People are 100% ignoring that going mobile is a red herring for the fact graphical fidelity is becoming increasingly expensive and publishers need an excuse to divest from lifelike game worlds and graphics. It’s the perfect excuse to go back to stylized games like SOTC or HiFiRush without antagonising the CoD and FiFA type crowds that send death threats when the recoil changes left 0,01mm in the latest update, or when there’s women as protagonists.
Graphical fidelity isn’t becoming more expensive, games (generally AA and AAA that target ‘realistic’ graphics) are just increasingly botch jobs. Games look worse than they did 10 years ago, on hardware that is like 5x more powerful.
What has this got to do with handhelds though? Handhelds will require studios to actually make their games properly again (I hope).
“Games look worse than they did 10 years ago, on hardware that is like 5x more powerful.”
This, as a generalisation, is not true. A critical example is Demon’s Souls (2009 vs 2020) which was quite the transformation. Nevertheless, I do agree that games have been increasingly becoming more demanding of hardware for very little pay off in terms of visual quality. One can thank NVIDIA for that. At any rate, due to said visual fidelity and graphical demands, AAA games are now hitting 9 figures in development costs which is problematic. Furthermore, the gameplay loops have seen very little evolution in the AAA space whereas companies keep dumping wads of cash on dubious graphical technology like path tracing (which we’ve seen before, those of us who were here for Giants and Larrabee). Pathtracing brings nothing to the table in terms of gameplay and is basically a tech demo to convince people to buy overpriced hardware (in terms of efficiency). Handheld on the other hand has driven people to games like balatro, vampire survivors, valheim, etc, that have very little in terms of graphical fidelity but have well crafted gameplay loops. I think that’s the market Sony is eying.
It is more and more true as each developer looking for them shiny games switch to UE5 and dont bother replacing its shitty ghosting and blurry TAA and ML upscaling crap.
The game Bodycam was developed by 2 people, a 17 and 20 year old, and has the most realistic graphics I’ve ever seen.
Described as “the first photorealistic shooter” by reviewers, there is quite literally no other game that comes close, in terms of graphical realism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzHfZYClTwo
https://gamerant.com/most-ultra-realistic-games-like-bodycam/
Honestly good. Graphics now have honestly gotten so bad with efficiency. We have hardware 10x more powerful and games that run 20x worse and have artifacting from forced TAA. Not every game but a lot are looking less clear, more blurry, with way better textures and resolution but just simply run like absolute shit. And for what? best example I can think of off the top of my head is csgo to CS2. Looks a little better yeah, but going from being able to be played on a core 2 duo integrated graphics to barely running for me when I had 16GB of ram and an rx 5500 that’s crazy. It doesn’t look that much better to run that much worse
And they’ve already lost lmao
Right? The only ones who can muscle in on the deck are Microsoft and Sony, and that’s only because they have their fan base and users who purchased their games digitally from their stores. Even then, they’re way behind on the Deck.
PC gamers Deck won hands down. I’m happy to see competition, but the Deck won. Everything else right now are the android Honeycomb tablets following the iPad. I’m sure they work fine, but there’s already a winner.
Ive been a console gamer for twenty years and I bought Decks for myself and my wife. For me, console gaming was about convinence and comfortability (and group play). The deck nails both of those, with the addition of cheaper games and full PC capability, while consoles have been regressing on convinence. The Deck also has an easy path toward the big screen group play I enjoy with accessories
I think what handheld gamers really want is AI integration.
Well, good/useful AI integration. An AI that makes games infinitely replayable by changing the story, levels, and characters so they’re 100% unique every time? That could be awesome. Oh man I bet that sort of thing would be amazing if done right in a roguelike game!
AI that tries to figure out how to sell you more loot boxes? No thanks!
Ever since I was a kid after seeing BMO in adventure time I’ve been obsessed with this idea.
A console with an AI that will make new games to play when it’s plugged in and not in use. Then you can favorite the ones that are fun and it will scrap the rest and make more games. One day I hope
if done right in a roguelike game
Here, have a Dwarf Fortress: https://bay12games.com/dwarves/ (For the roguelike adventure mode, you currently need to get an older version, 0.47.5 or buy the game on Steam, as adventure mode in version 50.xx is still in beta.)
Yeah, handheld war, Anbernic vs Miyoo, amirite?
