I must have expressed myself poorly, my point was not that I don't think it looks good, my point is that I feel like all this effort is focused on a single metric, making stuff look good in trailers.

Remember when HL2 was announced you had this super fancy physics engine? How objects would bounce and realistic react with each other, how you could stack things and come up with puzzles that would just use the physics engine without hardcoded scripts? HL2 was gorgeous looking but it was more than bump-mapping and complicated light models. You couldn't port HL2 to goldsrc and have it play the same.

Meanwhile almost 2 decades later we're back to fully scripted puzzles, mostly non-interactive environments and AI that's generally limited to a glorified A* algorithm.

This tech demo doesn't look decent, it looks really good, there's no arguing about it.

I will even go farther and say that I feel like I have now been playing the same game for 25 years. The FPS genre gets some new tricks, but it's still the same basic game with a few new mechanics and tricks- I can pick up a game I have never played before and generally be reasonably competent at it within a few minutes- a stark contrast to when I picked up tribes for the first time and was completely useless in online play for at least a week. Graphics increases have been both incremental and with diminishing returns in recent generations.

I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much control over your physical space you can have with a mouse and keyboard while still allowing good character movement, so there are limitations on what can easily be done.

On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience.

So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).

I guess I just feel there is a real lack of creativity in gaming these days- There used to be a rich variety of games- puzzle/adventure games, RTSes, Simulation games, Flight/Space games of all kinds, and now its just kind of condensed down to FPSes, repeated sports franchises, and a few outliers- KSP, Minecraft, to name a few.

Interestingly, I won an Occulus Go at a meetup about 9 months ago. I almost gave it away, I didn't really know what I had won, I thought it was going to be an upgraded google cardboard.

But man I was surprised at how cool it was. And yeah- everything feels really raw and unpolished and experimental, kind of like the early days of the internet. My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore, but still its all quite interesting and has me interested in buying a "proper" VR setup.

> My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore

Some titles on the Quest are a bit better in that respect, but you still have to research the game to know. I think that's also a factor of how new the space is. It's much harder to allow users to roam where they want and still have the polish allowing them to interact how they want with the environment, it took quite a few years for that to happen in the traditional game space, both because of the effort required to craft that world, and because the engines were still working on abstractions that made it easy to fill those worlds with things that could be interacted with without too much programmer/artist work.

A good example of this is all the ways people have found for break Half-Life Alyx by working around the game expectations. People have found a way to hoard items, which would normally be hard to do because you have to actually hold them, but throwing them in buckets and bringing the bucket with you (for example, hauling around a bucket with 20 grenades in it, when normally you don't have a way to carry them all). If you put too many items in a bucket and pick it up, the physics system slows to a crawl and can crash the came. They designed the game so there weren't too many interactable objects in any one scene (because that makes sense), but the wholly new paradigm means that people were able to easily do crazy stuff to break it.

I've been meaning to pick up Arizona Sunshine for Quest, and that might be along the lines of what you're looking for (but not for Go). The Walking dead game is supposed to come to Quest eventually to (but again, the Go is unlikely), and the reviews of that looks pretty open for movement and exploration.

Maybe it's just because I am old enough to remember playing Super Mario on a CRT, but that attitude sometimes astounds me. Like I have read many assessments that the latest Doom game's incredible framerates are nothing to be impressed by, because the game is "visually underwhelming". I think a lot of people don't understand how difficult real-time computer graphics are to implement, and I have difficulty viewing the world through their eyes.

You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the graphics in a game (which you play to escape real life) begin to mimic real life, it can feel underwhelming.

For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.

I love some pretty gfx as well, but I have the same feeling. Lately I’ve been finding the simplistic gfx of minecraft and terraria just fine especially given the mechanics are rather deep and enjoyable (for me at least). The simple graphics even add a bit of charm

Same here! Minecraft captured the hearts and minds of nearly every demographic, even with "rudimentary" blocky graphics. Never would have happened it went for realism.

Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully.

Sometimes the simpler, the better.

I'm old enough to remember playing games on a CRT with a 32x24 screen resolution (ZX80, ZX81) and whilst I am thoroughly impressed with graphics technologies of today, I do have to echo the feeling that AAA games have slumped to a local minimum of effort in gameplay and story.

But on the flipside, there's literally thousands of indie games with innovative, interesting gameplay, if not sparkling graphics.

I kinda agree with you, but I think it's expected: demos are just ads for technical people. So in a way you know that it's too good to be true.

Plus they don't actually explain how it works, how the demo was made and what's the limits of their technology. They only show the good side, so people naturally wants to know the not-so-good side as well.

It's the usual HN: pretentiousness abound. Can't even be excited about a wonderful tech demo.

Or maybe it takes thoughtfulness to read that comment for what it is: an opinion about priorities of game studios.

And it resonates with me. I like eye candy like almost everyone and can appreciate technological marvels in CGI (and currently working with UE4 after hours, creating my own assets, I can appreciate how much work goes into modern game graphics). At the same time, I do feel many games these days try to use high-resolution textures and pretty shaders to paper over incoherent storylines and lack of gameplay depth. I think it's an entirely valid point to make.