Control and Resident Evil 2 Remake still look incredible and run well on fairly inexpensive hardware today. We don’t need globally illuminated Unreal Engine 5 games with individually modeled nostril hairs on each character that require graphics cards with prices in the three digit range
Graphics should just be kept at late PS4 level for the foreseeable future to keep games as accessible as possible
Look at what Nintendo’s been doing for the last like 20 years. PS2 level graphics but great game design
I’ve always felt that photorealism takes second place to good art direction. You look at Half Life 2 and it’s dated, but Team Fortress 2 hasn’t aged a day despite being old enough to vote.
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Half Life 2 certainly extended, if it didn’t start, the trend of “high fidelity urban and rural ruins.” So much graphical potential wasted on mostly ugly boring environments.
It really nailed the intended atmosphere though. HL2 also had facial animation that was way ahead of most games and especially PC FPS games at the time
It really nailed the intended atmosphere though.
I suppose it did, and that intention wasn’t to my liking so I suppose that’s why I never really got into it much.
Make it 10. MGSV is the apex of how good a game should look.
I should probably give it a spin on my PC some time. Back in 2015 I had to play Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain on my 360
It’s a very lonely game and the plot is shit but the vibe is unmatched
The gameplay was excellent. My main gripes were the dogshit story and the repetitive environments. It felt like you were just taking down samey outposts for most of the game. It really needed large intricate areas like the Guantanamo facility from Ground Zeroes.
As for the story, I think Hideo Kojima was just out of MGS juice since 3. 4 was abysmally bad and 5 wasn’t much better. Peace Walker was kind of a return to form in terms of tone but I’m not even sure how hands on Kojimbo was with that game’s development
Had a surprisingly good PS3 port too.
I had the 360 version and at the time at least I didn’t feel like I got short-changed. Obviously, the frame rate, draw distance, etc weren’t the best and I knew the game could look much clearer but I still feel like I got the full experience.
It’s crazy that they could run it on PS3.
That engine is still the highmark of gaming fidelity for me. Nothing has ever run as buttery smooth as MGSV. I still haven’t come across a game that looks and feels as good. All these “advancements” in graphics and nothing is as smooth or pretty (outside of like games that are pretty because of art style, not just pure Graphics).
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The landscape textures are pretty ass
You sure do spend a lot of time in those games staring at stiff lumpy faces
I love how Bethesda somehow managed to make people look worse in Oblivion than in Morrowind
I think photo-realism is nice and all, but I think devs shouldn’t focus too much on it. I’m not saying they should avoid it. Just don’t obsessive over it, or see it was the main selling point of a game.
I really do appreciate the impressive work that devs have put into games, whether the graphics are on the higher end or lo-fi 8bit or 16bit style.
Personally, I really like cel shaded games, and that’s been around a long time already. When I see something that “looks” like a cartoon, my mind naturally thinks of fun. 😃
I wonder how much of the push for absurd fidelity photorealism is by the game devs, as opposed to the publishers/upper management?
Imo a lot of the effort is coming out of film animation and doctorate mathematicians, but I don’t doubt Unreal is funding a lot of that research
We got two chokepoints. I feel like graphics have not improved significantly for a little bit that is true. However one problem is way to much stuff can’t be re used. So, games will be made with thousands of hours of work done on assets. Then next game will use all new assets for thousands of hours more work. They really need to make some system by which we can keep adding to asset library’s instead of just having to make new stuff all the time.
The second is we need way more processors cause when you see good ray tracing it really is a wild step up in quality but it is super resource intensive. So maybe when we get reasonable level biocumputing I dunno. However that will be for first time in a while I feel like graphics really jumped up in quality.
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Nah, I want it back like in the hl1 days where everyone was just straight ripping and reusing everything. Those were fun days.
It hurts how the Far Cry series could be good with all the stuff they re-use and copy-paste. But they use those resources for evil.
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I agree with you. When that next level ray tracing hits though that shit is diffrent
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Yeah, I haven’t been impressed by anything else in a long time
It’s like looking at identical twins!
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Really? I’d think advancements in mocap and facial rendering at least help make for more compelling storytelling, since you can get more of the actor’s authentic expression
Plus I like looking at pretty things and the top image is nicer to look at than the bottom one
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tbh I think they looked good enough by around 2011
There were some great looking 7th gen titles for sure but in general I think it was a pretty ugly looking generation whose attempts at photorealism fell flat most of the time. Humans look really potatoy and unconvincing in most PS3 and Xbox360 games
Yeah but I kinda view that as a feature because photorealism sucks and I’d rather play something with an actual art style
Por que no los dos?
I would argue that there isn’t really an important technological development for consumers in about or over 10 years.
The rise of portables that can play all games, that’s about it. VR depending on how much of a success you want to call it. Good gyro controls.
I’d argue DLSS (and whatever equivalent AMD has) is pretty big, it made nice looking graphics way more accessible.
Gameplay wise you’re 100% correct, I’d love to see actually novel gameplay loops.
Proton has been a game changer
the atmospherics in RDR2 really are bonkers. after a long time away (a year, easy), i was dicking around in the rdr online with a friend a week ago. kind of re-learning how to do basic shit, exploring/remembering places, bow hunting, hand to hand fighting, roping/dragging npcs, etc in a few different areas. neither of us have upgraded our systems since before it came out and neither of us can even run it at max/ultra video settings either.
it still looks absolutely crazy in 4k at like medium/high settings.
they kinda eff’d us, imo, by not including the gta5 director mode thing for recording sequences in game for later render. i didn’t really get into playing with that until a few years ago. the amount of high effort stupid videos i would make with rdr online would be mind boggling.
rdr2 online they really scale back the graphics, it’s pretty unfortunate. single player looks amazing in 4k though.
I’ll take lovingly designed art within old graphics over high fidelity rusty fences any day.
I’ve read this same title every year for the past 15ish years
It was also true 15 years ago for the most part and it’s still true now.
I was thinking about photorealism, especially realistic human characters when making this post and we just weren’t there 15 years ago
I was bored with attempts at photorealism 15 years ago, and before that as well.
I’m old enough to have been bored with the FMV fad of the 90s.
'tis tradition 😛
Back in 2002 FFXI had special sequences for making your character that pushed the PS2 to it’s limit and still look pleasing today. If graphics stayed like this I would be fine with that.
Silent Hill 3, 4 and Haunting Ground had some incredible looking character models on the PS2. The PS2 had a ton of really great looking games on it and I wish there were indie developers out there trying to replicate that aesthetic instead of the PS1
Yeah there’s something appealing about how they look. It’s a nice level of fidelity while being able to be run on potatoes for the average person.
Gran Turismo 4 had stunning graphics, completely pushed the PS2 to it’s limits
These were cool to look at but then you get in the game and your cute female Hume actually looks like a turtle. The In-game graphics did not match at all. Still a big fan though.
Yeah Square did those scenes obviously for promotional material and like you said it didn’t match the actual in-game models sadly.
Shenmue’s Passport disc did kind of the same thing, having high poly character models for scenes of just talking and no in-game play.
UE5 games like Wukong look amazing tbh. It’s like touching grass without touching grass. Do older games also look great? yes of course, but new games also look great. also.
as well.
therefore.
They looked good enough a decade ago, PS4 and XBO were dogshit hardware but holding graphics back was actually beneficial, funny enough
Only Kojima is allowed to do graphics. I like what he’s cooking with Death Stranding 2.
Graphics can be good while also being well optimised but the issue here is a big commercial engine like unreal is designed to cut labour hours not run well. Crapitalism.
Most new graphics technologies could with clever application be used to enhance a game however it may be that it’s used to cut dev time. For example:
- upscaling and framegen to avoid the optimisation pass towards the end of development
- raytracing to avoid carefully designed baked lightmaps
- nanite to avoid making LOD’s, nanite isn’t magic it has its own major issues
- software rtgi also is a cheap way to avoid just using decent baked lights and it ue5 looks awful with so much artifacting
- automatic terrain generation to ynow
The effects aren’t really intended to elevate the game but to reduce the cost of labour making them. An engine that both looks good and performs well takes a very long time to develop but instead you get the fuzzy ue5 mess where every game looks the same and runs terribly with perpetual stutter
raytracing to avoid carefully designed baked lightmaps
There’s some truth to your post but I gotta push back a bit on this one. Raytracing isn’t so much a way to avoid having to generate lightmaps or cut costs so much as it is just an objectively superior option to lightmaps in terms of quality. In fact I would argue that Raytracing is maybe the singular reason games didn’t quite look good enough 5 years ago. Polycounts aside Raytracing is basically the number one thing that’s separated graphics in engine from prerendered cinematics that always seem to have that extra oomf. Lightmaps are largely generated by the computer anyway and even with raytracing both require an artist’s labor to light the scene. The only downside and why you’d ever opt for lightmaps over raytracing is performance cause rendering real time reflections at 120fps in 4k is expensive.
