I remember when I finally played God of War III after years of replaying the first two and was immediately put off by all the light reflections going on in the game. The first boss fight with Poseidon seemed to be almost exclusively made to show off these graphical capabilities of the PS3, with wet surfaces and all, but I found it just noisy and hard to look at and tell what was going on. It didn’t feel more “realistic”, just more “photorealistic” like I was looking through badly focused and framed HD footage.
Same thing kinda annoyed me in Dark Souls III, specially when compared to Bloodborne which didn’t look so greasy. I find the first Dark Souls incredibly beautiful, and never “upgraded” to the Remaster but all the pictures I’ve seen seem like they thought “this needs more light”.
In the first one the grass and less important textures blend into the background, so you can focus more on important stuff like the character through the game’s faded aesthetic. Old games also have this neat effect of having textures that are more detailed than the original resolution can handle, so I usually find that just upping the resolution on GameCube and Wii games already makes them prettier despite their “low graphics”.
So when games like Cyberpunk 2077 came out, the internet was immediately flooded with astroturfed campaigns to exalt how “pretty” the game looks. But it looks like “I can’t see shit” with all the lights, reflections, lens flares, glares and such. If that car didn’t reflect, for example, I could way more easily admire the model.
This one is also a good example:
Then there’s stuff like “Ray Tracing Mods” for games that were not aesthetically developed for that, like Minecraft.
As a point of comparison, here’s a modern game with “low graphics” that I think handles lighting much better even though it’s less “realistic”, Metroid Dread.
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It’s not natural, the light doesn’t bleed into the environment as easily. Samus isn’t lit up green by her little lights even though in real life she probably would given how strong they are. But the contrast makes scenes easier to read, and also I (subjectively) find them incredibly pretty. I also hate Breath of the Wild as a game, but it’s similarly pretty in a way that I think all these “ray tracing mods” ruin.
Is this just a nostalgia thing for me? Are Ray Tracing and associated lighting techniques just marketing ploys to sell more modern GPUs in an era where old hardware is already sufficient? Do any of you prefer oiled-up GoW 3 Kratos over rubber GoW 2 Kratos? Should I get my eyes checked? Is there a whole essay somewhere about intentional lighting decisions and how IT companies are trying to replace subjective human artistic labour with objective automatic graphical processes for financial gain? idk, Journey is pretty I guess.
Ray tracing imo is not needed for a good game
I don’t know anything about game development especially AAA ones but games requiring a NASA supercomputer to perform normally with the help of AI upscaling and frame generation while looking not that much better really gets my goat. Recent example is Outer Worlds 2. [I found this short video comparing its graphics with this first entry.)(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oi74SmWUCDM) What does the second game do that makes it run like molasses on my graphics card, GTX 1650? I don’t get it.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I want games to look good.
Looking good is not the same as looking realistic.
I wish more gamers & devs could understand this so we didn’t need to get a supercomputer just to run the latest releases.
Yeah this is my thing with technological advancement for the sake of technological advancement. There are so many things that were already possible with the technology we’ve had for decades yet because more people have access to increasingly more resources, alongside the crunch that comes along with game development these days, there seems to be far less focus on resource management and compatibility when software is being developed. Less “engineering”, less clean up, and more “just make it do the thing”.
I also feel this way about modern browsing. No way a fucking webpage needs the same amount of memory as an entire OS did 20 years ago. But resources are plentiful, so why would the average web developer give a second thought to optimization?
A large part of me swears it’s a racket to keep people buying the latest and greatest hardware but it very well could just be symptomatic of needing to pump out a usable/marketable/profitable product in as little time as it can possibly be done.
so we didn’t need to get a supercomputer just to run the latest releases
I tried playing a horror game I’d been waiting on for a while that my PC could barely handle; reducing the graphics settings (which still didn’t fix the issue) somehow made it look WORSE than games I CAN run normally; like how does that even make sense? My PC can run fantastic looking games that came out a handful of years ago, but the latest stuff which it struggles with, if I reduce the graphics settings, ends up looking as bad something from over twenty years ago and STILL doesn’t run smoothly!
I feel this. My gf got me WH40K Space Marine 2 a while back but I had to wait till I got a new machine capable of running it.
Finally got it not long ago and somehow it can’t run the game optimally. The graphics are literally capped and I can’t improve the visuals beyond a certain point, which leaves the game looking like a fucking turd.
It also runs like shit but I can at least mitigate most of that; but it’s still choppy and everything looks like a fucking paint smear.
you are making a very valid art criticism of games. some people won’t agree with it, and that’s fine. there has always been a tension between using all of the latest tech and actually making good artistic choices for a game, and a very consistent trend in the game industry is to shove whatever fancy new advertising buzzword technology into every new game regardless of whether it makes artistic sense.
It looks great in stills but it looks awful when you’re moving around because no machine can keep up with it without AI generated frames so it’s all just one big smeary mess most of the time.
Games can look great without realistic reflections and shadows and shit and I wish AAA studios would go back to using art to make games look great instead of technology
Reminds me, the Jimquisition aka Stephanie Sterling has a good vid on the topic of graphics. Specifically, they focus on remasters, but I think it’s in the same ballpark as what you’re talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N5pFDZTk84
It’s called “Some Games Look Worse Because They Look Better” and goes into how making “improvements” to graphics without thinking about the overall artistic style can make it look worse instead of better.
Personally, I tend to appreciate realistic anatomy 3d model over toony style of games (KOTOR or Skyrim over Fortnite or WoW), but when it starts getting into all the fancy 3d settings, they lose me fast. My personal pet peeve is motion blur in 3d games, which I pretty much always turn off; it makes my eyes feel weird trying to process the game, I don’t know how else to put it.
And yes, I don’t really understand the appeal of hyper realistic lighting or shadows either. Which is I think an appropriate term for it because hyper realism is, well, to use one definition:
Hyperrealism is a style in painting, photography and sculpture that replicates real life in more detail than is actually visible to the human eye, or a standard resolution camera.
(bold emphasis mine)
And this is maybe where the issue is. Realistic is an approximation of how we would experience it in real life. Hyper realistic is actually a kind of unrealistic, yet promotion of high fidelity graphics makes it sound like it’s selling you on realism.
In a way, it’s maybe for the best that games aren’t trying to be as naturally realistic as possible. I’m not sure I’d want to play a game where the main way of discerning that I’m not looking at a recording of real life is looking away from the monitor. But I do think what is more like hyper realistic gets pushed as inherently good “because of how real it is”, when it’s not actually that real and is more just another stylistic choice and preference.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Are Ray Tracing and associated lighting techniques just marketing ploys to sell more modern GPUs in an era where old hardware is already sufficient?
I really think this is a big thing. I run an older card with 4gb ram but the number of games I have wanted to play but can’t is pretty small. (my thrift justification bias is probably working overtime on this though)
Honestly no, no I don’t. I find it distracting and it often gives me a headache. I much prefer the flat lighting of older games (by which i mean pre-2012…Skyrim was one of the last games where the lighting engine didn’t give me a headache). I think there’s a difference between games and movies, and trying to make games look like movies is not a great idea. What works in one doesn’t necessarily work in the other. With games it’s not just about having something visually appealing to look at. In games you need to be able to parse the spatial geometry of the environment and identify the important things in that environment, and reflections and high contrast shadows make that much more difficult. For most games i play, i turn off the fancy shaders if i can. Shaders in Minecraft for instance can make for a nice cinematic but actually playing with them, for me, is not possible. But, you know…to each their own.
And this is a bit of a tangent but speaking of “photorealistic”: often what makes for an “artistic” photo or movie isn’t actually all that realistic. For instance when you use a low depth of field you can make something look more “artistic” and “aesthetic”, but it’s not really how we see things in real life. Yes, we don’t see everything in focus at the same time, but we can adjust our focus to see things at various distances clearly. So if you wanted a more “realistic” feel you would actually want a very high depth of field, ideally where everything is in focus so that you can pick and choose freely what to look at, not being forced by the composer of the image where to look. Even though this is not technically “photorealistic”.
It works similarly with shadows and high contrast. Yes there are shadows and lots of differences in light levels in real life. But IRL your eyes can adjust going from one environment to another. Yet when this is done in games it often just doesn’t translate well, at least for me. I find it very uncomfortable to have to strain to see what is in the darker areas when there is blindingly bright light in some parts of a scene and very little light in others. And when they try to simulate “adjusting to the darkness” when entering, say, a cave, it feels very off-putting and disorienting. I prefer a flatter, albeit “unrealistic” lighting model, the way you used to have in the very early 3D titles of the late 90s, early 2000s. (The one exception i guess would be certain horror games where the darkness is the point, but not in like, normal RPGs or action games.)
In games you need to be able to parse the spatial geometry of the environment and identify the important things in that environment, and reflections and high contrast shadows make that much more difficult.
This is a really good point and makes me think of games where they have minimized the HUD to being almost nonexistent for “realism” but in the process, it becomes harder to play the game like a game because there aren’t proper markers for where things are. An example is FPS games where “enemies” are not designed to stand out in distinctive ways, so they can, with relative ease, blend in and catch you off guard. This may be somewhat true to RL, but most people are not playing FPS as a war simulator and not giving proper visual cues on where to put your attention just makes things tiring rather than fun IMO.
But IRL your eyes can adjust going from one environment to another. Yet when this is done in games it often just doesn’t translate well, at least for me. I find it very uncomfortable to have to strain to see what is in the darker areas when there is blindingly bright light in some parts of a scene and very little light in others. And when they try to simulate “adjusting to the darkness” when entering, say, a cave, it feels very off-putting and disorienting.
Same here. I suspect part of the reason it doesn’t feel right to me is because in RL, if you are adjusting to lighting differences, you might do stuff like squint, blink, shade your eyes if you’re going into brightness, avoid looking at the sun, wear sunglasses. In a game, so much stuff that we’re doing without even thinking about it in RL just doesn’t exist as POV character behavior, automated or manual. So in such games, instead of perceiving light in a realistic way, you’re having it shoved at you in a way you can’t do anything about that is not how you’d tend to handle it in RL. On top of that, things like “don’t look at the sun” simply don’t apply in a game. You can look at a fake sun in a game because it’s not the same fundamentally as looking at the real sun (which can damage your eyesight if not make you go blind). Things like this are incompatible with “realism” design and it would be stupid if they somehow made it so you could actually go blind from looking at a fake sun in a game.
The immersion/realism obsession gets really up its own ass sometimes and loses sight of what art style is, which is always going to be approximation and choice of perspective, not real life.
I grew up in the era of the MSX keyboard and then the Sega consoles, and while I can appreciate nice graphics…I’m here for the gameplay, and the gameplay has been shelved in favor of graphics; yes I’m saying games on the sega genesis and megadrive were more fun.
I’m not paying attention to the puddles on the floor, I’m not stopping to look at my reflection in a mirror, I’m playing for the gameplay (or story, whichever drew me most to that game in particular). When I customized my current PC, I chose the titan x pascal which at the time was the latest Nvidia had to offer, and today because of ray tracing being shoved into everything, my PC struggles to play games it absolutely should be capable of running.
I don’t need every little smidgen on the screen to look photo-realistic; for God’s sake there are games on steam designed to look like PS2 (PS1?) games and they look AWESOME. Boomer shooters are specifically designed to look akin to the original doom.
I’d be tempted to buy a new graphics card (if it wasn’t priced as much as a brand new PC) but what’s the point? In four or five years they’ll come up with a new gimmick that these current graphics cards won’t be able to handle. Maybe they’ll come up with mustache rustling physics, or realistic crap on the floor your character could stumble from stepping on requiring a graphics card that can render all that floor-based junk.
Ray tracing is such a nonsense new development that’s broken what my graphics card can deal with.
I think it’s cool but also really stupid the way it cannot be used in the high end titles without insane hardware, and it seems like it’s another one of those things that will be forever out of reach while also not being implemented into simpler games where it might actually work without destroying frame rates.
Honestly the way they bake in lighting now is fine though, like I cannot justify this tech if it costs this much resources to render.
Ray tracing looks great when done right, especially when combined with properly calibrated HDR. Gran Turismo 7s replays, photos and out of gameplay scences (and gameplay if you have a PS5 Pro) look incredible thanks to the ray tracing and HDR implementation. On a normal PS5 when you transition to gameplay, you can definitely notice the graphical hit with Ray tracing off, even though it still looks great without it.
Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart is another great ray tracing implementation.
You can’t really do a “ray tracing mod”, true ray traced global illumination requires a whole change in the rendering pipeline. The mods are not really going to be able to do this well, so reflections het turned up to the max to compensate. I also dislike the overdone reflections and everything being super shiny with tonnes of visual effects everywhere, I think it’s a poor/cheap stylistic choice, but ray tracing is a lot more than that when implemented properly. I’m waiting for a naughty dog game to utilise the technology, I think that will look amazing.
You lost me at calling dark souls beautiful haha. Ngl, even dark souls 3 looks kinda trash for the time it released. You know how you remember shitty graphics better than they were because you played it as a kid? DS1 looks like how i remember PS2 graphics lmao.
I also never had a visibility issue with good lighting in games. No more than i do in real life i suppose.
I honestly do like more high fidelity graphics, but don’t care much about realism. The newest nintendo games as well as the latest God of War games are all beautiful even though they take on widely different art styles.
Realistic graphic mods can suck my dick tho’. That shit just looks like shit from ass 100% of the time and i can’t imagine someone actually playing with these mods besides putting them on to show your friends how cool it looks like before uninstallling it again.
You lost me at calling dark souls beautiful haha. Ngl, even dark souls 3 looks kinda trash for the time it released. You know how you remember shitty graphics better than they were because you played it as a kid? DS1 looks like how i remember PS2 graphics lmao.
Not going to argue because it’s subjective and all, but I replay Dark Souls 1 at least once a year, so it’s definitely not just memory. I don’t find it pretty because of the graphical fidelity, which granted is on the low end for a PS3 game but mostly for the framing and good use of vistas. For example, Anor Londo’s models are fairly low poly and the textures are simple, but I appreciate how the game forces you to look at it through flattering angles.
DS3 doesn’t really do much like that due to the level structure (except for Anor Londo again lol), and DS2 is just kinda fugly, but I don’t really like either of those games.
