One big issue I never understood is why do we need photorealism in games at all. They seem to benefit card manufacturers and graphic programmers, but other than that I feel it has nothing to do — and in fact may have negative impact on game quality.
It's something I really noticed when playing Disaster Report 4, where the people look amazingly realistic but some restrictions are clearly just 'developers didn't make this bit walkable'.
While also expecting you to go around searching for hidden goodies nd secret paths.
I swear, the invisible walls are the only thing pushing it to a 9/10 from a 10/10 for me.
Cars are also easier to make photorealistic. Less uncanny valley effect, lots of flat shiny surfaces.
What absolutely breaks immersion for me in most AAA car games is the absolute lack of crash, scratch, and dirt mechanics. Cars racing around the track for 2 hours don’t look like showroom pieces! Make ‘em dirty darn it. And when I crash into a wall …
I’m really excited to try Wreckfest 2 when I get around to it. Arcade-ish driving, not super photorealistic, they put it all on realistic soft body collision physics instead.
And granted this was an amateur race day, just weekenders having a good time, but it makes sense when you think about it: if the body panels aren't like falling off and are just a bit beat up... why replace them? Especially on some of these cars (late model Corvettes and Mustangs) they don't come cheap at all, and they'll require refinishing and you have to do your livery over again too.
Like a hockey player doesn't buy a new helmet every time they get hit, they/the team would be broke before the season was out.
And that's why I always think ladies who wear just enough clothes are way more sexy than nude ladies.
Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone.
I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum, in every way, because they also targeted last-gen consoles. I'm thinking in particular of the PS5s incredibly fast IO engine with specialized decompression hardware. In a game like Rachet and Clank: A Rift Apart, that hardware is used to jump you through multiple worlds incredibly quickly, loading a miraculous amount of assets. In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens.
And also the general clunkiness of the animations, the way there's only like two or three body shapes that everyone conforms to - these things would go farther in creating a living/breathing world, in the visual realm.
In other realms, the way you can't talk to everyone or go into every building is a bit of a bummer.
For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time that the projects never got finished.
In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year 2005.
I personally like Cyberpunk's 2077 style, it looks great maxed out with HDR. Yes, the models aren't the best, but the overall look/vibe is spectacular at times.
Cyberpunk has vanishingly few elevators. While it may be a loading hide in some spots, it's certainly not indicative of the game which otherwise has ~zero loading screens as you free roam the city including going in & out of highly detailed buildings and environments.
> I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum
I'm not sure how you can reach this conclusion to be honest. Cyberpunk 2077 continues to be the poster child of cutting edge effects - there's a reason Nvidia is constantly using it for every new rendering tech they come out with.
Cyberpunk is certainly an achievement for technical graphics - fog, light, reflections etc. These are all enhanced with cutting-edge hardware.
What I'm trying to say is that we're quite far along in one visual axis, but for the whole experience to be amazing, we have a lot of work to do in other axes. Clunky character animations and body shapes take away from the amazing fidelity we get with light/fog, etc.
The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in the future. Zelda can't pull that off with me, despite being a great game from other perspectives.
This is one reason, I believe, why some people can't stand animated cartoons. I like them but I know many people who won't even consider watching animation.
If we define immersion as "your vision focuses on what's inside the screen and you ignore the world around the screen, and you mostly ignore that your control of the player character is through a keyboard and mouse", then I've experienced immersion with every first person game ever, including Minecraft. I never considered that some people might need photorealism for that at all. There was another commenter that mentioned being unable to walk over a short wall due to character controller limitations as being immersion-breaking. I agree this is annoying but the qualia of it is more like a physical confusion rather than being something that actually breaks my experience of the game.
I'm also thinking this might be related to why I find VR to be, while very cool, not some revolutionary new technology that will fundamentally change the world.
VR despite its limitations is the one thing I’ve ever achieved “presence” in, as in feeling if for a brief moment, I was actually there.
Elite dangerous, OLED Unit, HOTAS. For a brief moment in time my brain believed it was in the cockpit of a spaceship.
Most releveant to this comment thread however was the fact that the graphics were very crude and not in a good way. I absolutely dispute the claim that realism equals (immersion/presence - I'm not getting involved in the debate about the distinction between the two)
I’d agree that certain degree of graphics helps with immersion, but photorealistic graphics only offers cheap immersion which turns off the immersion centre in the brain — Ok this is just my babble so 100% guess.
(edited to clarify that I'm not laboring under the misapprehension that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't a AAA game)
Was it this one? https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015464/Attention-Not-Immersio...
It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.
It really feels like they put so much work into how everything looks in the primary and secondary stories.
i can agree though that just "jobbing" it looks more like a run-of-the-mill shooter, though.
I then played it again, on the same monitor, last year, and i was pleased with the gameplay, but again, i didn't find anything that remarkable about the overall graphics. the fidelity was great, especially at distance, due to 4k.
I'm 50 hours deep in literally as i type this (about to launch the game), and this time, this time it is completely different. I have an LG 2k HDR screen with "Smart HDR" and i finally - finally - get it. Your eyes have to adjust just like in real life, to go from dark indoors to bright outdoors. you can see tail-lights and headlights in the mountains of NPCs driving around. lasers sweeping you are menacing.
Even fallout 4, which is the first game i played in 4k 10 years ago, looks easily 10 times better in HDR. And i only have the "vanilla+" mod set, 5GB of mods, not the 105GB modset.
I coined the phrase 4 or 5 years ago, that HDR stood for: Hot Damn, Reds! and really, reds are still my least favorite part, they burn to deeply, but from watching several movies on an HDR 4k TV and being real unimpressed, to just these two games, my entire viewpoint has drastically changed.
I didn't know you could put arbitrary people into photo mode in CP2077, and also pose them and move them around, so i was just entering photo mode as best i could and lighting and fiddling with the curves; however, these all took over 4 seconds to "render" to the final image, which i found interesting: https://imgur.com/a/DTesuhF
This is a blanket statement I would disagree with.
> Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them
I can't disagree with a statement about personal preference.
So which is it?
IMO it leads to really stilted experiences, like where now you have some photo realistic person with their foot hovering slightly in space, or all that but you still see leaves clipping through eachother, or the unanny valley of a super realistic human whose eyes have a robotic lock on your face, etc.
Physical interaction with game worlds (wasd and a single pivot, or maybe a joystick and a couple buttons) hasn't increased in depth in 20 years which only emphasizes the disjointedness.
I am personally not content with that and I explore all I can, and am trying to make games that skirt the trends a little bit.
But that stark contrast between visual fidelity but a lack of interactivity has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. You can even do so much more with just mouse and keyboard interactions, but I think it's overshadowed by the much lower risk visual fidelity goals.
Their hardware is underpowered, games look like cheap cartoons, but the effort spent into gameplay more than compensates.
Nintendo games don't look like cheap cartoons at all. They are absolutely not photorealistic but they do put a lot of work on the aesthetics/art and it's most of the time relly impressive once you take the hardware limitations into account.
Mario 64 ran on the same console that was known for its 3D blur.
Mario Galaxy 1&2 (which are still totally modern in terms of aesthetics) ran on what was basically an overclocked gamecube.
Mario Kart 8 which is still more beautiful than a lot of modern games ran on the Switch, which is itself based on a 2015 mid-range smartphone hardware.
I like my indie games, but not many are putting out what Nintendo is.
I mean it’s all subjective though.
I considered, and passed on, the other consoles.
Nintendo is playing a different game than other console/game makers (excuse the pun), IMHO.
Did we play the same game? Some of the best lore-building and environmental theming around, paired with some cool mechanics?
Sure, the combat got repetitive but this was hardly something to "just sell GPUs"
Crysis' system requirements at launch were so far above what most people had that I'll give you that. Control wasn't that way at all.
> Some games are sold just so the end user can enjoy exercising their new GPU and monitor.
Being used “for benchmarking” and “being sold just” for that purpose are two very different things.
It was a good looking game at the time, but remember it originally came out on PS4/Xbox One and that version did NOT have raytracing.
The lore was annoying to listen to; whenever I wanted to listen to an audio log, I had to stop playing the game and watch the exact same video of a man smoking and being mysterious.
The cool game mechanics were basically just the gravity gun from Half Life 2, which came out over 20 years ago.
It did have some cool environmental set pieces, but overall I just found the game too pretentious for something that was basically a rip off of the SCP wiki.
This is also true for non-photorealistic 3D games. They benefit from high-tech effects like outline shaders, sharp shadows, anti-aliasing and LoD blending - but all of that tech is improving over time, so older efforts don't look quite right any more, and today's efforts won't look quite right in 2045.
When a game developer decides to step off this treadmill, they usually make a retro game. I'd like to see more deliberately low-tech games which aren't retro games. If modern players think your game looks good on downlevel hardware, then it will continue to look good as hardware continues to improve - I think this is one reason why Nintendo games have so much staying power.
This has been the norm in 2D game development for ages, but it's much more difficult in 3D. For example, if the player is ever allowed to step outdoors, you'll struggle to meet modern expectations for draw distance and pop-in - and even if your game manages to have cutting-edge draw distance for 2025, who can say whether future players will still find it convincing? The solution is to only put things in the camera frustum when you know you can draw them with full fidelity; everything in the game needs to look as good as it's ever going to look.
I suspect part of the challenge with making a hit game with last-gen graphics (like Breath of the Wild) is that you need actual artists to make it look good.
The RTS switch to 3D was a mistake and I think RTSes will continue to fail until their developers realize what actually makes them fun is actively hindered by this technology.
Because WOW factor sells, specially if it's a new ip. You can see most trailers full of comments "this looks bad".
There are exceptions, but the general public will almost always prefer a photo-realistic renaissance painting to a Picasso portrait, a lavish period piece like Titanic to an experimental set design like Dogville.