I hate realism in games
When I'm playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 with my force feedback wheel and a VR headset, I start thinking about how much I wish it used OpenStreetMap to build the road networks so the map is more realistic (like how X-Plane uses OpenStreetMap for the entire planet).
packrat Yeah my sister in law's sister lives over there with her husband and 2 kids.
She says it's nice.
Although there's one place in the US I'd really like to visit, Hershey, PA, I've had Hershey's chocolate before and it's really nice.
GodotBeginnerRich As an American and a chocolate enthusiast, that's the last place I would have expected anyone to want to visit.
In America, we/I like to bully "fake food". We/I also like bullying corporation, and we/I especially love bullying BIG corporation.
Food's complicated, so I won't get into why Hershey's is barely chocolate, but I will urge you to visit Oregon and one of our millions of whole food stores. How they make 90% cacao chocolate taste so sweet is bizarre. It's a brick of pure choco. It's super bitter for a split second, then you crunch on a big sugar crystal. Suddenly, your whole mouth is sweet. It's awesome.
I think the brand is "Alter Eco" or something yuppie/hippie sounding like that.
I just looked up Hershey, Pennsylvania. It's super americana. Call me a terrorist but I really dislike the americana vision. Therefore my opinion is heavily biased and the smart thing to do would be to ignore it.
I think the reason for all this dislike toward realism is because abstraction is a tool that a lot of major game studios have just kind of forgotten how to use. red dead redemption 2 is a peak example of what I mean. in real life it takes a dedicated amount of time and effort to get on and off a horse, so the game makes it take a while. thing is, if you have to get on your horse, realize you forgot something, and then get back on, it's way more time consuming and annoying than in a game where it's a simple 1 second "hop on/hop off". and the game is littered with moments like these, little touches that add to realism but make the game even more of a chore to play. I consider it the culmination of everything wrong with gaming realism and I'm still shocked it was so loved when it came out. I didn't expect people to hate it or anything, but it seemed like everyone just didn't care that literally everything was such a slog because of how long the animations took!
it just seems like developers these days forget that the old guard did stuff like use dynamite explosions for gun sounds because they sounded more like how guns sound in our head, and made it feel more real even though it was actually more fake!
granted, it's not always a negative. stuff like "snake = poison" or "man with armor is harder to kill" are excellent uses of realism, because they play on our perceptions to give us quick and easy visual identifiers for important stuff.
cybereality check the game "thomas was alone" if you don't know it already, uses a similar concept of only simple shapes allowed.
packrat so I won't get into why Hershey's is barely chocolate
There's a video for that:
Chocolate is overrated, although highly addictive. All the worship it gets is just rationalization of sugar+cocoa addiction. If you go cold turkey for a couple of months and then put one of those things in your mouth again, they all taste like sugared-up vomit or bitter cardboard. Even the fancy European ones. Being from Europe, I can only imagine the horrors of Hershey's taste for an unconditioned palate.
Yes, Witcher 3 marks the time when AAA games started becoming too realistic, and I never even noticed the hair and beard growth. It still looked good, but later games became so realistic they actually looked bad, and they spend billions of dollars on artwork (is it even 'art' when it's all mocap, photo textures, and 3D scans?) while neglecting gameplay.
However, I make RPGs so I have to strike a balance; I can't simply say "no realism". Most RPGs have fuel and ammo. Anything that adds an interesting challenge is good realism, but excessive simulation adds nothing to gameplay or worse, leads to hair-splitting decisions or overly-precise aiming. If it's an open world RPG without fast travel, players will denigrate it as a "walking simulator". It also needs to look good by RPG afficionado standards, which are pretty forgiving compared to the latest normie AAA standards.
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synthnostate (is it even 'art' when it's all mocap, photo textures, and 3D scans?)
Yes, because art is about composition and meaning. In other words, it matters more how it's all brought together rather than how it's produced in the first place.
synthnostate If it's an open world RPG without fast travel, players will denigrate it as a "walking simulator".
Not necessarily. So long as you have meaningful challenges and interactions show up regularly along the way.
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The Stone Soup developers had some really good rules about what makes a good game and what should be thrown out. If there's a "best" option, let alone a "required" one, it doesn't belong in the game. If any activity doesn't directly reflect a strategy, it doesn't belong. If something can be done by a simple algorithm, it doesn't belong (or should be automated).
Of course, by their standards, MMOs should have all died out a long time ago. (I have a hard time disagreeing with that.)
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"Realism" is a very broad concept. Saying "realism=bad" is so generalized a statement that it almost makes no sense.
Engaging gameplay is the defining characteristic of games, that sets them apart from other forms of art and media. So everything that supports the gameplay is good for a game. "Realism" can do a lot in that respect. Every "bad" thing listed in the OP can be cleverly woven into game rules, instead of being just realistic for the sake of being realistic.
Even when used as mere gimmicks, realistic aspects can add to one other important dimension - the atmosphere. It's secondary to gameplay but still essential for satisfying gaming experience in many of genres.
arent most games about escaping reality?
DJM True.
This is what annoys me about Sony, most of their big sellers, other than COD, are "walking sim" or "narrative driven" adventure games like TLOU (The Last of Us).
Don't get me wrong I'm an adventure game fan from way back, but most of the good ones are PS exclusive, and I'm an Xbox guy.
xyz Maybe you've never had quality dark chocolate. I'd describe it as "fruity" or "exotic" way before I'd say "cardboard". But it's also true I'm weird. Maybe even a freak. I love earthy/medicinal flavors so much, I'm the kind of guy that seeks out protein bars for the flavor.
I understand where you're coming from if you're talking about milk chocolate, the average mars chocolate bar. 60% sugar, 10% dried milk, 20% cocoa butter and only 10% cocoa mass, concocted as punishment for man's gravest sins on earth.
Or maybe you're talking about fake "chocolate", the kind that has no real chocolate at all. No cocoa mass, no cocoa butter, but a brick of hydrogenated vegetable oil flavored with chemicals some dudes in a lab thought tasted kinda like chocolate, with a pinch of cocoa powder.
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If there's a "best" option, let alone a "required" one, it doesn't belong in the game.
that's way easier said than done. the life cycle of any online game is someone finding a dominant strategy that the developers attempt to fix, and if they manage it then someone else finds a new one, and it just repeats ad infinitum. and single player games are only better in the sense that there's not nearly as many people try-harding them into oblivion... normally.
xyz I understand what you're saying, but I struggle to figure out how something like "horse balls shrink in cold areas" (an actual example from RDR2, that took a surprising amount of resources to accomplish) could ever do any of that. if there is a line to cross, that game leaped over it with acrobatic prowess.
samuraidan Some dudes wanna play with their movies. Other dudes like their alternate realities to be a close cousin to ours. Others just want a puzzle to play with that has a pretty coat of paint. Ultimately if the machine can take it, someone gets paid for the work and someone enjoys it, I never saw the harm.
Besides that, shrinking horse balls was an awesome PR move. Do you know how many sites were talking about that?
The thing is, the huge $500 million dollar AAA games are a small portion of the games released. The vast majority are smaller indie stylized games.
If you go on Steam and just look at what's advertised on the front page, you see what big companies like Ubisoft and EA have paid for. But if you search out stuff you can find anything you want. Itch also has smaller more boutique games.