Yeah so I'm a graphics hater when it comes to video games. That doesn't mean I think games shouldn't care about graphics or that they should all be text-based but rather that way, WAY too much emphasis is put on graphics when the ultimate goal should be fun gameplay.
Nowadays games take 5+ years to make (and are still rushed) and a giant portion of resources are put into graphics: textures, 3D models, GFX. There's something to be said about how a game's graphics act as marketing as well: if something looks visually interesting it will attract a bigger crowd, but I don't think vastly detailed, photorealistic, high-res is the only way to go about it.
Plenty of indie games have uncovered that when resources are quite limited, making the graphics look like retro games or otherwise seriously stylized can reduce overhead. Celeste, SUPERHOT, and Return of the Obra Dinn are all examples of different approaches one could take to reduce graphical overhead while still looking visually stunning. Celeste chooses to look somewhat retro (although is clearly built for modern monitors) and the low resolution allows for easier stylistic consistency than another 2D game like Guilty Gear where the lineart and style requires much more attention to feel cohesive (not that Pixel Art is easier per se, but several different artists would be much more able to replicate a style than they would with more detailed methods). SUPERHOT gives everything solid colors and thus doesn't require many textures. This gives it a very unique look and enables the devs to spend more time on technical and design problems instead. Return of the Obra Dinn looks AMAZING and if you've seen Lucas Pope's modeling timelapses you'll see that graphical shaders do a ton of heavy lifting in the overall style. Shaders are really handy for this sort of thing because you can spend your time on one shader that applies to the whole game rather than on individual models or textures which only apply to a small portion.
But even if you don't put much emphasis on graphics and your game looks kinda ugly, that still gives you more opportunity to work on other aspects of the game instead! Mount & Blade: Warband looks pretty awful but I believe that actually helped it overall because only people truly interested in the game's premise actually buy it, rather than many games where people think it looks cool and buy it but then don't enjoy it. I'm just saying it's a pretty damn jank game but its steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Another example is Sunless Sea. The game doesn't look terrible and actually the overhead map looks amazing, but a lot of the art in the story events are... stylistically inconsistent, let's say. But even though the game obviously didn't prioritize graphics, it has some of the best writing I've seen in any game, and I've sunk hours and hours into it. For a AAA example, take Bethesda. Daggerfall is one of my favorite games ever, so large you'll never run out of places to explore, amazing roleplay opportunities like choosing your tone of speech, learning different languages to pacify enemies, moving your mouse in different ways to change your attack direction, hell, climbing walls and flying and underwater dungeons... In fairness it's jank as hell and all of those features could have been implemented better, but the game is brimming with fun gameplay elements but the game looks bad even by 1996 standards. But take later Bethesda titles. Gameplay opportunities get reduced every title and even though I love Skyrim's atmosphere and from what I've seen Starfield looks amazing, they feel so much smaller and emptier than Daggerfall. Maybe that's a crazy take but you see what I mean that development has so many more intriguing opportunities when fewer resources are put into graphics... What do high res, high poly, crazy gfx games actually do for the player?
Not to mention, one of the most common gates for being unable to play a game is when computer or console hardware can't handle these expensive graphics. Imagine Elden Ring with ps2 graphics. Does that sound fun as hell? Can you imagine enjoying how it looks? Imagine how many fewer hours and dollars would have to be spent building that, rather than what we got instead? Even though its graphics are amazing, how much do we actually lose by lowering the graphical scope? And now that we've lowered the scope, how much more resources could be spent on enemy variety, level design, number of dungeons, dynamics of the world? So many of the complaints about that game are a result of not enough resources during development, so imagine how much better Elden Ring or *any* AAA game with intense graphics could be if resources were allocated differently!
Thank you for reading my wall of text, I hope I don't sound like a maniac.
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