Why can't devs put maximum effort into visuals for games?

[DoritoMan256]

Its so stupid if games look good people say "TOO HARD TO RUN ERMAGHERD BAD COMPANY"

However if it looks average and is easy to run people say "COULD LOOK BETTER I HAVE 4 TITAN X GIMME SHADOWS!!!"

[LogicalDrm]

Why don't devs put out max graphics? Time and money.

It takes 3+ years to develope AAA game. If they want game to sell, it must: Look good, have long-sih campaign, good gameplay, multiplayer, good voice acting cast, good plot with interesting characters etc. Most games are somewhere in between. More time and money they get, better the result. Like you see in Witcher 3 which was delayed until it was ready.

[eye2012]

what the fuck do you mean we rarely get something like that.

 

witcher 3 ???

So  like he said, rarely.. you mention 1 game.. which is rare.

[ivhyn]

Its so stupid if games look good people say "TOO HARD TO RUN ERMAGHERD BAD COMPANY"

However if it looks average and is easy to run people say "COULD LOOK BETTER I HAVE 4 TITAN X GIMME SHADOWS!!!"

Basically this.

If a game is really demanding, the uneducated people will call it "unoptimized" and spam the forums with their annoying conspiracy theories, however, if a game doesn't meet their twisted graphic standards, which they probably can't even specify, because a dev. didn't intend to produce a super demanding game in the first place, they're all about consoles being shitty and how their GPUs could pump out a way prettier game.

Gamers, and more specifically PC enthusiasts, are a crowd that's incredibly hard to please and probably is one of the reasons many companys turned their focus away from the high-end players.

[sgtcool]

Crytek did, they are now dead

[EvilWiffles]

Almost every game looks crappy to me :C.

[PlayStation 2]

Until you realize that EA sucks at making games without freaking bugs EVERYWHERE @Iamdarkbowser

Battlefront had relatively few bugs at launch. And it looks surprisingly good on the Xbox One.

[PlayStation 2]

Crytek did, they are now dead

Crytek isn't dead. They're a big ass company that bought out Free Radical Design and had a United States subsidiary at one point.

 

On topic: To answer the question, it's kind of consoles, kind of "optimization only goes so far", and kind of "broadening your audience".

 

Don't need to talk about the first point.

Second point, optimization really only does go so far. It can go a long ass way if you're a company like Shin'en (Fast Racing NEO) and can utilize many clevers ways of cutting back in some areas and cranking the visual dial to 11 in other areas, and it goes nowhere if you're a company like Valve (Team Fortress 2 especially), where, despite there not being a single texture higher than 1024x1024 and models looking like shit and vertices on screen not even hitting 60k, it runs like absolute horse shit on anything that isn't a genuine gaming PC.

 

Third point, this is most exhibited in The Sims 3 and 4. Those games don't look bad, but the minimum settings look fucking godawful, to hit the broad audience down to even 2 core netbooks. Or the Fifa series pre-Fifa 15.

 

Now games that typically push the boundaries are normally relegated to one and only one platform to squeeze any ounce of performance and quality from the machines (Crysis, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Forza Motorsport (first one), Gran Turismo 4, Fast Racing NEO, Far Cry (also first one)), and this has been true for generation upon generation. Donkey Kong Country and Shenmue prove this even further.

[Bhav]

Because then I wouldn't have cthulu saves the world and binding of Isaac.

[W3dge]

This is why I love Elite: Dangerous so much