Honestly if the gameplay and/or story are good enough, I don’t care one bit about hyper-realistic graphics
Hell, the more stylised the graphics of a game, generally the more interested I am.
Games like Obra Dinn, Lisa or Undertale that lean into the graphical limitations of the past are some of my all time favourites
It’s an underappreciated fact that art direction trumps graphical fidelity, and it’s not close. Grim Fandango for example is old as dirt but still holds up remarkably well thanks to its unique look and strong art direction, despite being challenged polygonally and resolution-wise etc. There are many other examples.
Exactly. And you can go pretty far with this as well. I really enjoyed Manifold Garden, which has pretty simple graphics, but definitely had a clear art direction and a very interesting 3D world to explore. There are probably more polygons on the face of a MC in a AAA game than in that entire game, yet I felt absolutely immersed while playing it.
Give me more unique experiences, not more GPU clock cycles…