I’ve been replaying Uncharted 4, looking for a discrete narrative adventure after playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 and before I inevitably lose myself to Star Wars Outlaws. Though maybe I’ll finally check out the Wolfenstein games too — fighting Nazis seems cathartic in the light of the everything of it all.
But Uncharted 4. A Thief’s End is an excellent game. It’s not rewriting the action game genre, but it does everything that a game in that genre should and does it so darn well. Exploring is fun, combat is fun, the narrative is compelling, and it all looks so good it’s hard to believe the game is eight years old.
The game’s gorgeous. The sweeping vistas of Scotland and Madagascar brim with verisimilitude. The character models of Nate and the others look lifelike with animations that still rival animated movies to this day. Rifles have animated slings for hanging on characters’ bodies — a rare detail when most video game weapons (to this day) still just kinda stick to your character’s back. Eight years later and A Thief’s End is still one of the best-looking games out there.
There was a time when graphics were everything. Score rubrics had graphics as a criteria, alongside stuff like gameplay, story, and sound. Video games are a technical medium; how good they look is part and parcel. But now games all look good. Like with modern animation, fidelity has been achieved, so now what?
The answer, I figure, is story and gameplay. A Thief’s End still soars because it’s so much fun to play and the story is so darn good. The old Final Fantasy games I’ve been playing through hold up not because of their then-cutting-edge graphics but because they’re still really good, really interesting games (though seeing how some of the PS1 games were able to achieve their visuals within their limitations is fascinating). But graphics are a means to an end. The Uncharted and The Last of Us games ought to look good because they’re delivering on the idea of creating a playable big-budget Hollywood movie. I Am Bread is a game about being a piece of bread and just has to look good enough to communicate that. Celeste is a throwback to classic platformers and its sprite art evokes those games the way a contemporary artist could use chiaroscuro to emulate the Renaissance.
Of course, it’s totally possible that another graphical leap lies ahead. Something that’ll make contemporary games’ visuals look dated, the same way that games that seemed as realistic as possible twenty years ago look, well, twenty years old now. But through it all, good gameplay, that ineffable quality of playing through an experience, won’t age. It’s why a game like Balloon Fight is still so fun, even after decades of graphical improvements.
I mean, they are called games, aren’t they?
Essays, Not Rants! 