Horizon Forbidden West – it’s definitely a pretty game (pic: Sony)
Readers tackle the age old debate of what’s more important in a video game: its graphics or its gameplay?
The subject for this week’s Hot Topic was suggested by reader Paulie, who asked whether it matters to you how good the graphics are in a game and how bad the gameplay has to get before it becomes a problem.
Most people agreed that gameplay is more important, and always have been, with indie games earning particular praise for having interesting art design instead of high-tech visuals.
The one and only
For me, gameplay is always king. My favourite gaming experiences have all been because of the gameplay and the graphics are additional bonus. My favourite two games are Portal and Half-Life 2, which were pretty cutting edge graphics at the time but that’s not what I remember most about them.
Perhaps the best example of gameplay over graphics for me is Hotline: Miami. That game has a pretty basic graphical style, but the gameplay is so much fun it hardly matters, in fact the graphics of that game kind of suit its atmosphere perfectly.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is another game I did like a lot but it was the graphics and world which drew me through certain parts of the game and that was Read Dead Redemption 2. I found the gameplay to be very clunky and not much fun, but the world was so stunning to look at and experience (and still is) that I was willing to overlook those faults in the gameplay.
Angry Kurt (gamertag)/Truk_Kurt (PSN ID)
Now playing: Dead Space remake (Xbox Series X) and Zelda: A Link To The Past (Nintendo Switch Online)
Constant desire
There shouldn’t really be any question about this and yet if you look at the history of gaming right up to the modern day it’s obvious that graphics are more important to most people, or at least they won’t be interested in a game if it looks actively bad.
The only exception I can think of is Minecraft which makes its bad graphics part of the appeal but obviously Minecraft is not every game. The Switch may be low powered but all of Nintendo’s big games still look good for what it can do, so it’s not like everyone isn’t trying to make an attractive looking game.
My hope is that as graphics see less and less improvement over time that gameplay will become more of a distinguishing feature, but we’ve been hoping for that for years.
Toaste
No settlement
I find it a bit depressing that this debate still comes up and wasn’t definitively settled in some school playground in the early 90s.
It’s probably not that surprising, though, considering I’ve seen the lines becoming deliberately blurred into a single package (one you might call the overall entertainment experience) with even the most recent high profile triple-A release. I’ve heard professional critics gush about the facial animation during a cut scene in God of War Ragnarök, and how fundamental this is to the experience.
They have their place, but in some cases I almost regard a lack of things like facial animation, and other modern indicators of bloated production values, as a specific badge of honour whenever it suggests developers are being sensible enough to focus their resources on what matters and settle for efficiencies elsewhere.
Graphics can be important to quickly deliver on an emotional front or establish a certain atmosphere. But I play a 40+ hour game to do the stuff it has to offer over that time, not because of a series of short beats that take up a tiny fraction of it (and sometimes don’t even depend on an interactive element). When the games that often offer me the most stuff to do seem to treat that stuff as less of a priority, that’s a big mark against them.
The gaming event I’m looking forward to most this year is the release of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom. The one I’m looking forward to least is all the reviews that will inevitably be used as a platform to complain it’s being released on a six-year-old portable machine and it could’ve looked better otherwise.
Panda
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Interactive entertainment
Gameplay will always trump graphics for me. To be honest though, most games I choose in this day and age don’t have truly awful graphics. Zelda: Breath Of The Wild was hardly cutting edge and I doubt Tears Of The Kingdom will be much of advancement, but the art direction counts for more and if it drags you into the world through its interaction then polygon numbers in the billions and ray-tracing aren’t essential.
Bloodborne suffered from poor performance but didn’t hinder my enjoyment. People made the (false, in my opinion) point that Returnal could’ve easily run on a PlayStation 4 but it managed to be the best game of the current gen without looking as impressive as Horizon Forbidden West. Super Mario Odyssey, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Nex Machina, Nioh, Elden Ring, and even things like Fortnite all lack photorealistic worlds and are all the better for it.
Games have their own identity. Whether it’s art direction or just vivid imagination. Pushing for photorealism makes no real sense if you still have a giant HUD obscuring everything and tutorials where a totally lifelike humanoid tells you to press the circle button to awkwardly jump into the magical portal.
It’s why I despair at this obsession with making movies. The gaming industry makes more than the movie industry not because of its photorealism or it’s endless non interactive cut scenes it’s because YOU that interacts with it. Your actions decide the outcome. Not as a passive observer but as the person in control.
You can play through Journey solo, finish it in two hours and say ‘that was kinda fun’ or you can meet a fellow traveller, sing whilst using only one symbol and spend 10 hours just dancing in the sand, then weeping uncontrollably at the end. All done via interactive gameplay and not a cut scene with a ray-traced, native 48K, photorealistic Sahara Desert and a Peter O’Toole doppelgänger.
That’s my opinion though. Others can rightfully disagree.
Wonk
Too attractive
I can understand that in the 70s and 80s, when the best looking thing you could see on screen was some yellow pizza looking thing or just two white bars, that graphics and gameplay were linked to the point where players had to fill in the blanks of both what they were seeing and what they were doing. But as the 90s progressed there was some lavish 2D art in lots of games, and then 3D games bought some impressive stuff with both graphics and gameplay.
Now we’re at a point where many gamers, my self included, separate the two categories. In 2023 the cutting edge graphics of the PS1 look primitive, yet classics like Crash Bandicoot and Final Fantasy 8 still play great (if you’re into those kind of games). And if you play on an emulator they can look all the better, but really it’s the gameplay that keeps me coming back to old games, not the two polygon chests of the 90s.
This brings me to the games of today. I wanted to play Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (2017) recently but found it’s over 70GB to install and I don’t have the space or internet speed to warrant installing it. But why is the game so big? Because the environments and characters are so detailed, you can see the pores on people’s faces (obviously the graphics aren’t the only reason for the big size, but a fair contributing factor).
Don’t get me wrong, this is impressive, but this is a game where you shoot things and get shot at, and a lot of characters wear helmets, they really don’t need to go so hard on the graphics and it ends up putting people like me off playing the game. Glad to see that some developers are starting to recognise you can have good looking, stylised graphics that aren’t photorealistic and take up a good chunk of the game’s file size.
Sadly, these tend to be budget released platformers like Pac-Man World Re-Pac and the upcoming SpongBob SquarePants game. Notice because of the non-photorealistic graphics these games tend to be cheaper as well, so please can more developers stop making their games so good looking and instead make them fun, you know, that thing I play video games.
Sunny
Market forces
I’m sure everyone will be pretending that they value gameplay above all but I’m afraid that doesn’t really jive with what games are popular. The majority of people want to play games that look state of the art and they aren’t too interested in anything else.
Imagine playing God Of War or Horizon Forbidden West with mediocre graphics. It’s the visuals that make them interesting not the gameplay. Obviously it’d be best to have both but graphics are easier to make and easier to market, so that’s why it happens.
Eagly
Novelty graphics
I always seem to be playing games that are behind the current generation of titles, due to backlogs! I am used to viewing graphics from a little while back. Factor indie games into the question and graphics really are not the only reason to play the games.
The gameplay does prove to be more important but I am often curious to play a game where graphics are the leading factor. Heavy Rain is one example, along with Detroit: Become Human, to experience the realistic and awesome graphical power of these story-led games.
These games are fun and interesting regarding the storytelling, but gameplay is definitely not a reason to pick them up. For me as the player, who would usually feel more freedom in a more open world game, this does take some getting use to. It is a nice novelty but not something I’d go back to, unlike other games with more control over your character.
That is why indie titles are just so perfect. Not the best graphics in the world but the art styles are absolutely ingenious. There are so many titles, like Night In The Woods, Bastion, Celeste, Gris, and Ori, etc. with such exciting but not triple-A graphics. Instead, they have fantastic artwork to make up for less complex graphics.
So all in all, gameplay first but I am willing to try a novelty game where graphics are the main draw. Luckily, I am not a graphics junkie or I would have missed out on some of my favourite gaming experiences of all time.
Alucard
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Readers tackle the age old debate of what’s more important in a video game: its graphics or its gameplay?
