I'm of the unpopular opinion that games should stop aspiring so hard to be movies; in graphics, gameplay, and business.

Street Fighter III is, in my opinion, still one of the best-looking video games ever and it's over 20 years old.

It's just excellent art and animation. Games like this, Cuphead, Jotun, etc. will always look amazing. Meanwhile, here's a sample from the most popular game that same year of SFIII:

*plunger-muted trumpet wah wahs*

3D graphics, that can be run within a game engine in real time, are still not at a point where they will age reliably well. I'd say that Uncharted 4 is one of the only games in recent memory that I'd wager is still going to look great in 10-15 years. It's also no coincidence that practical effects in film have seen a resurgence this decade; they realize that CG is best relied on as little as possible.  

Unrelated to graphics, most games that focus on being "story-driven" fail to live up to even straight-to-dvd quality in terms of narrative and they don't interest me, personally, anyway. My time to actually play games is limited, and I'd rather spend it playing a game that's more competitive in nature i.e., like a traditional game, than slogging through Skyrim or Mass Effect and won't be an eyesore in a few years. 

Right now, I've been playing a bit of "Steamworld Heist" on Steam and it's great. It has completely 2D graphics that look superb, excellent procedural gameplay, lots of replay value, and a very simple story that you can progress through without spending hours and hours on it.

Personally I like cutting edge graphics.

The thing about games with high fidelity graphics is that it guarantees at least a average game and most of the time a good game. This is probably why you still -even in the golden indie age we experience now- there still are players who only play games with fantastic graphics.

Lots of people point to Final Fantasy XIII, Ryse: Son of Rome and The Order:1886 as games that have high fidelity graphics but bad gameplay. Yet that is only true when compared to AAA games and other games with high fidelity graphics.

If a player had to choose between say The Order:1886 and -let's use the latest steam monstrosity- The Unknown City: Horror Begins Now, then clearly The Order:1886 is a much better game.

To achieve cutting edge graphics you need a very dedicated and talented team. For this reason cutting edge graphics often means a good game and at worst will be an average game; not a bad game.

Ofcourse a game doesn't need cutting edge graphics to be good, lots of brilliant indie games have lower quality graphics. It's just a quick indicator to the player of the standard the game is trying to achieve.

We see the same thing in other visual media: Movies, TV, Comics and Anime. Usehally high fidelity will mean something worth looking at, at worse it would be average show.

5 hours ago, Chris Schmidt said:

I'm of the unpopular opinion that games should stop aspiring so hard to be movies; in graphics, gameplay, and business.

I doubt this opinion to be unpopular. I share the same opinion with my friends - maybe it depends on age (40+), maybe it's about growing out of games, or it's just natural to miss the good old days for everyone... hard to say without any statistics.

But i would exclude graphics from that list. If we look at early low poly 3D games, yes they look pretty bad in comparison to 2D hand drawn games of the same time. For the latter the artist has control about everything, for the former he has to deal with technical limitations like low poly count in the past and wrong lighting presently.

But we could say the same about the transition from 8-bit to 16 bit. New technology always helped to impress and to sell hardware and games. This will continue until we have path tracing quality graphics and real life physics in games. Many think this kind of realism is not to desire because games should remain games, but potential realism is always optional and will never limit possibilities in game design - it will only add to it. 

I'm also optimistic about issues in gameplay or storytelling.

Currently every game i'd be interested in feels like the same game. I think this is also the players fault, because they expect new games to be like the ones they know and they are skilled at. Difficult topic. Nothing is worse than a game that  teaches you complex controls in a short tutorial at the very beginning. I've forgotten everything until i play the next time. Features need to be introduced with reasoning and a given use case in the game. No short unconnected training passages please. One after another, over the whole game.

For the storytelling, often we see impressive cutscenes with acting close to movies. But the games fail to build up the story from the beginning, lacking to give reasoning and so motivation, and they fail to make a proper ending (to prepare the next title in the franchise...?). In short: Games throw you into a huge world and you have to kill everybody but you don't know why. That's boring, really. This is where we really should learn from movies and books, apart from the fact storytelling in an interactive environment is something new.

But all those issues are known and will be addressed. I remember i stopped gaming multiple times for some years. Got bored by side scrollers - graphics adventures came up. Got bored by that, 3D shooters dragged me back in. New genres is always the best that can happen. Also, even in the good old days, 99% of games were bad to me. It's just that actually i can not spot even a single one i'd like to play although i'd like to. 

7 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

To achieve cutting edge graphics you need a very dedicated and talented team. For this reason cutting edge graphics often means a good game and at worst will be an average game; not a bad game.

IMO, I don't know that you're drawing the correct conclusion here.

I think it would be more accurate to say that to achieve cutting-edge graphics, you need talented and dedicated graphics artists.

It's getting easier for even individuals to do impressive things on a limited budget. I have a friend who made headlines a year or so back for recreating Silent Hills' demo, pretty much to a "T", all by himself in Unity. There's also no shortage of impressive displays of what people can do in Unreal. But these are almost always just graphics showcases, and we can't assume they'd make even average-quality games when put to task — they are different disciplines. 

I think it's more the case that good-looking games are put together by people with enough industry experience and professionalism to see such a demanding project through to completion.

There's also the highly-debatable point that "average"-quality games today, are on the same quality of average games of yore, and I'm not saying that from nostalgia goggles.

That's just my take on it, anyway.

2 hours ago, Chris Schmidt said:

I think it would be more accurate to say that to achieve cutting-edge graphics, you need talented and dedicated graphics artists.

What I meant is that the cutting edge graphics uses multiple artists. The typical 3D AAA character uses a small team:

So 9 people on average, if we don't include janitorial, writers, developers etc. Most team member have multiple uses, like as a 3D modeler I make environment props and setup the lighting in scenes.

Static props are done by 4 people: Concept Artist, 3D modeler, Graphics Programmer and Programmer.

2 hours ago, Chris Schmidt said:

It's getting easier for even individuals to do impressive things on a limited budget. I have a friend who made headlines a year or so back for recreating Silent Hills' demo

I agree it is getting easier. However cutting edge means pushing the limits, the games you mentioned like Street Fighter III took a much larger team to make than it would today.

A example is Ori and the Blind Forest, using 9 visual artist if we include the level designer and graphics programmer to the artist list. https://www.giantbomb.com/ori-and-the-blind-forest/3030-46548/credits/

2D cutting edge fighter game Skullgirls used 5 visual artist and had a dedicated creative director. https://www.giantbomb.com/skullgirls/3030-34082/credits/

It really takes a good team of artist to make a good looking game. So it is no wonder that teams who spend this much on artist will also have a good design ready.

I think it's about the style of the game in question and whether or not the graphic levels are necessary.  Some games need to have amped up visuals to sell the atmosphere.  Others could benefit from having lower-level graphics to aid visual strategic conceptualisation.  I suppose in my opinion it's all about the game in question and whether it uses it's visuals to serve the purpose of the game it's going for.

1 hour ago, SillyCow said:

I sort of get the feeling that the 3D graphics revolution is over. We are now more limited by what artists can create, then what the computer can render. Ex: Creating realistic faces today is more about putting in the 3D modelling work then inventing new rendering techniques.

Right, but does not more physical detail, movement, lighting, etc. then become more resource-intensive and place greater demand upon hardware that most consumers don't have?

1 hour ago, SillyCow said:

This nvidia demo from 2006, looks good enough today (12 years later). The reason most games don't look like this isn't because of missing graphics tech, rather it's because it requires a daunting amount of artwork.

It does look good, but I can't agree that most games don't look like that today — to my eyes, most games look just like that or better. She definitely still looks plastic, and "doll-like" to me. 

But I'm no graphics expert, so this is all fairly layman's perspective. ?