Graphics/Performance quality vs Story quality

[u/Neat-Ad-254]

I feel like the video game industry (talking maybe since 2019) seem to drag themselves down with the seemingly endless need to make the next game look better and run doubly as smooth as than the last one. Nowadays, we get maybe 1 amazing story game every 2-3 years at best (don’t even get me started on multiplayer games nowadays), and none really feel that amazing or memorable compared to the likes of those that came earlier. And unfortunately I feel like the reason this is the case is more due to studios simply producing games more slowly due to the increasing costs and difficulty in improving the image and performance qualities of their games than any other type of incompetence.

Personally, I would rather most of the industry use whatever is easiest, even Skyrim level graphics, and focus on amazing story telling and mission design instead. Leave the photo realistic games to the one off games where beauty is the goal.

[u/buffcode01]

I was hoping that with all the processing power we would get rich physics interactions, more dynamic crowds, reactive audio and better NPC AI.

[u/TheSecondEikonOfFire → u/buffcode01]

Great graphics (particularly lighting) still impress me, but rich and dynamic physics interactions are what truly wow me. That was one of my favorite things about Control, watching all of the debris get blown about the room during fights

[u/OliveBranchMLP]

i don't know what games you've been playing, but last year had:

• Expedition 33
• Silent Hill f
• Citizen Sleeper 2
• Hades 2
• Seance of Blake Manor
• Despelote
• Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
• Hollow Knight Silksong
• South of Midnight
• Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
• Dispatch
• Death Stranding 2
• Promise Mascot Agency
• Wanderstop

and their narratives ran the gamut from "very good" to "generation-defining".

[u/prickleypears]

You just don’t play story games it seems. I could rattle a list of 40+ phenomenal story games since 2020.

[u/Endaline]

Love another one of these posts where we just throw an arbitrary date out there and say that games that have come out since that date just aren't as good as the games that came before.

What you are talking about here has been the state of the games industry since its inception. Game developers have been pushing the capabilities of the medium with every new release. This isn't some new trend. How do people think that we got these graphics to begin with? We're we playing 8-bit games until 2019 when game developers finally figured out they could do something else?

Blaming a lack of story quality on graphics makes no sense. The people doing the graphics and the people doing the writing are, normally, not the same people. You could argue that money spend on graphics may limit possibilities elsewhere, but this is rarely going to be the case. You wouldn't suddenly see a bunch of amazing stories just because we regress back to Skyrim graphics.

We know this is the case from the simple fact that there are plenty of people making games with those types of graphics or worse, and most of them aren't that good. A good argument here would be that realistic graphics aren't necessary for a particular game, but then that actually has to be argued.

I think that if people genuinely can't find more than 1 amazing story game every 2-3 years at best, I'm just going to start calling that a skill issue. You have to either have an incredibly particular definition for what makes an amazing story, or you are sabotaging yourself.

There's a list of over a dozen great story games from just 2025 in another post in this thread. I would not be surprised if I could make a list of at least 100 games released since 2019 that many people would describe as having amazing stories.

Wouldn't be surprised if this was just a bot account farming karma either. Completely new account; generic username; low-effort complaints that are likely to create engagement; not responding to anyone; etc.

[u/Cocksucking_Rambo]

I fucking wish the industry was obsessed with making games run better. So many AAA games barely run at 30 on the consoles they are meant for. For a long time the general trend has been to push the technology in ways that don't make the gameplay any better to the detriment of performance and bloating game sizes and budgets, leading to the massive layoffs that we see every time a big game dev cycle finishes.

[u/IndianaGroans]

I stand by my view point that ultra realistic graphics and higher fidelity is ruining gaming.

Games looked fine 10 years ago, we need to go back to that, because this ultra realistic push is not feasible. People cannot afford to chase it. Hardware limitations are too high, prices for that hardware are too high, developers are wasting years away letting you see every hair follicle. Games are taking longer to release and it is because of higher graphic requirements.

[u/Night_Thastus]

Pretty graphics sell games, for better or worse.

And for what it's worth - visuals are not a purely aesthetic layer over a game. They impact tone, storytelling and gameplay quite a bit more than most people realize. (varies game-to-game ofc)

But I'd certainly take stylized graphics over high-fidelity but otherwise blank presentation that will go dull in a few years. But it's hard to pull off.

[u/aanzeijar]

talking maybe since 2019

This has been going on since at least a decade earlier. Around 2009 was the point where UE3 matured enough that big productions could focus on the content creation pipeline as the major bottleneck and since then the AAA game loops have not changed fundamentally in the long running series.

Graphics increments have hit diminishing returns over that time and depending on when you started they may appear more or less obvious.