Except in 99.9% of cases nothing gets fixed after deployment either. That's just an excuse not to admit that from the get-go.

It's also diminishing returns of investment. The more realistic you want to go, the more work you have to put in. Also more realism will mean certain other things will look even more jarring, so you're having a much higher standard for bugfixes.

you have access to unreal engine source code, the problem is companies don't want to pay people to optimize engine

If you have the talent and manpower to create your own engine, it’s better business to make that engine your product instead of whatever game you wanted to make.

its harder to hire new devs if engine is built in house, because no one outside the company understands how to use said engine unless its open for the public to use. thats the biggest drawback of in house engines (other than the increased develepment life cycle to develop one)

its why for example, many 3rd party ports/remasters of old games use unity for example.

Using an inhouse engine makes sense only if you can retain a lot of talent. or have several projects that use it as a base.

That's not the problem. But why spend time and money to optimize your assets if the gamers will buy better hardware instead and you can even strike a deal with a big vendor.

Not just that, but prerendered backgrounds, too.

All games could look like this if they got 48 hours to render each frame and their entire realtime render budget went to three character models, total and nothing else.

I mean, I dispute that games don't look better than that in the first place, too. Grainy embedded screenshot aside, the RE1 remake definitely doesn't look any better, even with all that, than the newer remakes.

Yeah, but its still using rebuilt HD assets which make it look way better than the original game its based off of.

yep. Elden Ring is an example... cant even play that game without my fans going nuts. I didnt even buy the DLC expansion yet... taking a break until I get a better PC. Being a patient gamer means always having cool games to look forward to, someday far in the future lol

Graphics and jiggly physics.

Good graphics are fine, but not at the expense of creativity and fun.

And the most fun graphics are stylized graphics!

It looks so marketing driven.

We are in decades of video games. Look at very old game and assess how "ugly" they are by today's standard while at their time they were "the best graphics ever seen in history!" or something.

And so, the big question: we were having fun with games decades ago already. If graphics were part of the fun, your brain should explode under the immensely higher level of fun you have on modern games vs 20y old games. And… well…nope. Same as before, just higher expectations.

Of course, I don't want my game to look like utter dogshit, and graphics can be apart of the fun, but my biggest concerns with games are how they play and what the story/characters is like (if it's that type of game).

There can be times that I can appreciate more realistic looking games, but honestly it's boring to see so many games try the same style over and over again, especially when it isn't executed well. And if worrying about graphics causes my game to be an unoptimized game with a lackluster story, then I'd rather people just stick with a less detailed style to preserve the the fun (imo) part of games, which is literally everything else.

REbirth sure does look better than Fortnite, and REbirth sure does need a ton less of GPU and CPU.