I can't be bothered to extend the metaphor to cover this, because I'm lazy. Super Mario 64 still looks great, for example. You can have a game with basic textures that holds up because of the art style if you're not going for realism, which is why certain classics still hold up. You need it, because without it you've failed.īut it also depends on what the aim is for a given game's visuals. In this metaphor the soup is realism and the bowl is lighting. But if you're having soup, the rules change. Of course the food is the most important. So in a sense, there's no room for discussion because it's like asking what's more important between food, the plate it's on, and the cutlery. Textures, even moreso than models, are the baseline of everything visual in games. 3D DS games were rarely praised for their visuals in the same way that console games were.Īnd to an extent, you're right.

(I can't provide pictures now, but I will have examples when I get home!) <- this aged very poorlyĬlick to expand.That's probably also because one's a GameCube game and the others are DS games. But now thanks to direct storage, rtx io, the ps5 io, we can have more realistic textures and I seriously want to see ps5/Xbox devs capitalize on that because I'm tired of seeing these beautiful visuals suddenly interrupted by a blurry looking floor texture. Up until this point, game textures looked blurry and stood out like a sore thumb. This I think should be the focus of the next gen, visually. There were still some errors in some areas but overall the game felt more. When I applied an unofficial AI texture overhaul though, everything immediately looked far more convincing and I was able to suspend my disbelief more.

A similar thing occurred with Gran Turismo 4, the game looked realistic, but very dated thanks to the old ass textures. It takes away a lot of my immersion when I notice that the walls and floor look like they were smeared all over. I noticed this when I was playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake the other day, (which frankly feels like a massive downgrade from the original in most areas) the games modeling, lighting and animations were on point but even high textures looked really blurry and pixellated. While I can appreciate a good looking environment, a great artstyle and amazing models, Great lighting, modeling and VFX don't mean shit if the textures look omega blurry.

Half life 1 animated textures