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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> but consumers are also demanding better graphics.

Modern games have visually worse graphics than games that came out 10+ years ago. Beyond that, the success of a lot of games recently with non AAA budgets shows that gamers aren’t demanding anything from the industry beyond playable games that don’t treat them as a perpetual revenue stream.

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> Modern games have visually worse graphics than games that came out 10+ years ago

My knee jerk reaction was to disagree with this, but I thought about it a bit

The Witcher 3 came out 10 years ago. So did Red Dead Redemption 2 (edit: not quite, actually 8 years. Still!)

A lot of games still fall short of those in the graphics department

At the same time, both of those games had an entire AAA studio behind them (you could consider CDPR to be AA), whereas most other AAA studios work on a number of projects at a time. Same reason Starfield ended up having such high visual "prowess", in lieu of talking about just graphics.

Death stranding 1 and 2 also look absolutely amazing. They are not using unreal engine but their own. Not sure what magic they are pulling off there.

They are using the game engine from the developer who produced the Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West games, called Decima.

There is a real reason behind this. A lot of games before, used to be built on custom game engines and were heavily optimized. When you build on unreal 5, optimization is poorly done or completely ignored. On top of that, reliance on upscaling causes a weird feel to the overall look.

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