Former Thief: The Dark Project designer, Ion Storm game director, and sometime Spielberg collaborator Randy Smith Evergreen has shared his probably-incendiary view that photorealistic videogame graphics need not have advanced any further than Remedy’s original Alan Wake. For context, Alan Wake released back in 2010, when some of you people were screaming babies. Every touted breakthrough in visual fidelity since that golden year? A pointless indulgence and a reckless travesty. A middle finger jammed up the nose of god.
Smith Evergreen is entirely wrong, of course: videogame graphics actually topped out with PS1’s MediEvil, still definitively the most faithful and convincing portrayal of an incompetent walking skeleton known to science. That said, this is an OG Thief designer we’re talking about. Let’s hear the poor soul out.
“The fidelity curve has become outrageous,” Smith Evergreen told cheery RPS fanzine PCGamer in a recent interview. “It’s become a spectacle. I remember it was back when Alan Wake came out that I was like, ‘OK, this is relatively photoreal. I know 100% that I’m on a ferry. I see that I’m going to an island in the Pacific Northwest. Why do we need more graphics? Because they just cost a ton.’ Like, I 100% get it. I’ve got the vibe. It feels right. What else are we doing with this graphics arms race, right?”
I have quite vivid memories of that ferry, myself. The slowness of the town’s approach. The comforting grumble of the engine and the ashen hue of the shopfronts and signs. If Graphics Had Ended there, I would not have shed a tear. “I think Alan Wake is the fidelity everything needs to hit,” Smith Evergreen went on. “Where you’re like, I get it. I get your vibes. I can tell what’s going on, and everything beyond that is gravy.”
Smith Evergreen is being very casual in his phrasing, of course. To speak of “more graphics” is nonsensical. There is no one Graphics that is steadily getting bigger as people like Tim Sweeney pump more and more money into it. Even photorealism, often treated as a kind of neutral yardstick or artistic default, is not a monolith: there are specific practitioners and styles or traditions of photorealistic art.
In fairness, Smith Evergreen narrowed the focus a bit in his follow-up remark, arguing that immersive sims, especially, do not need to look as, well, expensive as “AAA” blockbusters like Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6. “Sure, would [players] prefer an immersive sim that’s got insane spectacle and gorgeous, Arkane Lyon quality vistas?” he said. “Of course they would like that. But is it necessary for what you came to an immersive sim for? I’m not sure that it is.” Indeed, to blow the budget ensuring that a Dishonored game has, I don’t know, hairdos as pant-wettingly fine as you’d find in a Ghost of Tsushima might be “a misread for the audience size of immersive sims.”
The ludicrous broadness of the framing aside, I like the underlying sentiment here that we do not need to keep spending pots of money making this year’s cobblestones look 13% more cobblestoney than those of the year before. Where do you draw the line for graphics being ‘good enough’? Again, we have established that PS1’s MediEvil was the high watermark, but I’m interested nonetheless to hear your wrong opinions.