sounds like PC gamers should fire up an Amiga emulator and learn what gameplay could be.

I feel like people who talk about graphics fundamentally misunderstand what they themselves crave.

People want things that are nice to look at. Some artstyles require more computation than others, but ultimately all of gaming is art, and all of art is a conjuring trick, much like Cinema, how something is accomplished or how "believable" it looks is secondary to how invested you are in what you are consuming, yanno?

I do however have personal opinions, and my personal opinion is that gaming peaked during the PS2/GameCube/Xbox years. Hardware was just about good enough that pretty much anything developers wanted to make, they could achieve. Nothing looked like real life, sure, but it looked good enough. And the more detail you are throwing at the screen, the more expensive it is to make. So back then we had a lot of mid-budget games. That had resources not available to modern Indie studios to do ambitious things, but were also not these insane investments that had to please every executive under the sun and monetise everything in order to break even.

The perfect balance between niceness and feasibility.

Ghost Recon, Ravenfield, Battlebit etc are shooters with simple graphics. Ghost Recon was from constraints of its time (2001 release) but Ravenfield and Battlebit could be way more photorealistic (like Squad) but chose not to. And I like that. In shooters you want good visuals if you can but having consistent performance is a bigger deal than some other games. I don't care about frame rate stutters in a turn based game like X-Com for example.

Speaking of turn based, one of the graphically simplest games I've playes recently is Armored Commander II. It is very very basic graphically (think dwarf fortress or intellivision) and I shit you not it is more immersive than it has any right to. The graphics and display info gives you juuuust enough info to set your imagination into overdrive to fill in the rest.

When your Sherman is almost out of ammo, bogged down in a muddy field and taking fire from enemy tanks in a nearby farm the actual graphics don't really matter so much

When you say graphics...

I'm my opinion games, like movies or comics are a form of medium for sharing ideas, feelings, escapism or enjoyment. Graphics can be good without being realistic, I think it's art not realism that matter so we may have to have a semantic argument about the terms 'graphics'. We all remember those 8 bit games that brought us joy. Just finished playing Dave the Diver, a modern game in pixel at form, which conveyed so much feeling and care that I was moved by so much of it.

You're not the only one, realise that it's just a means of covering thought or feeling and worry less about the realism.

While there are many fans of pixel art and low poly 3D, majority of gamers actually want high fidelity graphics. There are very few indie success stories with low quality VFX like Stardew Valley and pretty much no AAA games like that. Games like No Man's Sky won't be such hits if they were made in pixel art.

The reality is that it's not that games with good graphics are bad, it's that you can't afford RTX4090 and a QD OLED 4K monitor. There are plenty of great games with awesome graphics, it's time for you to upgrade.

yeah, but I assume you are a terminal nerd and not a normie. I kinda feel same like you however I do so because I can't afford a graphic card. I wonder if someone has already made a text based open world game.

plus it also depends on your age. I assume you are a old and don't like new stuff. but graphics has it's own place. eg, you can play plain minecraft and you play minecraft with realistic graphics mod. you will find a huge difference.