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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Strangely enough, I had the same experience with diablo 4 until I turned down some of the graphics settings. I'm not sure if it was some DLSS / frame generation thing or what, but the game felt sloppy to me. Especially in comparison to something like diablo 2 which feels razor sharp.

I wish modern game developers & graphics pipelines would spend more effort optimizing input latency. I'll stop noticing the graphics 2 minutes into playing the game. But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. And the feeling of everything being a bit laggy will linger long after I stop playing.

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I’m totally with you. It has a generic art style, and with optimized settings, looks like goop. There’s never going to be a game that feels like how it feels teleporting through a whole act in D2. Everything loads instantly. And it keeps doing that even at high cast speeds.

> But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing.

You've already bought the game at this point so most devs don't care.

They care a lot if they get bad reviews online. That translates directly into sales.

An insane amount of money and effort that goes into most AAA games. It seems like a stretch to accuse the industry of not caring about the quality of the games they make.

Well, yes, I explained myself horribly.

What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs.

There are a lot of games that, even without "real" input lag, have tons of animation dampening/inertia to the point that it makes them IMHO unresponsive, just to improve the "cinematic feel" and avoid characters instantly changing direction.

If you prefer responsiveness to having the player character spin be perfectly smooth, well, sucks to be you, because prettier games sell better.

Obviously this doesn't apply to fighting games or competitive shooters or anything like that where responsiveness is the point of the game.

Yeah, there's a lot of games where I don't care about lag. Donut County is a little drifty? Great, that fits the aesthetic. But some games really need to be tight.

> What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs.

Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised most people are much more sensitive to input latency than we think. But when there’s input latency, they have no idea that that’s the problem so instead they attribute the slushy feel of the game on something else. Or just don’t enjoy the game as much without knowing why. Game developers talk a lot about “game feel” and this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.

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