AngryMob

Fr. Sony/polyphony missing out on so many fans of GT that don’t buy consoles anymore.

And no microsoft, forza is not the same…

For me its lack of volume sliders

But where are the actual good reasons for the hate?

“Ugh i have to use this genuinely good storefront if i want to be successful” is not a logical reason. Its not a monopoly. Consoles and mobile are still a thing afterall, even if we ignore all the pc stores and the fact that plenty of games do fine without steam, including indie.

The only game devs i know who hate steam are shovelware or low effort devs. Or i guess contrarians that just want attention.

I get it, steam takes a big cut. But you make more releasing on steam alone than every other site combined, by a lot. You get more audience, word of mouth, advertising, you get more api features, etc.

And i say this as a fan of GMG and GOG. I want them to be the top dogs, and i like posts that give them more attention.

Ray tracing is not a fad though, and reducing it to just reflections is ignorant. Reflections, shadows, bounce lighting/global illumination, etc. all get noticeable bumps in quality. They are definitely more subtle than previous bumps from new techniques because those old techniques have gotten so damn good. But at the same time, those previous techniques have reached their limits and have unfixable problems. Whether that is occlusion artifacts in reflections, light leaking from global illumination, non-interactive baked lighting, shadows with uncanny resolution and no penumbra, hacky ambient occlusion, etc. etc… the problems are all minor, sure, but they are there, noticable, and devs want to keep pushing.

And this is ignoring the benefits on the dev side as well. No more annoying rasterized light placement. And pulling your hair out trying to hack the engine to get the look youre after. “It just works” is an unfortunate comment but holds a lot of truth. Even non realistic looking games will use more and more ray tracing as time goes on because of that. And eventually every device and card will have performance for a full suite of effects. Its an inevitability, not a fad.

Art style, fidelity, and realism are all somewhat separate. Yeah a good art style can make a game timeless. There are countless examples of that. But it doesnt mean that realistic looking games cant have a great art style. I think cohesion is a huge part of what people mean by “art style”. Realistic looking games that focus on having a cohesive look can also be fairly timeless. They may not compete with today’s fidelity (resolution, technology, etc), but Assassin’s Creed, various Battlefield games, Crysis 1, and plenty more all look great if you look at them today.

Theres also the concept of somwthing not realistic, but high fidelity. Minecraft RTX is simply amazing. Taking that already timeless art style and increasing the fidelity doesn’t suddenly remove the timeless factor, and i love that. I want more of that. Even if it means i need a fairly beefy gpu for such simple graphics otherwise.