• EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    7 months ago

    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 ā€œrealisticā€ FPS games from the time are looked back on as the ā€œreal = brownā€ era.

    • MudMan@fedia.io
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      7 months ago

      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 ā€œgraphics haven’t improved since the Xbox 360ā€ crowd. I think remembering that we spent like a decade playing games in black and white will become the new ā€œPSOne games looked terrible and we didn’t realizeā€ in a minute. It’s due, because now we’re in the wave of ā€œPSOne games looked awesome, here’s a lo-fi stylized game people think took no effort to make for some reasonā€ after people stopped referring to pixel art as ā€œretroā€.

      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.