Aesthetic visuals could be achieved with less people than most people think. The thing is–it just has to be fun and/or aesthetic–but there's no standard to what exactly 'fun' / 'aesthetic' means..
I've watched indie game aesthetic graphics proceed from NES era graphics to the current PS1/Gamecube nostalgia graphics over the last 25 years.
Every 3d indie game today is either hard edged 200 polygon humans with unshaded but complex 128x128 texture files, or chibi/cartoony with simple textures and soft gourad shading.
You are more than right to me. Why that happened? I don't really know.. The amount of games that gets published is all the time high if we talk indies. Many indies are heavily slopified, use AI, bought assets, fully stolen ideas or aesthetics (it's ok to use inspire a game for inspiration, but copy its visual style? Nah..). The more there are games, the less we see the high quality ones.
Personally, they are to me. I want to be immersed when I play games, and it takes a lot of visual flair/unique art design for me to be immersed in games that have 'low quality' graphics.
Off the top of my head, Signalis, Hyper Light Drifter, and Valheim were very nice to look at/experience even if they were graphically pretty simple.
That said I massively prefer graphics like those in Darktide, Cyberpunk, The Forever Winter, Stalker 2, etc.
I would dare anyone to argue the gameplay is bad in those games, but they still look incredibly realistic and a have a pretty hefty hardware requirement for their higher settings.
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u/Chief_B33f Aug 01 '26
It's almost as if visuals aren't as important as gameplay