Yeah, I can’t tell whether they mean aesthetics > graphics or everything else that goes into a game trumps good graphics.
With the latter, I generally say that good graphics can’t save a bad game, while the former I refer to as the Wind Waker effect. People complained about how cartoony Wind Waker looked after the GameCube graphics demo showed off a realistic-looking fight between Link and Ganon, but today Wind Waker is looked back on fondly for its art style that defined many Zelda games after it while many of the “realistic” FPS games from the time are looked back on as the “real = brown” era.
Oh, yeah, that’s a branch of this argument I had almost forgotten. Such violent swings in the stylization wars.
I think these days it’s less aesthetics/graphics and it’s more photorealistic graphics/minimalist graphics, except minimalist graphics don’t register as graphics at all in some cases.
In the middle there we also have the “graphics haven’t improved since the Xbox 360” crowd. I think remembering that we spent like a decade playing games in black and white will become the new “PSOne games looked terrible and we didn’t realize” in a minute. It’s due, because now we’re in the wave of “PSOne games looked awesome, here’s a lo-fi stylized game people think took no effort to make for some reason” after people stopped referring to pixel art as “retro”.
I have to say I wasn’t ready for how much getting old makes these nerdy arguments start to pile up in sediment layers. It’s been a long trip.
Well, I assume most people splitting things this way typically think of design as gameplay design or systems design.
Either way I’d argue it’s a bit of a misunderstanding of both what goes into good non-photoreal visuals and of the concept of game design.
Yeah, I can’t tell whether they mean aesthetics > graphics or everything else that goes into a game trumps good graphics.
With the latter, I generally say that good graphics can’t save a bad game, while the former I refer to as the Wind Waker effect. People complained about how cartoony Wind Waker looked after the GameCube graphics demo showed off a realistic-looking fight between Link and Ganon, but today Wind Waker is looked back on fondly for its art style that defined many Zelda games after it while many of the “realistic” FPS games from the time are looked back on as the “real = brown” era.
Oh, yeah, that’s a branch of this argument I had almost forgotten. Such violent swings in the stylization wars.
I think these days it’s less aesthetics/graphics and it’s more photorealistic graphics/minimalist graphics, except minimalist graphics don’t register as graphics at all in some cases.
In the middle there we also have the “graphics haven’t improved since the Xbox 360” crowd. I think remembering that we spent like a decade playing games in black and white will become the new “PSOne games looked terrible and we didn’t realize” in a minute. It’s due, because now we’re in the wave of “PSOne games looked awesome, here’s a lo-fi stylized game people think took no effort to make for some reason” after people stopped referring to pixel art as “retro”.
I have to say I wasn’t ready for how much getting old makes these nerdy arguments start to pile up in sediment layers. It’s been a long trip.