Firewatch doesn’t have a realistic graphic style, but it does have an outstanding lighting atmosphere.
Even if he doesn’t remember afterwards, Fritz sometimes throws controversial theses into the podcast round. After playing Ghostwire Tokyo, which lacks variety but is highly detailed and mirrored by raytracing, he asked Micha: Can games just be beautiful?
Micha promptly noted this in his podcast file in order to confront Fritz with it again.
Because that’s what we need to talk about. Actually, the defensive reflex would be obvious: Graphics are secondary, it’s the inner values that count! And that’s true, too, if you look at games like Rimworld, which despite its rudimentary look keeps spouting great stories.
At the same time there are games like Ghostwire Tokyo, Ryse: Son of Rome or – back then – Incoming and Rebel Assault, which were not very remarkable from a purely playful point of view, but which we enjoyed thanks to their technique. And the fact that Micha plays through Homeworld Remastered every year is not necessarily due to the gameplay either.
So he discusses with Fritz and Peter Bathge “Celeste was also nice” about whether graphics can be the main thing after all – and ultimately even consoles us for inadequacies in the game.
Fritz himself draws a Solomonic interim conclusion: Games cannot just be beautiful because there is hard work behind their beauty. What we perceive as impressive, stylish or atmospheric is what developers have built. That too is an achievement!
In addition, our concept of beauty is of course subjectively discolored: If Jung-Micha hadn’t sat open-mouthed in front of »Battlestar Galactica«, Homeworld might have left him as cold as Peter today The Order: 1886 (not “1866,” that’s what we had in mind on the podcast Emperor Palpatine).
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