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[Fooj]

Where is your minimum?
For what genre?
For what quality of gameplay?
If games were to stop advancing eyecandy, at what point (name an example game) would you not care if they stopped advancing?

For me?
Shooters: Quake II
Strategy: SNES
RPG: SNES
I don't care past the point of: Source Engine.

I'd mention something about the game industry putting graphics ahead of gameplay, but considering where I am, I think I would be preaching to the choir

[Phantom]

I don't care about graphics if the gameplay is good.

And if the gameplay isn't good I still would not care even if it has fancy graphics.

But if I cared about graphics...
Minimum would be a bunch of shapes and stick figures.

[Sowelu]

All I care about is that people don't abuse the graphics they use.  A lot of indie developers should have never tried to advance past 256 colors and low-res because they don't know how to use it properly.

[Farce]

I love me some art style.  Give me good art style and I'm set, be it in 2d or 3d.

I'm fine with sprites and such - love 'em, in fact.  It's more like I prioritize everything being clean and polished looking.  Incursion has very neat ASCII, and I think it's damned pretty.  On the flipside, I remember playing some Batman game on my SNES once, and how badly the sprites were animated, and how they kinda looked like cut outs from a photo or something, turned me waaaay the hell off, more so than how stiff it was or how I had no idea how to do anything outside of the basic punch/kick stuff.


I guess the movement contributes to aesthetic too.  Jak & Daxter was so deliciously fluid and animated on top of being pretty.  Monster Hunter on my PS2 was heavy and clunky, but it was so for the whole game, and gave it a heavy, deliberate feel.

/ramble

[Duke 2.0]

 I expect some thought to have gone into visual design. Somebody had to think "Alright, these color choices go well together." or "This is an aesthetically pleasing level layout and design" or "This character was designed with a silhouette made to be recognizable." You can't just add some glow and particle effects ans think it will work. More shades of brown won't cut it for color. You can't just have programmer art, unless you want the project to look like a small minor one.

 Whether a model with thousands of polygons with dozens of rendering passes to make the best-looking skin and clothes you can find anywhere or a sprite made in a 16x16 grid using four colors, you need to have an artist on the team to make sure things look good.

[FluffyToast J]

Whether a model with thousands of polygons with dozens of rendering passes to make the best-looking skin and clothes you can find anywhere or a sprite made in a 16x16 grid using four colors, you need to have an artist on the team to make sure things look good.

This.

[Heron TSG]

I personally preferred Disgaea DS (sprite based) over the Halo games (3d) due to the crazy awesome combat system, but the sprites were animated better than the 3d models of Halo, and the effort put in was much higher.

[beorn080]

The graphics need to be good enough to provide all the information that is needed, and better graphics aren't always better. This runs from nethack and DF's ASCII mode, up to FPSs where information about weapons and ammo is needed immediately. Super shiny graphics seem to have a tendency to get in the way.

[Virtz]

Only things that scathe me are early, blocky true 3D games where people were made of rectangles and the very early DOS games with palettes where the colours were cyan, raging purple, white and black.

But these are merely dislikes, if I came across something good with these graphics (like, say, Rocket Jockey), I'd still play it.

[Duke 2.0]

I personally preferred Disgaea DS (sprite based) over the Halo games (3d) due to the crazy awesome combat system, but the sprites were animated better than the 3d models of Halo, and the effort put in was much higher.

I dunno, despite lazy level design the game was still somewhat polished. And the art design on the aliens was rather nice. Halo just seems to be the victim of feature creep.

 I'm a little iffy with ASCII art design, as many roguelikes like to do things in weird ways. Let us look at Dwarf Fortress. Look at the smoothed walls, the tiles for plants and animals, the tiles for workshops, furniture and land features. It all looks very nice. It all looks like it fits. Then we see other roguelikes with # for walls and & for plants and things just don't seem right. Even ASCII can have an art direction. And while ASCII is generally for developers without the time to make graphics they should consider what would be the best symbols for representing what they want.

[Jack A T]

If the graphics are really, really impressive, I care about them.

If the graphics get in the way of playing the game, I care about them.

That's pretty much it.

[Farce]

Only things that scathe me are early, blocky true 3D games where people where made of rectangles

That reminds me, I thought the overworld/map models in FF7 were cute.  Then when FF8 rolled around with it's more anatomically correct models and jagged edges everywhere, I was like :\.

[buckets]

Whether a model with thousands of polygons with dozens of rendering passes to make the best-looking skin and clothes you can find anywhere or a sprite made in a 16x16 grid using four colors, you need to have an artist on the team to make sure things look good.

This.

Aye.

[Shades]

I can't play games with poor graphics, they just end up annoying me too much.

Generally this includes stuff with low resolution, early generation 3d games which almost all look terrible now.

It's a shame because some of those games I loved but going back to try and play them I just couldn't get past the graphical aspect.

[Cthulhu]

I like good graphics, and I try to get the graphics as good as I can possibly get them with a reasonable framerate.  I can also handle bad graphics, depending on the game.

What I can't stand is when people get all elitist about it, like preferring bad graphics somehow makes them superior to people who prefer good graphics.