At least the skin textures are 4096x4096
(media.scored.co)
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I'm not a big AAA game player.
I honestly just get bored as hell watching the new trailers. I couldn't even finish the Witcher 4 trailer. The photorealistic, gritty, bland graphics just ... bore me. It's really amazing how much soul and detail could be packed in low resolution graphics.
Ditto for Dragon Age Veilguard. It just looks so ... tedious and generic and modern day bland.
There's an adventure game speedrunner Youtube channel called One Short Eye. He's done some deep dives into old games. Here's one of his videos on the EGA Sierra game "Colonel's Bequest"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2budy3S3MA
It's a game that was built on a shoestring of a budget compared to games today, with fewer resources and tools than a kid on an ipad. The details and environmental effects are amazing.
I think the lower quality graphics meant that the player's imagination had to do a lot of the heavy lifting and the human imagination is always going to produce a better product than whatever a development team can. So the more you remove the need to lean on the human imagination, the lower the quality of the product becomes. It's all on a curve and there's an optimum amount of graphical fidelity, but as you approach hyper realism you end up on a point of the curve where everything just gets unappealing.
I very strongly agree with your take. As an example, to this day, I find the Classic Warcraft graphics preferable to the latest expansions. Some of the later expansions were great with vey stylized “Warcraft-esque” graphics…like Pandaria. But, once all the models were redone, animations enhanced, textures made higher res, etc., Warcraft lost a lot of its feel.
There’s definitely a sweet spot somewhere in there. Many old 2D games hold up well. Games like BG1/BG2 are still incredibly playable and look good today. Some early 3d games are really impossible to deal with.