As long as a game looks decent in this day and age then it's good enough for me. It doesn't look like the best game visually but who cares? If it's fun it doesn't matter. Due to various problems with my PC I had to play Witcher 3 at minimum setting capped at 30 FPS at a low resolution and yet I still found the game amazing.

It does not, 30 fps at full hd on Xbox point towards pretty modest graphic. this is an developer decision I respect, they did not know the performance of the full game then starting so they aimed low.

Environment is another issue, both Fallout 3 and Skyrim did this very well. Fallout 4 will do this way better because of more horsepower and most of all more memory.

Following image describe the memory limitations of previews console generation more than 1000 words http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NjQwWDE2MDA=/$T2eC16FHJF0E9nmFQVJ,BQcnhNkqMw~~60_57.JPG

As many have said there is a balance to be struck.

Any development across multiple platforms must be mindful of each platform's capabilities, without that acting as shackles for all.

When the trailer aired many were disappointed that the graphics did not 'appear' as cutting edge as expected.

The subsequent gameplay has mitigated that concern, particularly with some of the gorgeous lighting.

I sense a mid-point, with perhaps a nudge toward gameplay over graphics.

What do people mean when they say graphics? Do they mean the most high resolution and GPU-intensive stuff they can fit in, or good art design?

I'd say that Fallout 3 beats the vast majority of videogames on the graphics front, going by the second definition, but a lot of the actual textures in the game look absolutely gross to modern eyes, and im not sure if it looked that top of the line in 2008 either. I'd always take better art direction over better textures or models or what not. Fallout 4 looks to have the ruins of the Wasteland down pat with the same attention to detail as Fallout 3, and for that I am already in love with the graphics side, atleast the second one.

It's a shame that one can't up-vote a comment on this forum.

Graphics and gameplay should be balanced. I am not hyper picky about graphics, but if the game is too ugly for me to enjoy then I won't be able to give the ol' gameplay much of a chance. I am trying to figure out what was so great about the Witcher 3 though. I mean, it had wind effects. Not sure what else I was supposed to be impressed by. It is a good looking game but I'm just not getting it as the standard by which all other games are compared. Back to Fallout 4. When I watched the E3 presentation, I was suitably impressed by the lighting, the palette and the water effects. Honestly, as long as the shadows are not the blocky mess from Skyrim, I am way better than okay with everything I saw. I am so looking forward to roaming around in this world.

Why not both?

Prior to CGI, people thought that a Lord of the Rings movie was impossible at possible budgets. In games, there is the same problem. Those that can imply depth to the player, yet don't have to depict it with detailed sound and animations; can be made cheaper to produce. Once everything demands visual representation and/or foley & voice work to ~legitimize it in the game, it becomes an issue of expense and feasibility. This can mean that the depth gets cut; the mechanics get simplified. There are developers that will omit a working feature, simply for being unable to make the artwork look decent for it.

Games visually improve every few months, and so in a few months a game's graphics are not competitive anymore... but good gameplay has staying power, and can remain relevant for years. There is a reason that players still play Fallout 1 & 2 ~17+ years later. I don't expect that of FO3; what it was exceptional at, is too too easily surpassed.

Couldn't agree more, and that's why I still play Star Trek Starfleet Command the ship combat was fun as heck. . . an Interplay game just like FO 1&2.

This would be art style and aesthetics. However, no, the aesthetics do not need to "fit" some predefined idea of what the world and the entities that populate it should look like. In fact, doing so is exactly the problem with Bethesda's games and why so many popular mods change the character aesthetics. For many people, including myself, BGS' focus on uninteresting, unappealing (I could say "poor" but anyway...) character aesthetics is exactly why we need mods to fix this problem because we cannot immerse ourselves or empathize with our character and other characters if we simply cannot care about them. This is one of the biggest problems that they will almost certainly never address even though they continue claiming (falsely) that the player can "create any character you want and do anything you want". This is patently false when we are forced to deal with these unappealing character aesthetics and do not have a choice in the character creation process (aside from mods, of course).

They need to either address their lack of appealing character aesthetics of stop making false claims about freedom of choice in creating characters and doing actions.

If the game doesn't play well, the greatest of graphics mean nothing. I'd rather a decent looking game that played amazingly well, than a stunning looking game that played terribly.

Acceptable graphics for the standard of technology is all I ask for. Anything else is nice, but comes a distant second to engaging gameplay.

This was an problem in earlier games but mostly solved in Skyrim.

Think it was mostly an problem with the character creator toolkit and that you had to make many hundred caracters.

Things was vastly improved in skyrim and looks good in Fallout 4

I have never ~in memory, had this problem. I tend to think Bethesda's 3D work is sufficient, and sometimes exceptional... Better than Obsidian's IMO. However, So long as the RPG is good; and the mechanics sound, it doesn't really matter to me what the entities are represented as. As long as I can understand what's going on, then these two images mean the same to me: http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/ADrim_zpspb5uhvhn.jpg

personally, I care more about gameplay then graphics but if I can barely stand to look at it, it better be some rarely good gameplay. story is a factor too. a game with so so graphics and passable gameplay but a great story will get alot more play from then just about any amount of flashly graphics and/or good gameplay. it is one of the reasons I prefer ff-x/ff-x2 over the ff-13 trilogy.

Graphics will be fixed soon enough with high res packs and graphic mods. Just give us the awesome core game and the mod community will take care of the rest =)

Oh my God! You're like the Neo of computer games! You don't see characters and dragons and cheese wheels, just 1s and 0s!

This is an problem, good graphic also demands that the features also look good.

This is why we don't have ladders in Skyrim, an good ladder animation is hard to at least then you have variable body height. With primitive graphic you accept more abstraction so you can easy add features.

I want the best graphics possible without compromising gameplay and performance. If 'dated' graphics allows for more NPCs rendered, less loading screens and more dynamic objects with physics, then give me dated graphics. If I have to give up something that I can actually play with to make what's left 'purdy', then it's not an acceptable trade-off to me.

Um, Skyrim was definitely pushing the graphics limit, when it first came out. Even my top-end gaming machine had a hard time with maxed-out visuals in that game.

I recently picked up Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge at GOG.com (great place for all kinds of great games) and it's pretty darn ugly, but IMHO it plays really well. If the gameplay is great, then graphics will hold a distant second tied with music and ambient sound . Wiz 6 also had really poor sound, so the gameplay was really that good.

In it's defense, it is a fairly old game.

Maybe it's because I started out in the age of the awful pixelated PC graphics of the mid-90's, and was greatly affected by the shock-and-awe of the first true 3DFX 3D visuals when they came out, but since then I've always been an appreciative admirer of better visuals in gaming. I agree completely that if the gaming svcks, good visuals are irrelevant- but when the two come together in the same game, booyah! Fortunately, I think we've come to somewhat of a plateau in PC graphics, where decent realism is fairly easy to come by with the hardware we have now, and I think my own preference is towards great art vs. absolute photo realism. For instance, I'll take the fun artwork of a good comics-art game like Borderlands 2, over more photo-realistic games like Far Cry, etc. And I don't expect F4 to be ugly, by any means. I guess my rambling point is, that great-looking graphics have more to do with the art direction and creative talent of the people making a game, than any efforts to make it look photo-real.

I guess I'm old-school in the sense that I like the graphics to be appropriate to the game play, not just the most realistic the platform can reproduce. F4 could have looked like F3 or FNV for all I care; it's nice that it looks so pretty but if the game play isn't fun it won't matter.

I still don't see why the world needed the current next-gen consoles, so my opinion may not count.

I agree somewhat on the graphics, but we did desperately need that upgrade to 64 bit. Being able to put all that extra memory to use will do a lot more for the game than the graphics improvements.

Yeah, that's a good point.