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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

I've always said (as a joke) that all game developers must have bad eyesight and dirty glasses.

Everything is blurry, you can't see far, you get dirt over your vision and there are glares and lens-flares all over.

What's worst is that this is done on purpose and on almost all the games. They must think that this is what real life look like.

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I rarely play games but the most recent game I played was Alien: Isolation. It had been quite a while since I played a game before that so I was surprised to see a lot of these things on by default. Specifically, chromatic aberration. Why the hell would anyone add in a setting for that? I get that they were going for the Super8/VHS type of look but it's just really distracting. I forgot what the other settings were but I turned off a lot of those junk visual effects and then things looked beautiful.

I also can't stand chromatic aberration in games - especially because it's so freakishly exaggerated compared to actual CA you would experience with old video/photo gear.

A lens that completely separates color channels is defective. It was defective in 1950 and it's defective today, so unless your goal was to replicate the look of hopelessly broken hardware, it's in no way "vintage".

Which I think goes more generally into my issue with game graphics - the taking of interesting effects (depth of field, chromatic aberration, lens flares, etc) and cranking it up to 11 for its own sake.

Epic added chromatic aberation to the new Unreal Tournament at some point and the mob started sharpening their pitchforks. The reason given afterwards was that they think it’s important to break the “sterile” cg look by roughening the image slightly. I can see their point, games are at the point where they look “photoreal”, but not like a photo. I find the almost-but-not-quite realism jarring, personally, I even prefer playing older games usually because of it. so I can understand why devs try all kinds of tricks to alleviate it.

They do this in many action movies (especially Michael Bay) as well. They believe the audience prefers these over-the-top effects. Based off the revenue of entire film franchises with millions of people returning for sequels of more of the same, I think they nailed what consumers want?

In the past draw distances were much worse. But those restrictions spurred creativity. For example, the miserable draw distance of the PlayStation 1 resulted in the developers of Silent Hill to hide faraway rendering with a thick fog, which soon became an iconic theme for all Silent Hill games, even as the hardware far surpassed the need to keep it.

Tons of games in that era had dense fog for that reason.

Yes but in silent hill they gave a reason for it as opposed to just being something the player was supposed to ignore. They took the limitation and used it in world.

The first thing I turn off in most games is Bloom. I actually do have glasses and the bloom effect in most games just looks like my glasses are greasy, no thanks.

Also, AA is another thing I generally turn off. It gives quite a performance boost and the resolution these days is high enough that I'm not bothered by it.

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