Getting tired of people being so dismissive of games having poor visual presentations. While, yes, graphics are not necessarily the be all end all for every single game, to say that the visuals of a VIDEO game aren't important is patently absurd. I feel like those who say that graphics aren't important are like the hipsters of the gaming scene. The "I was there before graphics WERE graphics maan!!" type. There used to be a time where reviews actually *gasp* RATED the quality of a game's graphics!! And I find it bothersome that we've entered this time where graphics are looked at as being "unimportant" when the visual fidelity of a game is vital to our own mental immersion in said game, ESPECIALLY considering how much more dense and complex the worlds of these games are becoming. When a developer goes through that much trouble but everything looks "wrong" it shatters the illusion. Imagine if Marvel released a new Avengers title that featured effects on par with a sy fy channel movie. People would flip. Same thing goes here. Games are, at their core, a visual medium. It's a bit silly to say that the quality of those visuals don't matter. As for this game in particular, it very much looks as if Fallout 4 was initially fully intentioned to see release on the last gen consoles. Before they hit a memory ceiling with the size of the world they wanted to create and thus HAD to migrate it to the new consoles but lacking the time necessary to make significant changes to the renderer. I'll still buy the game and play it next week and probably enjoy it a great deal. But the visuals ARE a disappointment. And it's OK that that matters to some people.
People around here aren't
ever 'dismissive' when a game has a poor visual showing. They harp on it, day in, day out, like that's the premier metric that games should be judged by, the main element of a game that should be considered before a purchase, if the game is backed by a name more than five people in that thread can recognize. Because that's how AAA works, I guess? If you're a successful game developer, that means you'd better learn to melt my eyes off, 'cuz that's pretty much the only thing I care about! And there's the reason why I'm not joining in this chorus of applause for your post - I never said that people shouldn't judge games based on their visuals, but some of the people in these threads seem to believe that it's wholly appropriate to judge the entire quality of a game, and the level of work its creators put in,
solely based on the visual fidelity of the game. And as for someone who's willing to look beyond a game's visuals and emphasize the enjoyable experience they'll have with the game, someone who urges others to do the same?
Or in other words, the typical attitude expressed toward almost every single one of the hundreds or thousands of games released every single year that don't have that nebulous AAA label tacked on? The type of attitude commonly found in userbases of platforms whose upcoming lineup usually isn't propped up almost entirely by games that sell themselves on their technological wonder first and foremost?
Well those people, they're just hipsters. They're off base for not allowing their disappointment with the visuals to color their perception of the quality of every single 'part' that contributes to the 'sum', the game.
Yeah, I don't like that. Maybe it's because I only recently started gaming on PC almost exclusively, but in the last year or so I've been exposed to dozens of games I never thought I'd enjoy, that rely on so much more than their visuals to bring a quality experience. And while graphics are always 'part' of the equation, you'd think going by the discussion in here that they're the only part of a game that even merits any level of serious analysis or discussion. We get a dozen or two dozen posts when a new mechanic is touched upon in a leak or in impressions. Graphics? Hundreds of pages.
Anyone can think whatever they want about the graphics. I just get caught up in the hyperbole, personally. Half of the people I've responded to up to this point were the ones whom I believed couldn't make an objective comparison or analysis if their lives depended on it (and don't get me wrong, I've gone overboard a few times myself in my own flawed comparisons), because according to those people, these graphics aren't just 'underwhelming', or 'disappointing', or 'shitty' - they're PS3/360 level, when they're not. They're indicative of a lazy, cheap, budget developer with a lazy, cheap, budget dev process, when they're not. They're indicative of a 'piss poor', 'awful', 'terrible' game, when they're not. And of course, they're the only element of the game that merits discussion, or the only element of the game that ought to factor into your decision to support it, when they're not.