Today when you look at gaming there’s been a shift starting with the last gen. I was taken aback by it because I didn’t really care that much.

Graphics have always been part of gaming. You wanted a new game to look good while playing good. The 7th gen had a push for graphics as an even greater priority. The number one priority, became the undisputed number one. Games were still good, you saw more and more franchises where things would get cut from previous games in a franchise for better graphics.

At the start of the 8th gen, one word was the definition of a good looking game, resolution.

As a gamer since the 90s I have never cared about resolution. Digital Foundry were the ones who made this such a sticking point. The Xbox One had games that ran between 720-900p at launch while their PS4 counterpart could do 1080p.

The game that kicked off this so called resolution war was Call of Duty: Ghosts. Specifically DFs analysis of it where there was a big resolution difference. So this whole thing was kicked off by the worst mainline CoD, up to that time. Ironically this was the biggest impact it had on the industry. After that everybody was saying what their resolution and frame rates were.

Resolution is one of the most overrated parts of an image. Obviously if you zoom in 400x, you’re going to see a difference. Some games you can tell the resolution is lower but it doesn’t detract front unless the games dithering or aliasing. If your game looks like trash at 720p, it looks that way at 1080p. That’s why I never understood this whole push for 4k, there’s no point in shading 8 million pixels per frame. Give me between 1080-1440p and 90-120fps.

When consoles were low power, did you know what saved them? Good art direction and in other cases stylization. The old Splinter Cells and FEAR still look good to this day because of that. With those games it’s good to have a resolution bump as the fixed pixel grids of modern TVs can make them look bad, specifically LCDs. Also a digital signal from a converter device can work well too.

On Xbox a good example of a good looking lower resolution game was Ryse: Son of Rome. To this day on Xbox that game still looks great. Forza 5, Halo 5, Sunset Overdrive, Gears 4, Metal Gear Solid V on Xbox look good. On the PS4 side you had Infamous, Killzone, The Order, Ghost of Tsushima, and God of War all look fine playing the 1080p version, even on a 4k TV.

You also have the cartoony stylized games like South Park: SoT and FBW. Where it looks the same no matter what resolution you play at. Other examples would be Cuphead, Veatiful Joe, and Okami.

The PS4 Pro and Xbox One X came out because of people buying 4k TVs that consoles could only do 1080p. I’m fine with a 1080p game, but devs need to innovate.