Can't believe how shite COD is now. Everything is shite. Battlefield is shite. They're all shite because they have no identity beyond maximising profits.

Every amazing game I've played in the last few years has looked pretty but has not looked realistic. From tiny indie games like animal well or blue prince all the way up to elden ring all of these games look fantastic and all of them can be played on a steam deck or a switch without much compromise.

Anytime a game promises amazing graphics I immediately stop caring about it because it's going to be a shit game that runs like shit and sucks to play. What was the last actually good game that also had impressive photorealistic graphics? I can't recall one

Because fuck the bandwidth? Is that about the scope of the reasoning? Because I can’t think of another. It’s cool to logjam the fuck out of our communications technology. Because why not. Who needs communication, a 12 year old needs to stream a photorealistic bullet corridor of racially and politically appropriate targets. Fuck my actual life. The people involved in actualizing this rent seeking bullshit for their miserly bosses need to get Nuremberged.

Gaming.... what a joke it has become.

Graphics were a mistake, back to text adventures

I recently finished Control: Resonant and also really like the first one and what struck me again is those are both very graphically good looking and very graphically demanding games and Remedy seems to be the only studio that ever bothers to actually do anything with those grafix. I don't think those games would work as well in a sort of PS1-devolution style because the contradiction between the photorealism and the decidedly otherworldy stuff wouldn't hit as hard.

Especially the manhatten that's wrapped in on itself and all the patterned enemies would simply look fairly quake 2 if not for the fidelity, the oldest house and the hiss to a lesser, but still present, effect. Hell, Alan Wake 2 manages to use its graphical fidelity to turn the taken from what is basically zombies to be shot by the dozen by bonafide action hero Alan Wake (lol) into something that is visually easy to see, but hard to grasp.

And then, like here, you get 250gb of textures, streamed for your hard drives convienence if you want, to approach the photorealism of a Michael Bay movie. The explosions look almost as good as special effects or VFX and presumably every one of the 8 gajillion enemy soldiers you individually spend 1,5 seconds shooting dead and then moving on has eyelash models and textures, what it adds to the experience is unclear.

80gb

180gb texture pack

I don't care how good your game is. If it's a quarter of a terabyte, I'm not downloading it

Swagged out flight sim levels of installation space lmao

they've just fully given up on compression, i see

Bandwidth is unironically cheaper than storage at this point. This is arguably the consumer friendly option(if you really must have absurdly sized games I guess)