Fumito Ueda (the hugely influential developer behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) and Keita Takahashi (the similarly iconic creator of Katamari Damacy) recently sat down to chat about the state of games as they are right now, and both icons agree: graphics don't matter half as much as they used to.
In an interview with Denfaminicogamer, reposted in English on Reddit and translated using Google and DeepL, the legendary duo noted that most players no longer seem to care as much about glossy graphics. Takahashi specifically pointed to Roblox's popularity with kids who don't seem to mind its blocky, lo-fi aesthetics, while Ueda thinks that, in general, we're past the era where individually rendered blades of grass were a selling point to gamers.
Ueda also went into detail about how developers of their generation came up in an era where game tech was always evolving - bigger sprites to 3D to HD - but things have kind of plateaued since then. Developers now need to focus on wowing players in other ways, Ueda went on, and put resources into the actual heart of the game.
The AAA industry's hyper-fixation on 'photorealistic' graphics has created a significant challenge, with games like The Last of Us Part 2 costing $220 million to produce and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 costing an unsustainable $300 million. So, yes, spend more resources making something interesting rather than rendering every individual pore on a character's face, please.
Fumito Ueda is now working on a still untitled game that debuted at last year's TGAs, which looks to have giant mechs and an epic scale that's not too dissimilar to his previous work. Meanwhile, Keita Takahashi just released the adorably quirky To a T about a teenager permanently stuck in a T-pose, hence the name. (It's one of the most overlooked games of the year and it's on Game Pass, so you have no excuse!)
