State of the Art Graphics - But at What Cost?

[Asura]

Same as Dogg Thang, the Xbox 360 wasn't sold to me by better graphics, it was sold with the image of Frank West atop a truck, surrounded by zombies.
Straight away you're wondering how did this happen and how are you going to escape so many enemies?

Yeah, this is the thing. It was a technological leap, but it used that technology to do something which was part-visual, but also hadn't been done before. It offered a geniunely new experience.

I haven't played the new God of War games; I understand they're great, but I've played six titles in that series end-to-end. I'm not sure what the new ones can offer other than a seeming more mature father/son coming-of-age story... Which is absolutely not what I buy a God of War game for.

Maybe this is why I like VR so much. VR feels like the PS1/Saturn era, in that tons of the games are experimental. Hell, many are bad, but even the bad ones can be really interesting.

[Dogg Thang]

I haven't played the new God of War games; I understand they're great, but I've played six titles in that series end-to-end. I'm not sure what the new ones can offer other than a seeming more mature father/son coming-of-age story... Which is absolutely not what I buy a God of War game for.

I realise I'm in the minority here but I played the first of the new God of War games and it was a perfect example of games heading right for the centre now. It felt like the newer batch of Tomb Raiders and so many other games. Yes it looks pretty but it's slower, more complex (not in any good way) and, for me, lost a lot of the fun in the process. There is a similar kind of feel in so many games now and I'm not sure what it is. Star Wars Outlaws has it. The Silent Hill 2 remake has it to a small extent, the older origins preventing it from going too far down that path. All very different games but something in how they look and feel just seems like they're all going towards the same place.

Maybe that's natural too. Play systems and camera systems get refined and devs learn from them so they're all evolving in the same direction. But for me, when it comes to games like TR and GoW, it's not a good thing. But like I say, when it comes to GoW I know I'm very much in the minority.

[fishbowlhead]

I realise I'm in the minority here but I played the first of the new God of War games and it was a perfect example of games heading right for the centre now. It felt like the newer batch of Tomb Raiders and so many other games. Yes it looks pretty but it's slower, more complex (not in any good way) and, for me, lost a lot of the fun in the process. There is a similar kind of feel in so many games now and I'm not sure what it is. Star Wars Outlaws has it. The Silent Hill 2 remake has it to a small extent, the older origins preventing it from going too far down that path. All very different games but something in how they look and feel just seems like they're all going towards the same place.

Maybe that's natural too. Play systems and camera systems get refined and devs learn from them so they're all evolving in the same direction. But for me, when it comes to games like TR and GoW, it's not a good thing. But like I say, when it comes to GoW I know I'm very much in the minority.

As someone who makes stories and animation for a for a living, you owe it too yourself to play through GoW at the least, stunning game on every level.

[wakka]

I realise I'm in the minority here but I played the first of the new God of War games and it was a perfect example of games heading right for the centre now. It felt like the newer batch of Tomb Raiders and so many other games. Yes it looks pretty but it's slower, more complex (not in any good way) and, for me, lost a lot of the fun in the process. There is a similar kind of feel in so many games now and I'm not sure what it is. Star Wars Outlaws has it. The Silent Hill 2 remake has it to a small extent, the older origins preventing it from going too far down that path. All very different games but something in how they look and feel just seems like they're all going towards the same place.

Maybe that's natural too. Play systems and camera systems get refined and devs learn from them so they're all evolving in the same direction. But for me, when it comes to games like TR and GoW, it's not a good thing. But like I say, when it comes to GoW I know I'm very much in the minority.

I think there's an extent to which this is natural and a positive - by god did we have a lot of games that played awfully in the mid-to-late 90s, as developers grappled with 3D for the first time.

At the same time it does tend to feel like there is - notionally at least - a big, thick book of 'best practices' for how games should work that developers of major league software are very unwilling to deviate from.

This applies to the intrinsic mechanics, like how the avatar feels to control and how the camera behaves, and what I would consider the extrinsic - like how it's considered mandatory now that games include what we would once have called 'RPG elements', in the form of upgrades via skill tree.

This makes games with otherwise disparate settings and themes tend to feel pretty similar to one another. Add that to the user experience testing that many high budget games undergo, with the goal of reducing friction and increasing playtime, and you have a recipe for everything starting to feel rather samey. It's almost as if they've come off the same production line and then been dunked in a particular sci fi, post apocalypse or fantasy land skin.

Being totally honest I don't play as many games as I used to and this kind of thing is part of the reason. I do just tend to get a bit bored as I glide through these finely honed experiences. I'd probably like it if I was a kid though, as opposed to frequently falling through walls and floors or getting otherwise stuck in bafflingly designed levels, as was the case in many a less well-crafted PS1 effort.

[eastyy]

I have felt the past number of years they have made the games....then tried to get them to work on the hardware, also performance wise i am seeing games that while there is probably lots of teccy stuff happening behind the scenes based on what i can see...the performance should not be as bad. Ray Tracing though its really dependent on the game but most of the time its either a case of I cannot stand the performance hit or just many times I cannot tell if I like it or not...as if the game has a good lighting system anyway to me it just looks different.

Shader compilations and microstutter is still one of my big bugbears of the past many years

For me though a good art style will be something i usually prefer anyway I find that does not age as badly

[egparadigm]

I was never a graphics whore until Cyberpunk came along.

That video is pretty impressive, especially the inanimate object reflections (cars). I honestly haven’t seen much modern stuff like this. Was thinking I ought to try a newer FPS, not played any for around a decade.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I have literally never heard of this game. How out of touch am I? 😅

[Hirst]

I must be an outlier as I'm not really bothered how detailed anything looks or even if it maintains a solid framerate (it ideally should, but I'm not that bothered). I'm more concerned that things look like somebody cared about making it, especially if it's meant to be a realistic place, because your mind can fill in the gaps.

For example, Shenmue was mentioned up there as a game that had a "graphics jump" and I wouldn't disagree - but the reason I like the look of the game is because the environments have been created with care. You go into a little bar and the objects have quite low polygon counts and low-resolution textures, but the choice/placement of objects and details are really good at making a place feel like it exists, like this one.


This place is very simple in design, but so much detail - the sink and water heater shoved into the corner, some random photos stuck behind the counter, objects strewn over the bar in a way that feels realistic rather than neat and tidy. Bottles are missing from the shelves in a few places suggesting that the place is a "working" environment where things happen rather than a static display. The lighting is gloomy, with a couple of spotlights with light cones that are baked into the object itself. The way the light cones are visible in such a way suggests that it has a smoky atmosphere, which is also alluded to by the ashtray and the extractor fan on the wall. But it feels like a place that might exist, it almost makes me feel cosy.

I'd much rather game designers tried to focus on giving things a sense of place, rather than worrying about how much detail they need to add to each 3D model as I think it's a diminishing returns situation. As an example, I think Gran Turismo 7 looks fantastic on a technical level, but if you pull up on a stage they feel strangely eerie and post-apocalyptic, like you're driving around in some kind of dead world and nothing exists immediately beyond the race circuit you're on. Everything is so neat and perfect, but lifeless and strange, an uncanny valley type thing, it fills me with dread in a way that Nana Karaoke Bar somehow doesn't.

[Neon Ignition]

God help if I tried to find it but I watched a vid on Youtube around a fortnight ago on Ray Tracing in 2024 and since the tech emerged with the 20XX series the vid went through supporting games to compare titles that supported it with RT turned off, working through to highlight all the games where RT made a clear improvement. The list ended with around 3 games that qualified. All too often the pre-baked solution looked very close or in some cases superior due to how the game artists intended the scene to look versus how RT calculated the real time effects. It can be impressive when you see it used correctly and deployed heavily but it's definitely something that far too much fuss was made over. A tool that, by the time it's common place, no-one will be talking about anymore and isn't worth the performance sacrifice.

With DF, at this point they're good at what they do but also starting to play a little into justifying their own existance. As soon as discussion drifts into north of 60fps debate I tune out because it's the same arena as picking something apart about natiev 4K or 8K etc support. Like the graphics discussion, it moves things past the point of real relavance because the benchmark has been met. They need to do it because consoles no longer provide those interesting port variations we had back in the 360/PS3 days so they're pulling for a story that isn't there anymore in most cases. Even the swathe of PS5 Pro coverage has been pretty boring because new hardware isn't even providing the interesting deviations anymore.

Even if games forced 60fps as the new standardised base and abolished 30fps, they'd only be buying themselves a few short years. We're definitely in the iteration over revolution era of gaming and studios really need to diversify rather than stupidly thinking half a billion dollar budgets or live service titles are going to be their Get out of Jail Free card.

[QualityChimp]

FPS should mean fun-per-second.

[Asura]

This place is very simple in design, but so much detail - the sink and water heater shoved into the corner, some random photos stuck behind the counter, objects strewn over the bar in a way that feels realistic rather than neat and tidy. Bottles are missing from the shelves in a few places suggesting that the place is a "working" environment where things happen rather than a static display. The lighting is gloomy, with a couple of spotlights with light cones that are baked into the object itself. The way the light cones are visible in such a way suggests that it has a smoky atmosphere, which is also alluded to by the ashtray and the extractor fan on the wall. But it feels like a place that might exist, it almost makes me feel cosy.

This is one of the reasons that Half Life Alyx excels, which (admittedly) a lot of players don't notice; there's tons of environmental storytelling in that game.

Like I recall, at one point, there's an office you go through. If you stop and look around, you can see some of the drawers are open, papers are scattered, the chair is pushed over at the desk. There's enough there for you to conceive that a person was sitting at the desk, interrupted from the door, the desk person rifled through drawers to find a weapon, but was ultimately dragged out of the room. Additionally, throughout the game you find a lot of bottles; then at one point you make your way through a warehouse that, it turns out, is a Vodka distillery, presumably a previously big employer for the area and potentially explaining the bottles. Neither of these things are of any real importance to the game, but the weight of so many of them makes a huge difference.

This is why I raise an eyebrow when you have people suggesting the recent Metro game or Batman: Arkham Shadow is "the new Alyx" in VR gaming, because I just can't help but feel that anyone who says this doesn't really grasp all the things Alyx did. Those games are fantastic, it's not a criticism to say they're not on Alyx's level; Alyx can only be like that because Valve spent time and money that no-one else could really conscience; most games could be much better with 4x the budget!

[QualityChimp]

Every time someone mentions HL: Alyx, it reminds me of Brad playing it and bemoaning the limited inventory, however the physics engine was so good that he was putting surplus grenades in a crate and walking around with a crowbar and his grenade crate!

[fishbowlhead]

Every time someone mentions HL: Alyx, it reminds me of Brad playing it and bemoaning the limited inventory, however the physics engine was so good that he was putting surplus grenades in a crate and walking around with a crowbar and his grenade crate!

If I get the chance to play this I’ll gladly take the hit on motion sickness for the rest of the day, just for shenanigans like this.

[Asura]

Every time someone mentions HL: Alyx, it reminds me of Brad playing it and bemoaning the limited inventory, however the physics engine was so good that he was putting surplus grenades in a crate and walking around with a crowbar and his grenade crate!

Yeah, that was one of the high points - realising that you could only carry ~2 grenades in your inventory, but if you just carried a bucket, you could carry a bunch of them