Why Graphics Matter (In Video Games)

Now, some people might take me as to being a graphics whore, but I don't really see it that way. Usually I never try to "promote awesome graphics" in bad taste, and I usually know that some games try to rely too much on graphics and have poor gameplay.

That said, this editorial(rant) is gonna be using examples of why I think graphics do matter in a more general sense, and why sometimes when people focus too much on graphics...I rather just have good gameplay.

So why do graphics matter? Well, why not? Since the dawn of video games, some of the best video games had both good gameplay AND graphics. It's hard not to feel addicted,immersed, and downright wired to something that has the best of both worlds.

Some of these franchises include Final Fantasy, Deus Ex, Battlefield, Star Wars, Uncharted, Killzone, and other titles that have a good mesh of both important gaming aspects. That said, there are some games that look pretty, but don't play pretty. I must admit that Call of Duty, The medal of honors pre-airborne, and titles like Halo just rub me the wrong way. Even though people find delight in them (somehow), their sporatic and downright clunky moments kill most of the fun in their respective moments.

That, and even if Final Fantasy XIII is a good game all around, I can't help but feel that the battle system was one of the last things added to the overall design.

There's also the matter that having more graphics support and graphics options can lengthen the replayability of a game (at least PC-side). It's hard to really go back to an old PC game that doesn't support widescreen or any resolution that is 720p or above. Not that the gameplay stinks after a few years, but a game that can't take advantage of post-launch hardware is hard to play if it doesn't look fresh anymore (or able to take up your monitor fully).

Also, it seems technology is behind the actual resolution of video games. If anyone knows of my recent rediscovery, is that while consumer TVs have yet to hit the 4k or super-hi vision mark. That it's almost common knowledge that a single character itself in a game has a 4k texture, and here we are stuck at 1080p (while still amazing), and sadly in some areas just 720p.

720p and 1080p are still awesome to look at, but for all you know by the time we reach 4k products, that games will have been using 8k textures per model.

Now there's not really a problem with this if you think backwards, as it's always better in my opinion for games to be downscaled by tvs instead of upscaled by them. It seems a common demographic that unless your tv has a good scaler of recent (2010+) tv model, that 720p games on a 1080p model look pixelated and just...not smooth. It was not only 'til recently that my family bought a newer plasma 1080p that had a scaler that made 720p (and even 480p) look pretty awesome, and that well...made the 1080p content look realistic.

If you have seen my Deus Ex and Vietnam 1080p footage and looked at what I posted before then, there's a considerable difference, definitely when I upscaled both games to 4k (aka Original-Original in good taste).

Now, at the start of this gaming generation, people overused and abused the term "uncanny valley". A term that basically means; the closer we get to more realistic graphics, the uglier they will seem before we "get there".

Now, even my non-graphics whores will agree that, given the right techniques (like actually making better graphics), that in some ways game nowadays almost look better than reality itself. Games oozing with texture-detail and polygon counts that given at TV 720p or above...reality just looks dull.

Sure, there are games this generation that look downright ugly, but that's usually because while the graphics processing has so much potential, that the shortcuts the developers use look like everyone's face is a mugshot.

One example I would use is GTA series, while the cars and buildings are pretty nice, everyone looks like they got their face rear-ended one time or another.

Now, with all this said and done. Graphics are not the end all and be all of games, which people use this phrase to hound me about. Which I actually agree with most people. That said, graphics do help (a lot) and helps with keeping you immersed. Gameplay is more important that is true, but I'd rather play a game that has good gameplay and the people look real, than a game that has good gameplay but characters that look under-modeled.

That's it for me for now, hope you enjoyed this little rant/editorial of mine.