games as well as plenty of indie games that focus on gameplay with very limited graphics.
Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.
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Are dcss tiles banned? I don’t want to play it ascii
Yeah, I think it's interesting to play it in ASCII. It makes you actually read the text logs and use your imagination, which feels more like a book. But it also makes it harder to actually know what's going on, so I really don't know about it being more fun...
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Unpopular opinion but graphics do matter a little bit or at least more than the meme depicts. Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it. I wish things moved between tiles fluidly like in Rimworld instead of it being a slideshow, but I can actually stand to play Dwarf Fortress now. If the only video games that existed were text-based, I'd probably never play video games again. Ps2 era graphics on the other hand, hell yeah. 90s era dos graphics are passable too. But PLEASE no text adventure games.
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it
OBJECTION!!
The ASCII graphics have a charm of its own, even if it skews the horizontal-vertical distances due to characters being 8x12
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it.
Supremely unbased, I still just see elf, dwarf, plump helmet...
Abandon widespread* texture use, return to polygons+vertex colors+in-engine cutscenes (and similar data-saving techniques like soundfonts).
my examples (2D: created with Godot, 3D: created with Blender)
spoiler Animated eye
This was using a feature that likely isn't viable (for common use) due to performance.
:::
And for something not-by-me, see Spyro's vertex color skyboxes.
* general normal maps are ok, but I didn't have much luck beyond using generated noise for metal. I even tried some stuff with watercolor, maybe with better shaders it could work but untextured is easier.
Or another example, any material you can just apply without alteration (for instance, make something look like wood) is alright too. Maybe UV mapping is not too bad, but extra per-model work is not ideal.
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There was an excellent text based RPG called Roadwarden that came out the other year. It's just text and illustrations so thought I'd use this post to mention it.
If small amounts of animation are allowed then WORLD OF HORROR was decent too.
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