Ah, yes, the graphics over gameplay argument.
That's not even a real argument, incidentally.
Surely not a relevant one, in any case.
Yeah, sure, BG3 looks incomparably better. So what?
It's not like anyone was arguing in favor of BG3 borrowing Solasta's graphics as reference, so not sure what would even be the point of arguing its superiority in that area.
Also worth adding, the graphics argument has been observed to have one measurable effect, maybe two: it probably has a greater effect on increasing sales over everything else. Much of humanity is quite shallow, and yeah, the primary goal of a game is to sell, after all.
The arguable second effect is that a lot of franchises sacrificed quite a bit in the gameplay department for chasing the graphics specter. One only needs to see the vast graveyard of RPG franchises that outright died at the turn of the century, for their outright refusal to either chase the holy graphics ideal, the publishers chose to sacrifice them in favor of other franchises that they thought would adapt to the HD era better, or botched the gameplay so much that they alienated too much of the fanbase while chasing the specter of graphics. And of the ones that made it through, the studios have somehow ended up in a complete dev hell state afterwards, approaching further projects with seeming existential dread. See: Bioware, Bethesda, and CDPR.
It feels like the only developer that has actually escaped from that unfortunate cycle is Capcom, starting with Monster Hunter World and then realizing that gameplay should take priority over graphics with everything else they've released since. And they seem set for life in the graphics department with their RE Engine.
At least enough people know better now to expand their horizons a bit, so that enough of a market for other concepts exists for even remakes of older games like Live-A-Live to be taken seriously now. But we're still going to see Game Journalist-level takes for anything that doesn't conform until the end of time.
...
In other news, what the hell is Square Enix doing towards the end of the year, releasing so many games so close to each other. What the fresh hell?
