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.
Text rendered onto a screen is also graphics.
How many layers can be peeled before it’s not a video game anymore?
I remember people discussing that Dear Esther was not a video game.
Just remove the video part. Now it’s just a “game.”
Oh. Why didn’t I think of that!?
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
The flash game The Blind Swordsman does something like this.
I’ll just leave this link to Mindustry here, I guess…?
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
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.
This is also why I prefer the San Andreas era GTA, the graphics are cartoony and the gameplay is fun as hell, the hyper realism style they moved to with GTA 5 is so boring and lifeless
It sounds silly, but San Andreas is really underrated. Like I know it’s considered one of the best games of all time, but the writing, the confrontation with racism and the police and the dynamics of gangs….
I mean, most of the time it’s just fun to get 5 stars and enact your own revenge for the MOVE bombing. But that main storyline is so slept on.
I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC
Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.
Lucky for your, there are lots of older games as well as plenty of indie games that focus on gameplay with very limited graphics.
Terraria
I’ve yet to actually play it, shame on me, but A Blind Legend took an interesting approach to being graphicsless!
Interesting! Added to my wishlist.
Is this a crosspost from https://lemmy.world/post/29709088 ?
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.
Ok ok, i searched history (you know what i mean…).
Thanks!
I can’t handle getting addicted to Nethack again at this point in time
try out Moonring. you might like it and its free
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.
Also - can’t you pick up tea at some point, when you need to have the item “no tea” to complete the game?
I played the Apple II version. Old games were cruel. I’d get frustrated and rotate between Rivers of Light and The Return of Hercules.
You release the bird from the cage to kill the troll, or maybe I’m thinking Adventure
The troll you can kill with the sword that glows in its presence, if I’m remembering my Zork correctly. I think it regenerates though, so maybe you have to cut the head off, and then it vanishes in a puff of vile smoke, or something like that.
The smirking sneak thief can be dispatched the same way, although I think you can also use the axe you get after killing the troll. I think it wasn’t a sure thing though, like you can give the “stab thief with sword” command a few times and sometimes you win and other times you die.
Although you should give the egg to the thief (he can open it and you can’t) and then kill him and retrieve it from his dead body later, otherwise you can’t win the game. Obviously.
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.”
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. 🤪
It’s the same mindset as people who overclock or tune their cars
All of this is lost on me. Out of ancient habit, I keep my video streams throttled to 360p to ‘save bandwidth’ even though that hasn’t been a necessity for me for a decade or so.
1080p60fps gives me motion sickness. I have no idea what 4k120fps would do to me, not that I have a capable monitor.
Does ASCII art count? Dwarf Fortress, MUDs, etc. are great fun.
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)
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.
Why the hate against TAA?
It’s completely shit, it’s like covering your monitor in vaseline. All games with deferred rendering should use SMAA.
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.
Not necessarily, no. I watched this interview with one of the Squad devs recently, and he did a really good explanation of it though, if you want to hear it.
It’ll never be perfect, but it can help, especially in slower paced games, or games where most of what you see is very far away (so it moves slowly on screen).
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.”
The frosting might give my system constipation though.
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)
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.
I love Spyro to bits but that game/camera style makes me motion sick something fierce. Can we get a compromise?
Look at how some of my examples are 2D, motion style is not really core to my point. Many variants of fixed-camera, top-down, sidescroller, even static/semi-static art are possible.
I mean I guess if you make a cool skybox like that you’ll want players to be able to look at it somewhat freely. Is it specific to flying/camera speed or any 3rd-person game? 1st-person? Can settings help, or is this something that would not work with faster-paced games?
I do see that less motion seems to help, one person said higher FOV+big display with distance (among other non-digital things)… though I don’t think I’ve ever had motion sickness from a game (though I think I do have some issue related to inner ear) so I can’t be sure.
I know personally if I’m able to make anything, it’ll probably be on the smoother/simpler side. For example, I made a simple character controller and adding view bob never entered my mind. Probably no filters either.
