PC graphics have stagnated

I think you just described Daggerfall there. Not quite, but I know what you're saying. I don't mind "empty" terrain in RPGs, but in a typical RPG you can expect that after some empty area you will stumble on a dungeon of some sort, or some random NPC, etc. In space, no one can hear you scream (at how bored you are because it's all empty space. ). In that case planets are your points of interest, or space stations, maybe asteroids, but in general it seems those games as of now are really sparsely populated with general "things to see".

I have said that I think a modern Daggerfall-style game would be pretty crazy (in more ways than one. ). But using modern proc-gen tech + the typical handcrafted content of a TES game spread out a bit to create a huge RPG world could be interesting. Making maps, conversations about locations, finding your way around in general, etc., indeed could be really neat.

Originally Posted by Fluent
In space, no one can hear you scream (at how bored you are because it's all empty space. ). In that case planets are your points of interest, or space stations, maybe asteroids, but in general it seems those games as of now are really sparsely populated with general "things to see".

I think the current examples definitely justify what you're saying, Elite Dangerous being a prime offender. That said, personally, in a space game with a rich selection of content to be found if you follow somewhat clear channels, I wouldn't mind the realism of a largely empty universe, where random exploration is likely to only yield resource discoveries. One could spice it up a bit with an ability to detect very distant signals, leading to sidequest-type content - not necessarily procedurally generated, but procedurally located, if you see what i mean.

Strike commander and 1942: Pacific Air war were 2 of the games that helped accelerate CPU technology as when they came out even the best spec CPU made the game barely playable. Hopefully the same thing happens when Star Citizen comes out. Personally I don't care for graphics much but it is nice on certain games.

I haven't followed SC very closely, although I am quite interested in the game and genre. I just don't have it in me to follow the news of games in development anymore. But, I agree with your original post that the technology (not necessarily art) on display is incredible. Having watched the first few minutes I knew that this was a game I would play.

However somewhere around the 10 minute mark I began to experience some motion sickness. I tried to power through it because I've done so in the past. I played all of Wolfenstein 3D under constant nausea. I had to stop watching around 15 minutes in. Hopefully the actual game doesn't do this to me. I have a feeling it was all of the involuntary head movements, such as when he entered driver mode.

Originally Posted by Korplem
I haven't followed SC very closely, although I am quite interested in the game and genre. I just don't have it in me to follow the news of games in development anymore. But, I agree with your original post that the technology (not necessarily art) on display is incredible. Having watched the first few minutes I knew that this was a game I would play.

However somewhere around the 10 minute mark I began to experience some motion sickness. I tried to power through it because I've done so in the past. I played all of Wolfenstein 3D under constant nausea. I had to stop watching around 15 minutes in. Hopefully the actual game doesn't do this to me. I have a feeling it was all of the involuntary head movements, such as when he entered driver mode.

The video isn't too clever, which doesn't help - I'm kind of surprised they didn't provide a top quality vid to showcase what they're doing.

Also, for such a long video in first person, with movements that are not under your control, it's probably not surprising that it starts to unsettle your balance. I read an article a while ago, by a guy that's been working on VR for years in the field of professional training simulators, and he reckoned that the widespread sensitivity to visual perception conflicting with physical awareness would be a showstopper for mass adoption.

Originally Posted by Ripper
The video isn't too clever, which doesn't help - I'm kind of surprised they didn't provide a top quality vid to showcase what they're doing.

Also, for such a long video in first person, with movements that are not under your control, it's probably not surprising that it starts to unsettle your balance. I read an article a while ago, by a guy that's been working on VR for years in the field of professional training simulators, and he reckoned that the widespread sensitivity to visual perception conflicting with physical awareness would be a showstopper for mass adoption.

Yeah, I'm assuming we'll need a Matrix type situation in order to get the pan-sensory input needed for real VR to be useable.

On the question of graphics progress, there's a conflict between VR and overall graphical quality, because both require more computational power. If I were a studio making the choice as to which to focus on, I know what I would choose.

If you were a publisher concerned with making a profit, you would look at market segments, see where you can compete, and then make a game that will sell a lot of copies in that market. For a lot of publishers, that means paying to develop mobile apps.

If you were in charge of a small indie studio determined to make a name for yourself, you would probably have to focus on original gameplay or artistic presentation. You most likely wouldn't have the resources to produce the quality and quantity of content to compete with AAA titles on their own turf: no one is going to out-Call-of-Duty Call of Duty.

If you had a team of a few hundred programmers, 2D and 3D artists, musicians, writers, network engineers, and all of the HR, finance, health, and executive staff to guide and support them, plus a budget to pay them all for a few years, then you would probably return to the first paragraph here, and produce AAA games for consoles instead of shovelware for phones.

As for VR versus graphical quality, regardless of how many graphics cards you have in your machine, your VR headset still has only so many pixels.

The video looked pretty cool. Showing vast planetscapes with detail to be seen from the solar scale down to the individual blades of grass is pretty amazing. I'm more impressed by crowds though. I'll be amazed when I can run a battle of over 10,000 unique soldiers on my home PC, or when I can interact with a city of thousands of unique inhabitants.

Edit: also, the character models in Star Citizen look good, but it obviously wasn't their main focus. If they really wanted to show detailed people, there would be translucent layers of skin with subsurface scattering. When the guy looked into the sunrise at around 6:50, you should be able to see his skin glowing a little, and you should see through his ears slightly. Look at a person standing in front of a window with the sun behind him, and you'll see what I mean. Also, there should be anisotropic lighting in his hair, and not just a reduction of specularity.

What hasn't stagnated are the hardware requirements for new AAA titles. 3DCenter.org published an article with their current recommendations to play all games @max on the desired resolution. "Only" 95% of the games might require significantly less though. Here is an update with the developments since 2013.
All articles are in German, but you should be able to understand at least the graphics anyway.

The short summary: If you're buying new, get no less than 6 GB graphics RAM, period. Even for FullHD.

I love to see threads like this. I have been thinking exactly the same thing myself. As far as I know Star Citizen is the only game really trying to push modern PC's. I have some hope that Kingdom Come might push a few things forward as well, like clothes.

But I guess we have to wait until the next round of consoles before we'll see any huge leaps in graphics. I can totally understand that, the costs for creating high quality models is extreme, and it would just not be feasible to make a PC only game with such an enormous costs, except perhaps for an MMO.

It is also hard to believe how long DirectX 9 was the standard for creating games on PC, there was several reasons for that. One being Microsoft of course. Another one being the delay of UE4.

I do think there is some hope, once we see some high profile UE4 games being released, we'll see also see some significant increases in graphics quality, even if consoles would still keep the PC back.

I can't agree on the premise and it's blaming on consoles.

The major reason for PC stagnation IMO are not consoles but phones. Next IMO reason is PC sales idiotic media articles where 99% people are still using 10 years old PC because they can't understand what upgrade means. The third reason is IMO safebets where no risk product will still sell. One more reason is developers' being techlocked in some ancient engines instead of giving a chance to fresh ones. Final IMO reason is the audience itself that for whatever reason accepts rubbish ports and suggests those to others as good games.

I'm fine with graphics stagnating, it the gameplay, AI and environmental gameplay stagnation that is much worse imo.

AI peaked with fear and has actually regressed imo and I'm not talking about difficulty, I'm talking about believable AI. Fear AI sometimes made me forget I was playing against a computer.

Farcry 2 introduced spreading fire. Yet how many years later when a fireball fight breaks out in a tavern it doesn't end up burned to the ground. If it did you might think twice about throwing that fireball and losing potential quests and a merchant to a nasty fire.Hell, I can't even flip a table over for cover yet.

Might and magic dark messiah had some decent if not repetitive way to kill using the environment and yet today it's used sparingly or not at all. It definitely has advanced. By now I should be able to break a bottle on a bar and use it as a weapon, shoot fire arrows at a bandit house flushing them in to an ambush or even rig an explosive on a cliff side to bury an entire bandit camp in rubble.

I understand what you're getting at an I do like a pretty game, but to me graphic advancement is the least of my needs from gaming.

Star Citizen is nothing but a tech demo at this point. It doesn't have any working gameplay systems, no economy, no real AI and no dozens of players in the same space in any of those featured videos. It's all flash and make-believe to incentivize gullible people to cough up even more cash for ship JPEGs.

You might as well look at the very flashy and impressive Unreal Engine feature trailers for what is theoretically possible. Same thing. It doesn't really translate to what a final game will look like, especially complex games or MMOs where compromises will always have to be made between visual fidelity and performance.

It is no coincidence that some of the most beautiful games are the ones that are lacking gameplay or any complex features like e.g. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter which has stunning graphics but is otherwise very low maintenance in terms of hardware requirements. It is literally a hiking simulator.

With the promised feature set of Star Citizen it is inevitable that a lot of the visual fidelity shown in the trailers is going to have to say good-bye if the game is supposed to come out this decade (which is already impossible for the full featured game).
Squadron 42 might make it within the next couple of years but we will have to see where the visual quality and the features will be at if/when it finally does come out.
The full featured Star Citizen, the MMO, however, is literally still years away.

To be honest, for me graphics reached a point where I'm fine with. The next step I'm looking foward to is VR, not 4K.

Once you go 4K you don't go back.

Graphics like those in Might and magic, wizardry, everquest one and two are just fine for me, don't need anything more taxing. As long as the gameplay is solid, I'll try it, the window dressing is secondary by a lot.

I realize this post wasn't specifically about RPGs, but the RPG (and strategy) genre is still niche relative to the action / shooter genres that typically get AAA releases. Which many of us here don't really care about. And the handful of AAA (so-called RPGs) that have released in the past are really action games / shooters with light RPG elements. While many Watchers (including even myself) enjoy these sometimes, they still pale in comparison to a really good CRPG, IMO.

In theory it would be great if we could have CRPGs have breathtaking graphics that push modern hardware to it's limit. Thanks largely to crowdfunding and early access we're seeing a few AA RPG releases… Although it seems like many of these are underwhelming as far as the gameplay goes, they look pretty; even if they're not even at the level of AAA console games, it's great that an "old school" RPG with a budget of a few million dollars is now possible. But it is still not enough of a market for big publishers to take a risk with….

Graphics aside, I want to see more PC exclusive RPGs get made. In an ideal world indie CRPGs like Expeditions: Viking, Copper Dreams, Stygian, Age of Decadence, etc. would sell like hotcakes laced with crack so that the developers could hire more staff and potentially make their next game with bleeding edge graphics. Unfortunately we don't live in that world and all we can hope is that the good indie RPG developers do well enough to simply stay in business.

But even if they do sell better than expected I'd personally much rather have RPG developers spend the extra revenue on hiring more writers / designers for future games to enhance the story and make the gameplay better, more complex and varied…

As graphics improve so does the expectation for better production values in general; e.g., there would be an expectation for full voice acting which is also extremely expensive and can lead to developers reducing the amount of dialogue choices in the game to cut down on VA costs… As much as I'd love to have my cake and eat it too, the AAA audience seems to want interactive movies, not deep stories / gameplay.

TLDR; graphics schmaphics , it's all about having fun games that are actually made for the PC rather than phones and wiistationboxes.

Originally Posted by daveyd
In theory it would be great if we could have CRPGs have breathtaking graphics that push modern hardware to it's limit.
…
Graphics aside, I want to see more PC exclusive RPGs get made.

You write the nicest things.

Could it happen a decade back? No - PC gaming is dead.
Can it happen today? Absolutely can for a few reasons: one is TW3 presentation, investment and it's number of sold copies, for Ubisoft CEO blind followers there is Denuvo, finally at the top of the foodchain other genres already have an unbeatable competitor (for example racing simulators can't outsell GTA5 mediocrity).

Originally Posted by sakichop

I understand what you're getting at an I do like a pretty game, but to me graphic advancement is the least of my needs from gaming.

Graphics are easy to market, their advancement is already written in stone. After 4K, 8K. At that point, on a common home flatscreen, the human eye will start seeing no betterment from higher resolutions. One solution will be to increase the size of flatscreens to give meaning to 16K resolutions.

The other mentioned features are far from providing the same security and are hard to market.

Noncasual PC audience don't care about 4+K marketing. You know, people who don't play hidden object games and similar "escaped from phones" stuff.

But if you market a visual gem that looks as powerhungry game as 60+FPS even on superold GPUs, you got yourself a bestseller.
It doesn't even have to be paid marketing, check MGS5 requirements for example, in reality a machine twice weaker than minimum requirements will run that game at 60 FPS without a glitch - tested and wordspread by the audience and the very reason the game sold more copies than it potentially should. Would that game sold more if was marketed as 4K where buyers would discover that it struggles at any resolution? I doubt it. While I don't have a proper example where 4K game sold well, remember nicelooking Arkham Knight release that was unplayable because of unbelievaby poor performance even at the lowest possible settings and on the most expensive hardware that exists.