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curl-6 on 30 August 2025
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sc94597 said:
curl-6 said:

Piling on the effects til the resolution is blurry isn't really making your games as pretty as possible though.

I'm not saying publishers are blameless in the whole thing mind you, scope creep is a real thing, but the development studio bears responsibility too if they bog down the hardware with expensive effects. Sometimes less is more; the best looking games of last gen are still held by many to be prettier than most current gen titles.

The blurry resolution is a by-product of a lack of resources though. 

The way this works is like this: 

Designers, senior developers, senior artists, and project managers have many early meetings, some of which involve how a game will look. Designers and project managers pressure the senior developers and senior artists to agree to create as visually appealing a game as possible. The publishers also want this, for the reasons I mentioned earlier. The work to do this is planned out over time with project managers trying to keep the strict deadlines provided by the publisher. In the mean time developers might quit or be laid off. Early promises still have to be kept, because the epics, features, stories and sprints have already been planned, and the timelines are already made. The developers, with limited resources, and likely because they already over-promised to keep their jobs, try their best to provide each incremental feature (including visual features) they had agreed to provide in the pre-planning phase. Time runs out. The game still runs poorly. The game needs to be released. How do the developers make the game run well before release? Reduce scalable graphical features, like internal resolution. 

Now if the development company was well staffed, timelines were extended, expectations realigned, publishers were flexible, etc the end result might have been better. 

Nowhere in the process did the individual developers have the free-choice to say "oh I want to put as many pretty graphical effects in this game as possible." In fact, if it were up to them they probably wouldn't want to do that, preferring to create a performant game that had a clean look to one with flashy visual effects that are hard to develop in a strict timeline. 

An individual programmer on their own bears little responsibility, but in a larger sense members of the development team who make these calls and over-promise in the first place do.