Readers are addressing the age-old debate about what’s more important in a video game: the graphics or the gameplay?
The topic for this week’s Hot Topic was suggested by reader Paulie, who asked if you care how good the graphics are in a game and how bad the gameplay has to get before it becomes a problem.
Most people agreed that gameplay is more important, and always has been, with indie games mostly praised for their interesting art design rather than high-tech visuals.
The only real
For me, gameplay is always king. My favorite gaming experiences are all because of the gameplay and the graphics are an added bonus. My favorite two games are Portal and Half-Life 2, which were pretty advanced graphics at the time, but that’s not what I remember most about them.
Perhaps the best example of gameplay over graphics to me is Hotline: Miami. That game has a fairly simple graphical style, but the gameplay is so much fun that it hardly matters, in fact, the graphics of that game match the atmosphere perfectly.
On the other end of the spectrum is another game that I really liked but it was the graphics and world that pulled me through certain parts of the game and that was Read Dead Redemption 2. I found the gameplay very clunky and not lots of fun, but the world was so stunning to look at and experience (and still is) that I was willing to overlook those flaws in the gameplay.
Angry Kurt (gamertag)/Truk_Kurt (PSN ID)
Now playing: Dead Space remake (Xbox Series X) and Zelda: A Link To The Past (Nintendo Switch Online)
Constant desire
There should be no doubt about this and yet if you look at the history of gaming up to the present day it’s clear that graphics are more important to most people or at least they won’t be interested in any game if it actively looks bad.
The only exception I can think of is Minecraft, which makes the poor graphics part of the appeal, but of course Minecraft isn’t every game. The Switch may be low powered, but all of Nintendo’s big games still look good for what they can do, so it’s not like everyone isn’t trying to make an attractive looking game.
I’m hoping that as the graphics improve less and less over time, gameplay will become more of a distinguishing feature, but we’ve been hoping for that for years.
Toast
No settlement
I find it a bit depressing that this debate is still emerging and not finally settled in a schoolyard in the early 1990s.
It’s probably not too surprising, given that I’ve seen the lines deliberately blurred into a single package (one you might call the overall entertainment experience) with even the most recent high-profile triple-A release. I’ve heard professional critics gush about the facial animation during a cutscene in God of War Ragnarök, and how fundamental it is to the experience.
They have their place, but in some cases I consider a lack of things like facial animation and other modern indicators of inflated production values almost a specific badge of honor when it suggests that developers are wise enough to focus their resources on what’s important and settle for efficiency elsewhere.
Graphics can be important to quickly convey an emotional charge or to create a certain atmosphere. But I’m playing a 40+ hour game to do the things it has to offer in that time, not because of a series of short beats that take up a small portion of it (and sometimes don’t even rely on an interactive element) . If the games that tend to give me the most things to do seem to treat those things as less of a priority, that’s a big bummer for them.
The gaming event I’m most looking forward to this year is the release of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom. What I’m least looking forward to are all the reviews that will inevitably be used as a platform to complain that it’s being released on a six-year-old portable machine and that it could have looked better otherwise.
Panda
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Interactive entertainment
Gameplay will always take precedence over graphics for me. To be honest, most of the games I choose these days don’t really have terrible graphics. Zelda: Breath Of The Wild was barely advanced and I doubt Tears Of The Kingdom will bring much progress but the art direction counts for more and if it drags you into the world through its interaction then there are billions of polygons and ray tracing is not essential.
Bloodborne suffered from poor performance, but didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment. People made the (incorrect, in my opinion) point that Returnal could easily have run on a PlayStation 4, but it managed to be the best game of the current generation without looking quite as impressive as Horizon Forbidden West. Super Mario Odyssey, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Nex Machina, Nioh, Elden Ring, and even things like Fortnite all lack photorealistic worlds and are all the better for it.
Games have their own identity. Be it art direction or just vivid fantasy. Insisting on photorealism is no use if you still have a giant HUD obscuring everything and tutorials where a lifelike humanoid tells you to press the circle button to clumsily jump into the magic portal.
That’s why I despair about this obsession with making movies. The gaming industry makes more than the movie industry, not because of the photorealism or endless non-interactive cutscenes, but because YOU deal with it. Your actions determine the outcome. Not as a passive observer, but as the one who is in control.
You can play Journey solo, finish it in two hours and say ‘that was pretty fun’ or you can meet a fellow traveler, sing while using just one symbol and dance in the sand for 10 hours and then cry uncontrollably at the end. All done through interactive gameplay and no cutscene featuring a ray-traced, native 48K, photo-realistic Sahara Desert and a Peter O’Toole doppelgänger.
That’s my opinion anyway. Others may rightfully disagree.
Total
Too attractive
I can understand that in the 1970s and 1980s, when the prettiest thing to see on screen was a yellow pizza-like thing or just two white bars, graphics and gameplay were tied to the point where players filled the blanks. had to fill in both what they saw and what they were doing. But as the 90s progressed, there was some lavish 2D art in a lot of games, and then 3D games bought into some impressive stuff with both graphics and gameplay.
Now we’re at a point where many gamers, myself included, are separating the two categories. In 2023, the PS1’s advanced graphics look primitive, but classics like Crash Bandicoot and Final Fantasy 8 still play great (if you’re into those kinds of games). And if you’re playing on an emulator they might look all the better, but it’s really the gameplay that keeps me coming back to old games, not the two polygon chests of the 90’s.
This brings me to today’s games. I recently wanted to play Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (2017) but found that it takes over 70 GB to install and I don’t have the space or internet speed to install it. But why is the game so big? Because the environments and characters are so detailed, you can see the pores on people’s faces (obviously, the graphics aren’t the only reason for the large size, but quite a contributing factor).
Don’t get me wrong this is impressive but this is a game where you shoot things and get shot at and a lot of the characters wear helmets they really don’t have to go that hard for the graphics and it ends up stopping people like me from playing the game to play. Glad to see some developers starting to see that you can have nice, stylized graphics that aren’t photo-realistic and take up a big chunk of the game’s file size.
Unfortunately, these are mostly budget platform games like Pac-Man World Re-Pac and the upcoming SpongBob SquarePants game. Note that due to the non-photorealistic graphics these games tend to be cheaper too, so please more developers stop making their games so pretty and instead make them fun, you know, that thing I play video games.
Sunny
Market forces
I’m sure everyone will pretend that they value gameplay above all else, but I’m afraid that doesn’t really add up to what games are popular. The majority of people want to play games that look state of the art and they are not interested in anything else.
Imagine playing God Of War or Horizon Forbidden West with mediocre graphics. It’s the visuals that make them interesting, not the gameplay. Of course it would be best to have both, but images are easier to create and easier to market, so that’s why it happens.
Eagly
New graphics
I always seem to play games that are behind the current generation of titles, because of backlogs! I am used to looking at images from a while back. Keep in mind indie games and graphics are really not the only reason to play the games.
The gameplay indeed appears to be more important, but I am often curious about a game in which graphics play the leading role. Heavy Rain is an example, along with Detroit: Become Human, to experience the realistic and awe-inspiring graphical power of these narrative games.
These games are fun and interesting in terms of storytelling, but gameplay is definitely not a reason to pick them up. For me as a player, who would normally feel more freedom in a more open world game, this takes some getting used to. It’s a nice novelty, but not something I’d go back to, unlike other games with more control over your character.
That’s why indie titles are just so perfect. Not the best graphics in the world, but the art styles are definitely ingenious. There are so many titles, such as Night In The Woods, Bastion, Celeste, Gris and Ori, etc. with such exciting but not triple-A graphics. Instead, they have fantastic artwork to make up for less complex graphics.
So all in all, gameplay first, but I’m willing to try a new game where graphics are the main draw. Luckily I’m not a graphics junkie or I would have missed out on some of my all-time favorite gaming experiences.
Alucard
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