The Shrine

Everyone should know that unlike most people I DO care about graphics, but this issue has been bothering me for a while. I saw it again with Rift but it's always around. You see people comment stuff like 'animation is bad' or 'graphics need XYZ'. Seriously? You got games that with millions in budget that is most likely trying to sell on graphics and you need your armchair quarterbacks telling the company that maybe they should need a basic lesson in anti-aliasing or that they should use more than 3 frames for an attack animation? I don't know the exact thing that goes into making graphics look good, but I'm assuming these guys are pro so it's not like the graphics will somehow forget concepts that are well understood for the last 10 years.

Yes I know there are always the guys who go "Graphics are not important if my game looks worse than yours". That's obvious. But the more annoying are the guys of: "It's not the number of polygons that makes the graphics (when my game has less of them)." It's not like there's some huge difference between the artistic level of most development studios and usually the guys with the better polygon counts tend to have better looking graphics. Generally speaking what you get in graphics is exactly equal to how much resource you put into, so Square Enix tends to be #1 since they put the most into that. It's certainly hard to argue that Square Enix is not the industry leader on fancy looking graphics. I understand that if you feel Lightning isn't naked enough you can hate the game for that and that's totally valid, but it's not because Square Enix forgot how to design character models.

With everything on such a big budget nowadays, not all games are going to get the additional budget to make sure everything, including graphics, are top-notch. Couple that with developers dreamin' big then having to hit a deadline and you end up with a lot of rougher edges in a lot of areas, including graphics, on secondary titles

Obviously there are different degree of 'top notch' but it's not like because you're low on budget you ended up finding an Internet message board warrior to do your 'swing sword' animation. A lot of stuff in graphics is basic stuff that's been done for years. Sure the polygons and firepower goes up but it's not like people forget how to make a humanoid model or how to animate something that's running.

I can see if you dislike one type of style ove another, and certainly style can be argued as something that can be fine-tuned, but just because Zelda isn't naked enough for you doesn't mean Nintendo needs to learn from you. I have no problem if you say "I think Nintendo's style is dumb" since that's a totally subjective statement, but that doesn't mean Nintendo doesn't know how to make good graphics. It's just whatever they're shooting for doesn't match your expectations.

Also I'm talking about graphics in relationship to games with obviously very large budgets here, where they'd generally feature statements like "STUNNING GRAPHICS" in an ad. I don't mean to say it can't be wrong, but a game claiming stunning graphics is probably not going to need your help on how to draw polygons.

Square is number 1 because they have great artists. That is why FF10, to this day, is still more pleasing to look at than most games with much higher levels of polygons in their models. Square also has very good animators, other companies do not.

I am not exactly sure who pays their art teams the most, but I think it is Activision - their games are the highest budgeted in the industry.

Pretty sure Square has the most number of guys working on graphics too. The list of guys that have anything to do with graphics in the credits on a FF game is just huge. Graphics is one department where you get what you pay for, and while you can argue how good is top notch, there's no reason to believe any of the top tier games skimped out on graphics so that a random Internet warrior can tell them where it went wrong. This isn't like say gameplay where you just misjudged what the public wants. You can clearly see the result of the game and it's almost unfathomable you'd mistake something that looks hideous for 'good graphics' even if the definition is rather subjective.