Summer Game Fest 2025 – The Same Old Sh-…
- Alc, The Cracker
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
I'm sending out an S.O.S. That being a "Same Old Shit" alert.
I watched the 2025 Summer Game Fest and the only opinion I could form is it would probably be best if we just replaced the gaming industry with AI at this point. It’s both fascinating and absurd how much of it blended together.
Once upon a time, you could tell games apart from just a glance, despite being on the same console. Once upon a time: Devil May Cry looked nothing like Resident Evil. Legacy of Kain looked nothing like Final Fantasy X. Postal 2 looked nothing like Grand Theft Auto. Shadow of the Colossus looked nothing like Okami. SWAT 4 looked nothing like Hitman.
Yet, in modern gaming: you can’t tell Death Stranding from Call of Duty. You can’t tell Horizon Forbidden West from Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. You can’t tell Atomic Heart 2 from Bloodborne. You can’t tell Onimusha: Way of the Sword from Assassin's Creed Shadows. You can’t tell Relooted from Overwatch. You can’t tell Jurassic World Evolution 3 from Planet Coaster. You can’t tell Arc Raiders from Starfield. You can’t tell Ill from Resident Evil Village. You can’t tell Last Flag from Fortnite.
Believe me, I had to get the scribes hard at work to find the names of these titles. Video game graphics today have become disturbingly archetypal. Diminishing returns is quite real, and unless you’re actively engaged in the industry nowadays, there’s no telling what is what.
Back when I used to snoop around GameStop to find new games (I know, “back in my day” trope), it was always the cover that spoke to me the most. The cover of the game was everything.
Now? Every cover art is about as inspiring as whatever ChatGPT can put out. Like I said, it would probably be best if we just replaced the gaming industry with AI at this point.
We are spending far, far too much resources on graphics that are supposed to look modern but really just look old. I say this as someone who’s got the 4K monitor and a new PC that can play these things at max with such resolution: it hardly impresses me when I have seen the Source game accomplish more – graphics wise, physics wise, gameplay wise – at a third of the RAM, disk space, and graphics processing.
People forget that realism is in itself an art style, and it’s overdone, but no one wants to point it out.
