Unpopular opinion but graphics do matter a little bit or at least more than the meme depicts. Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it. I wish things moved between tiles fluidly like in Rimworld instead of it being a slideshow, but I can actually stand to play Dwarf Fortress now. If the only video games that existed were text-based, I’d probably never play video games again. Ps2 era graphics on the other hand, hell yeah. 90s era dos graphics are passable too. But PLEASE no text adventure games.
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it.
Supremely unbased, I still just see elf, dwarf, plump helmet…
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it
OBJECTION!!
The ASCII graphics have a charm of its own, even if it skews the horizontal-vertical distances due to characters being 8x12
I want fidelity, crisp frames, with a cool art style, not some jank and blurry attempt at “realism”. Ban TAA, ban ML upscaling, ban frame generation. Ban AAA.
(All the best games are indie games)
I recently upgraded my computer with the best possible components, and it makes me so mad that games look worse than they did when I put my last pc together. What’s the point of bothering with graphics at all if you’re going to add a smear filter.
Indie games out here killing it with pixel art.
Because the bigger games are made as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The now so popular UE5 just enables this practice, because it allows an easy avenue to “realistic” looking games with all the fancy lighting. Quick to put together, but in the end, you get a poor performing blurry mess. And a happy nvidia, because you slapped their dlss bullshit on it. So thats the new trend.
Why the hate against TAA?
It’s completely shit, it’s like covering your monitor in vaseline. All games with deferred rendering should use SMAA.
TAA can be fine when implemented well. Temporal information can be very useful for adding more detail over multiple frames that couldn’t be obtained without doing more samples every frame.
However, when done poorly it makes things blurry as you move the camera. The information needs to be correctly adjusted for camera movements or it smears all over the screen. It’s also made worse with things like rain drop effects and things like that.
TAA is useful. It’s just too many games just enable it and it without knowing how to use it well and it just degrades the image.
Do you have an example of a game using TAA correctly? Because so far, all the games I’ve played with TAA on are blurry.
Not necessarily, no. I watched this interview with one of the Squad devs recently, and he did a really good explanation of it though, if you want to hear it.
It’ll never be perfect, but it can help, especially in slower paced games, or games where most of what you see is very far away (so it moves slowly on screen).
Vintage Story has the graphics of that other voxel graphics based block game. The gameplay is so good that I bought and play VS, and Terraria, but I haven’t ever played more than 30 minutes of the other block game.
Graphics barely matter. Gameplay is king.
Text rendered onto a screen is also graphics.
Fuck that’s a nice font
Alright we go back to tabletop until the situation improves
How many layers can be peeled before it’s not a video game anymore?
Just remove the video part. Now it’s just a “game.”
Oh. Why didn’t I think of that!?
It will also be more accessible to the blind, being audio only.
The deaf? What about them?
There are rumors that the deaf are able to make good use of text based technologies.
I remember people discussing that Dear Esther was not a video game.
I honestly think it would be interesting to play a game by sound alone, where you play as a blind person (maybe Daredevil or Zatoichi or something) and you navigate the world by listening. Ironically, it’d probably need to be on a VR headset so that the game can detect you turning/tilting your head and adjust the stereo balance accordingly.
Maybe Zatoichi would be best, as you could hear an enemy swinging a sword like “SHING” and “SWOOSH” etc, and maybe that would give you enough information to block or dodge. You’d probably also need haptic feedback to tell you when your blade connects.
Maybe there could be graphics, but only to recreate the sense of smell, like the screen is pure black except when you smell something and then a word appears on the screen like “rose” or “blood” etc.
There is some game where you are blind any the only thing you can see is blood from what ever you killed splashed on the walls. Totally forget what it’s called. But yea yours sounds cooler
The flash game The Blind Swordsman does something like this.
I’ll just leave this link to Mindustry here, I guess…?
There was an excellent text based RPG called Roadwarden that came out the other year. It’s just text and illustrations so thought I’d use this post to mention it.
If small amounts of animation are allowed then WORLD OF HORROR was decent too.
Roadwarden is excellent.
Hyperbole and a half style artwork.
I miss her :(
Hope she’s doing ok
I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC
Lucky for your, there are lots of older games as well as plenty of indie games that focus on gameplay with very limited graphics.
Terraria
Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.
If we consider a game as a cake, I think of the graphics as its frostings. Sure, it could make the game look very good, but won’t do shit if the base of the cake is crap.
i’d consider realistic graphics as fondant, sure you can create amazing visuals with it… but that thing is barely edible. give me some buttercream (stylised graphics) instead
One of the things I liked about Blizzard was that they never tried to use fondant. It was all buttercream…
Until Activision made them start mixing fiberglass into the frosting to cut costs
The frosting might give my system constipation though.
As Alton Brown said, “Cake is only the delivery system for frosting.”
Is this a crosspost from https://lemmy.world/post/29709088 ?
No, Florkofcows is just a popular artist.
I can’t handle getting addicted to Nethack again at this point in time
It’s still great. Like old school Civilization, or even older Zork
I did a lot of stuff in the first Zork (kill the troll, solve the maze, open the gates of hell, etc), but I never quite figured out how I was supposed to win.
They had to start putting graphics in their games before I could beat them.
You release the bird from the cage to kill the troll, or maybe I’m thinking Adventure
The troll you can kill with the sword that glows in its presence, if I’m remembering my Zork correctly. I think it regenerates though, so maybe you have to cut the head off, and then it vanishes in a puff of vile smoke, or something like that.
The smirking sneak thief can be dispatched the same way, although I think you can also use the axe you get after killing the troll. I think it wasn’t a sure thing though, like you can give the “stab thief with sword” command a few times and sometimes you win and other times you die.
Although you should give the egg to the thief (he can open it and you can’t) and then kill him and retrieve it from his dead body later, otherwise you can’t win the game. Obviously.
Hitchhikers Guide was even worse.
Fuck the babble fish puzzle.
Plus getting a third of the way into the game and if you didn’t take the junk mail at the beginning you have to restart.
Also - can’t you pick up tea at some point, when you need to have the item “no tea” to complete the game?
I played the Apple II version. Old games were cruel. I’d get frustrated and rotate between Rivers of Light and The Return of Hercules.
try out Moonring. you might like it and its free
So you thought suggesting another addictive RPG was the correct response here??
Seriously though, seems fun–I tried to go through one dungeon and died very quickly. Looks like it has a lot of depth though, so I’ll probably wait until I have a break to give it a real go. Looks a bit more accessible than Caves of Qud, so I might actually have a chance of getting somewhere.
its very unique for sure. good luck matey
Obviously these things are not mutually exclusive. Be a REAL gamer and demand both quality in gameplay and narrative, WITH excellent graphics. You don’t have to settle for less.
Are dcss tiles banned? I don’t want to play it ascii
You can play adventure books
Noooo
Fuuuuuck, I forgot all about those. Lone Wolf, Wizards Warriors & You, Fighting Fantasy… They were like a bridge between CYOA and D&D.
Thanks for the unintentional recomendations, sometimes when i can’t play a tabletop rpg and video games won’t fill that gap, but some adventure books manage to help
Yeah, I think it’s interesting to play it in ASCII. It makes you actually read the text logs and use your imagination, which feels more like a book. But it also makes it harder to actually know what’s going on, so I really don’t know about it being more fun…
funnily enough I always found the tiles to be harder to read. For me ASCII is clearer on what the enemy is and how dangerous it is. Always been a huge ASCII fan so maybe that colors my opinion.
Yeah, maybe I would need to get used to ASCII more, too. I just find it particularly tricky in crowded fights to know which monster is where. Like, I can work it out with a bit of time, but I can’t just look at it once and see immediately that the
Cnext to me is a cyclops, which I should be getting away from ASAP. I guess, you’d probably memorize letters/colors like that sooner rather than later, when actually playing with ASCII, though…
I’ve yet to actually play it, shame on me, but A Blind Legend took an interesting approach to being graphicsless!
Interesting! Added to my wishlist.
Does ASCII art count? Dwarf Fortress, MUDs, etc. are great fun.
