To the older heads who have experienced most gens (8bit through to current), do graphics still impress you like before?

[goonergaz]

Pong guy here lol

I do but I can appreciate why people say they don't, I mean, since C64 I can remember what my brain at the time thought 'wow, so realistic'! In particular on PS2 I remember thinking a basketball game was as close to real life you could ever get.

Diminishing returns muddy the water, but Sometimes I also think you need to go back to appreciate how far forward the graphics have come. The biggest thing (graphically) that's taking things to the next level and making me go 'wow' is what RT brings and the potential of SSD.

 

[SigSig]

I don't care at all anymore. You can bring PS2 level graphics, just keep the IQ as clean as you can and get me 60/120 FPS.

 

[craven68]

Way more now than before. I m going to Say , it's been some years since i think every games that i played, Always impress me in some ways.

 

[Mr.Deadshot]

Yes. The last two games that deeply impressed me are TLOU2 and Half-Life: Alyx.

 

[fanboy]

We are done with big generational leaps in graphics. They are adding so much stuff thats not visible to our eyes opposite of huge graphical overhauls. I certainly miss these wow moments however.

 

[Fallout-NL]

Old head checking in: the Demon Souls remake blew my mind, but that's been the only current gen game to do that for me.

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This.

 

[Drek]

Kind of, sure.

Playing Control with RTX on was fucking awesome for example.

But with the PS2 there was a clear "everything is fucking amazingly better" jump over the PS1. I don't feel like the DC achieved quite the same impact as it lacked the same showpiece games for that era, namely sports games and racing games, that were targeting realism. DC was like a super-N64 while the PS2 was the tipping point where games were far more capable of spectacle.

Now I typically find myself more impressed by the confluence of really good artistic design and technical skill. Sony's first party games routinely impress me because of this, but so do Nintendo's on massively weaker hardware.

 

[Not Spaceghost]

i find myself more impressed by good art direction than technically impressive graphics

 

[Gong]

OG Atari 2600 w/terryfing Pac-man conversion reporting for duty (I still hear that horrific noise in my nightmares)



I find myself still blown away by how far games have come and fascinated and excited as to where they could go from here. As much as I love this new console generation and 60fps becoming (hopefully) more standard, if it doesn't play well? Yeah, I'll find myself losing interest pretty quickly.

This has been true from the beginning and will continue to be the case until they bury me with my Switch cartridges. Or they just sell them to CEX for a pittance.

 

[Reinhardt Schneider]

Honestly, no, in a technical sense at least. The last time i had a "wow" moment was with the original Assassin's Creed and Crysis, after that my usual reaction is something like "nice"

Art style and inventive does it for me now, things like Breath of the Wild, tge modern Guilty Gear games, Hades... Shit like that, games that amaze me with how the artists use tech, instead lf the tech itself.

 

[GuEiMiRrIRoW]

Nope, just in rare occasions. I play games since 1989.

 

[Oreiller]

Yeah, I'm sometimes really impressed by technically advanced games. It doesn't bother me to play outdated games though, I have never really cared about this stuff if the game is fun or interesting (been playing since the NES for reference).

 

[RedGator]

I'm blown away by everything these days. On average, the fidelity of modern games astounds me.

 

[Pancakes R Us]

Honestly, just sometimes, but not much. I'm more interested in a stylised look or a unique/less-used aesthetic as opposed to realism.

 

[JumbiePrime]

Few and far between . The only 2 games I can think of lately are Demon's Souls Remake , with its beautiful use of colors and lighting , and Granblue with its great looking characters and art design . Too many games focus on looking "real" and that just doesn't impress me

 

[Timppis]

They do in many cases.

And the variety of games and that we still have new takes and fresh ideas in the indies and in the AA-games is amazing.

Sports games and their animation and graphic levels are just mindblowing comparing them to older versions.

Yeah. They still amaze me even if they have never been a deciding factor.

 

[Magog]

Yes, more than ever. I was never really "impressed" by graphics on the Intellivision. Serviceable would be more appropriate. Graphics now are so much better and more impressive nowadays you would have to be very jaded NOT to be impressed. Just fired up God of War on the PS5 with the new patch and played through the Maiden demo. Was wowed by both!

 

[Sevvybgoode]

As a lot of people are commenting it's mainly art style that impresses me. For instance 2 graphical darlings of last gen were gears of war 5 and RDR2 and both left me cold barring some of the vistas on RDR2. Demon souls and AC Valhalla are 2 recent gen games that I also found pretty without being truly impressive.

I honestly found games like Hades and 13 Sentinels more impressive just due to the art style they went for.

 

[Pargon]

I've seen enough to know that today's ground-breaking graphics are tomorrow's old news - so frame rate is what matters most, since that is far more lasting.
That's not to say I don't appreciate graphics; but not when it comes at the expense of performance.
I remember the days when the games pushing the graphical envelope were also doing so while targeting 60 FPS.
That systems today which are many, many times more powerful than Gen 6 consoles are putting out sub-60 FPS graphics makes me wonder what went wrong that caused huge portions of the industry to lose sight of the things that are actually important.

 

[c0Zm1c]

Not really. Visual style and design impresses me more than technical achievement these days. I love the graphics in games like Cloudpunk and Valheim but they are not in any way state of the art. They're even a bit rough looking but are more visually appealing to me than most other games that do push technical boundaries.

Trying VR for the first time is like the "wow" moments of old but that's not because of state of the art graphics - Half-Life: Alyx, for example, looks about the same quality as most other semi-modern AAA games.

 

[Kouriozan]

Kinda, but photorealistic never did anything to me, I'm more impressed by original styles.

 

[nny]

Began with Atari 2600 - I still get awed with graphics, but not to the extent as in earlier gens. VR was the last "wow" of similar level, and it wasn't exactly for the graphics quality ;P

 

[Wackamole]

Yes very much. 3D graphics really begin to come at a point where i always hoped they would be.
As in: The extra power slowly makes we are getting games where the game-graphics are almost exactly what the artists and game- & art-directors envisioned. And nowadays without jaggies and with an acceptable framerate. Yes, very impressed with what is possible. Both art-wise as shaders, effects, lighting, textures, sky boxes, animation, size of worlds, etc etc. It's pretty insane. Maybe because i've seen the entire evolution unfold before my eyes but i'm often very impressed. I often even wonder how the fuck it's all possible that certain games are made and run.

 

[Skeff]

Gone from an Amiga / Master system to PS5. The gaps between generations is getting smaller and it's shifting to other things, VR Adaptive triggers etc. Last thing that wow'd me were the last of us 2 animations.

 

[Skade]

Yeah, a bit. But nowadays, it's more about small details than the huge graphical gaps we had in the past. So the impact is lower.

 

[Gorthaur]

I started on a spectrum 48k and I still get floored sometimes by graphics. I skipped Xbox one/ps4 generation and playing the first mission of jedi fallen order on my series x was incredible.

 

[AmirMoosavi]

No not at all. Haven't been impressed since Dreamcast. Shenmue was my peak. Basically everything looks good now and there isn't any company out there making exclusive pc games trying to push graphics as far as possible anymore.

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Shenmue was definitely the most I've ever been blown away by a leap in graphics. But recently I've been impressed by Rise of the Tomb Raider and DOOM Eternal. The scalability of the engine of the latter is particularly impressive.

More recently I'm more impressed by things like load times and asset streaming with the likes of Unreal Engine 5. A future with huge maps and zero load times is mind boggling. I'd be happy if future DOOM instalments kept the same visual fidelity as Eternal but had larger maps with more enemies and a faster movement speed like classic DOOM all thanks to the likes of features shown in UE5 and super fast SSDs.

 

[metal]

Yup, each gen EVENTUALLY finds a way to blow my expectations away. Red Dead 2 on the One X is the last game to do so. I expect a ps5 or XSX release in the next couple years will do it again.

 

[Guaraná]

My first console was an Atari 2600 back in 1989.

Some graphics still impresses me, but i rarely care for them.

 

[joffocakes]

I can still be impressed with how games doing something different look (Obra Din, Guilty Gear Xrd, Gorogoa) but on the whole I'm unfussed by modern games' fidelity. I think I was nearing the end of my first playthrough of the Demon's Soul remake when I realised I hadn't considered that this was all on a fancy new console.

Racing games in particular I'm not as impressed with as back in the Playstation/N64 days; there's no doubt that they're getting closer and closer to photoreal but all it does for me is draw my attention to areas of their environments that don't come close to matching the cars.

 

[AmirMoosavi]

I think the biggest "wow"s in future will be in VR. Imagine having current gen graphics with Ray Tracing at 4K per eye in VR, will be absolutely mindblowing once we get there. First time I tried VR on a Vive in a PCWorld/Curry's in 2016 was a jawdropping moment, I picked up a Rift a year later.

 

[werezompire]

Art style impresses me more these days than tech. Persona 5 is probably the most recent game to impress me based on its visuals.

 

[Jlynn]

I'm 41 years old and have been playing since the Atari. Yes. The graphics of the current generation are super impressive. I saw the Digital Foundry video on NBA 2K21 on the PS5/New Xbox series of consoles with my mouth dropped to the floor. I could make out skin pores and saw animated beads of sweat and remembering playing 2K on the Dreamcast thinking this is it graphically.

 

[drewfonse]

i'm in my early 50s, Pong as hell, and I'm continually impressed by PS5/Series X on my new LG CX. Like to he point of getting out of my seat and looking at the screen from 2 inches away. Part of that is definitely the TV, but yeah many games look more and more amazing to me.

 

[LCGeek]

Kind of, sure.

Playing Control with RTX on was fucking awesome for example.

But with the PS2 there was a clear "everything is fucking amazingly better" jump over the PS1. I don't feel like the DC achieved quite the same impact as it lacked the same showpiece games for that era, namely sports games and racing games, that were targeting realism. DC was like a super-N64 while the PS2 was the tipping point where games were far more capable of spectacle.

Now I typically find myself more impressed by the confluence of really good artistic design and technical skill. Sony's first party games routinely impress me because of this, but so do Nintendo's on massively weaker hardware.

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Are you smoking something?

Football games ripped off NFL2k from that era and have never been anything else since in terms of looks.

The system had soul calibur at launch which was untouched for a while in fighters if you were using a vga box for quite sometime.

DC wasn't like super N64 at all. One of the systems mentioned could do textures, polys and resolution for it's era damn decently. The other was a fun party machine that barely ran the best games placed on it.

As for the OP. Been here since 80's and using commodore, apple, sega master system, and nes. Graphics always impress each gen but for different reasons. I still am a fps snob, but a recent gpu I got is changing my opinion on resolution or using tech to enhance such areas. Raytracing and better lighting engines in hybrid form will be very welcome.

 

[Bonejack]

Started playing games on an Atari 2600, i couldn't care less about graphics. Art style / design is more important, and gameplay is much more important.

 

[Rei Toei]

I've been playing games since 1987. The occasional title can still floor me visually, but it's not just graphics, but graphics + art/assets/ambiance or whatever you call it. Like, I can still be impressed/moved walking thru the forests of Witcher 3 and Horizon Zero Dawn and those aren't exactly super recent games. New generations and the technical possibilities are still exciting to me, specifically when there's beautiful (natural) worlds being build.

 

[Madrugador]

No, they don't impress my that much now. I do care for 4K and 60 FPS though, that is a main concern for me now.

 

[FinFunnels]

Every generation there's new games where the graphics just blow me away. I remember being super excited with how "realistic" Goldeneye looked on N64, for example 😂

More recently, it was TLOU 2, which really impressed me. Especially on base PS4 hardware.

 

[Ignatz Mouse]

Started playing games on an Atari 2600, i couldn't care less about graphics. Art style / design is more important, and gameplay is much more important.

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I still think arcade Joust has some of the best looking graphics ever. The style and the animations are perfect.

 

[Slacker247]

Kinda, but photorealistic never did anything to me, I'm more impressed by original styles.

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I like photorealism in how far we have come and keep going, but after about 3 minutes, I'm not that bothered. Style and animation is way, way more important to me now and has been in a long time. By Uncharted 2/3 I was done with photorealism.

Either I am getting cynical, but gameplay is not impressing me much these days when it comes to AAA stuff.

 

[AlgusUnderdunk]

Nothing will ever blow my mind as much as the transition from SNES to N64. Going from sprites to polygons was just stunning.

 

[Rangerx]

Yeah I'm kind of in the middle. There are times like with TLoU 2 where I'm floored by the th graphics but they are not that important to me anymore. I spend most of my time playing games like Spelunky

 

[KlytusImBored]

They certainly do sometimes but we also grew up with most things running around 60fps on CRTs so it's nice to see that push for frame rate in the new gen more than anything. My opinion anyway.

(I'm thinking 8-bit / 16-bit stuff)

 

[Bonejack]

I still think arcade Joust has some of the best looking graphics ever. The style and the animations are perfect.

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I mean, it's knights, on giant ostriches. There's no time and age where that isn't cool!

 

[UltraGashInferno]

It's more like "that's nice, here's a cookie" when the graphics are nice. Framerate is way more important (and game design!) My peak graphics nut time was ps2 era.

 

[Unaha-Closp]

For sure. That early part in The Last of Us Part II where you are riding into the main quest with Dina and you are in a lush green as fuck forest is maybe the best-looking part of any game I have ever seen (disclaimer - I have not seen every part of every game that has ever existed). I remember thinking 'fucking Naughty Dog you didn't have to make this look so good' as I played it. You only travel through it and get some dialogue. It didn't have to look so good. I remember having a similar thought playing Uncharted 2 back in the day - there was a highly colourful room and I put the controller down and thought about what my ZX Spectrum playing inner child would make of it. Red Dead II had some vistas that made me say damn out loud too. So yeah I still get impressed.

 

[dodmaster]

8-bit gaming required you to use your imagination more, so most advances beyond that seem luxurious. I often just stroll through most adventure games, admiring everything like a child in a toyshop. Photo modes are fantastic and let you explore games in a new way. I'm playing through Hivebusters atm and the shooty bits are getting in the way of admiring how awesome it all looks and how the environment seems to come alive. Forza Horizon 4 having interiors that actually looked realistic from the outside and GTAV still looks great ... GTAV waves, Sea of Thieves seas, God of War world serpent, RDR2 in general ... the whole experience of games like these is fantastic coming from a formative experience of text adventures in Zork and such like.

And then there's the physics based games like Teardown and Portal that don't have to look great but have a realism all of their own that doesn't require much investment from me at all, because i'm pre-gfx invested.

 

[Tan]

I think what blows me away more is how 'normal' it is for any game to look really good. I'm still not used to that

 

[OrangeNova]

Honestly, yeah, but not as big as the leap from 2d to 3d games of course