I skipped the text and looked at the images and was unable to understand if they were supposed to be bad or good examples. I liked them. Then k read through the text and learned that they are supposed to be bad examples.
But why though? I suspect that either I am not good at this kind of thing, or this is a purist thing, like „don’t put pineapples on pizza because they don’t do that in Italy“.
I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts.
I totally agree. The example pictures in the article look fine.
I don't know what the author wants, but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything, and the dialog is quiet mumbling and the sound effects are ear-shattering. Perhaps there's an equivalent to that in games.
I can see why people wouldn't like them - they're all oversaturated and most of them go for the cheesy "everything is teal and orange" or "everything is piss yellow" gradings. There's a quote I heard in a photography tutorial once that goes something like "once you've moved all the sliders to what you want, move them back 50%", and games basically don't that.
But the biggest problem with the screenshots is they literally aren't HDR. So how can we judge their HDR?
>I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts.
In photography and cinematography contrast and color curves are near ubiquitously modified artistically to evoke a certain feeling. So even without 3D renderings added colors are adjusted for aesthetic over raw realism.
Real life has a lot of sensations that games don't. A rainy/foggy day might look boring, but it feels nice to be out in (ideally). Well, that and computer audio is/can be about as good as humans can perceive, but displays are nowhere near it.
So both of these mean you have to jack up the sensation so people can feel something.
From what I understood is that these are supposedly bad because they look like video games instead of photographs. Not sure what the problem with that is though. I'm fine with video games looking like video games.
I also thought that, but then I scrolled down to the Breath of the Wild shot and got (part of) it: BotW has an awesomely rendered sky, whereas the CoD and to a lesser extent HZD ones have a desaturated, largely overexposed mess (despite all my affection for HZD). The Smaug shot is flawed in a similar manner.
And the photography comparison does come to mind immediately, because that kind of thing is in fact what you’ll get from a DSLR on a sunny day if you don’t know what you’re doing, and to some extent from a film camera too (I’m speaking about the sky only—the HZD shot has much too large a dynamic range to capture on a real camera without compositing). Photographers have a huge bags of tricks to deal with the problem, from taking photos in early morning light to darkening parts of a shot with a graduated ND filter to underexposing and fixing it up in post (before digital, that meant chemistry).
I think it is fair to hold games to this standard. It’s not that they have to look like photos. It’s that they shouldn’t have flaws in their look that have been recognized and solved for photos for more than a century.
I believe the author, but I'd also have liked some "before/after" comparisons, where the sane scene is shown with the actual, "bad" tone map and a fixed one.
You can get a bit of a feel for what the author meant though if you compare them with the "good" examples further below, in particular the Zelda one.
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.
Photorealism is a bad idea if your movement engine isn't good enough to handle the character walking around on uneven terrain. For racing games or flight simulators or such it is less of a problem, but seeing a regular person being absolutely flummoxed by a knee-high wall is massively immersion breaking.
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'.
> For racing games or flight simulators or such it is less of a problem,
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.
I think it's like porn. Not sure about you guys, but for me soft-core always looks better than HD hardcore. Soft-core encourages imagination and conveniently covers any body part that is a bit far from perfect.
And that's why I always think ladies who wear just enough clothes are way more sexy than nude ladies.
This is true in Wukong too, which is otherwise a very good-looking game. There are various points where rocks and scaffolds look just as climbable as those in the game area, yet the game engine places an invisible wall in your way. It breaks immersion instantly.
A large section of the gaming public sees photo-realistic games as serious, and prefers them for high-budget games. It's a rat race for devs though - its just incredibly expensive to create high quality models, textures, maps.
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.
I think chasing photorealism also hurts the modding community, which hurts the players. No ordinary modding community could push out photorealistic contents in a realistic span of time. I think that's why we are seeing less and less mods nowadays comparing to the late 90s and early 2000s.
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.
> In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens.
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.
Let's see how GTA VI will change this and the industry.
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.
We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. 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. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me .
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.
I find this an interesting argument. I wonder if it's a generational thing.
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.
I’d argue that immersion has little to do with graphics, even for FPS. Actually I had more immersion in some text adventure games than in some AAA games — and not out of nostalgia because I never played the said text adventure games before.
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.
I bought cyberpunk when it released, i may have even pre-ordered, i don't remember. I played about 20 minutes after the title drop, you know the one. It was buggy, and didn't really look that good to me, on my samsung 4k monitor.
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
You're not alone, Cyberpunk's blend of near-future with realism whilst maintaining a clear art style that is not total realism is very immersive. I have spent countless hours wandering around Night City, not even playing the main gameplay.
There's something about the image quality of Cyberpunk that looks off to me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe the hair rendering? Shadowing?
It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.
I think, like polygon count, resolution, FPS, etc, realism is very easy to objectively assess and compare even with no artistic background, which makes it a target both for gamers (who want to explain why they like a game, or debate which game is better) and studios who want something they can point to.
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 totally agree with your last paragraph except to add: there has actually been some great advances in interaction, but people vote with their playtime, and I think the reality is that the "median gamer" is totally content with WASD + mouse/the typical controller thumbstick movement. In the same way that so many are content that many game mechanics boil down to combat and health bars.
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.
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.
There are tens (if not hundreds) of indie and B-games that offer the same experience as most current Nintendo titles. Nintendo is doing well more because of nostalgia - it's the parents buying those consoles for their kids because they have very fond memories with Nintendo from their own childhoods.
This. To me one of the reasons why Coffee Stain Studios is such a successful publisher is that its games typically don't push for visual realism for the sake of it (hardly possible anyway when they feature dwarves, alien species and the like).
My take is that video game devs learn to aspire to cinema, since they're both making "entertainment art that exists on a screen" and cinema is more widely accepted as art among the intelligentsia (not that I agree).
I've wondered whether photorealism creates its own demand. Players spend hours in high-realism game worlds, their eyes adjust, and game worlds from ten years ago suddenly feel wrong; not just old-fashioned, but fake.
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 agree it doesn't benefit most games, but it's still genuinely amazing to see sometimes.
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.
Completely agree. People lament the death of the RTS genre for all kinds of reasons but I think the biggest one was the early-2000s switch to 3D. Performance considerations meant you have way fewer units. The only exception was that Supreme Commander was somehow able to get around this, but suffered heavily from the second big problem with 3D RTSes: the tiny unit models are so much harder to tell apart in 3D compared to 2D.
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.
How do you understand other human desires? That is, what is different about the desire to match reality in other mediums is different from other more understandable desires?
For the same reason it was searched for in painting for so long, and for the same reason movies and plays often meticulously recreate (or film in) real locales and use period-appropriate attire: people, by and large, love looking at reality way more than stylized images.
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.
This is [...] a series examining techniques used in game graphics and how those techniques fail to deliver a visually appealing end result
All I see is opinions though. And the internet is full of them. You just have to Google "why does this game look so ...". At least if the author had compared the search stats of "good/bad/beautiful/washed out" it would've carried some weight.
The GTA 5 screenshot is a terrible example. It looks like a cheap, dead, video game environment, reminding me how far we've come.
In my experience Elden Ring looks better when you turn the graphics quality down. Baldur's Gate isn't particularly ugly for a '98 game.
And I agree that it would be nice to have some positive examples. I think there were a bunch of SNES games which did it well, but that may just be nostalgia.
I truly don’t understand the author’s opinions about contrast here. The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast.
No other image here comes anywhere even close, definitely not Zelda nor GTA5.
Personally I think the whole problem with the first 5 images is that they don’t have enough contrast, and they have too much detail. The color handling isn’t the only reason they don’t look realistic, but making sure every single pixel’s nicely exposed and that nothing gets too dark or too bright is allowing to let all the CG fakeness show through. One of the reasons the RE7 image looks better is you can’t clearly see every single thing in the image.
If you take photographs outside and the sun is in the shot, you will absolutely get some blown out white and some foreground blacks, and that’s realism. The CG here is trying too hard to squeeze all the color into the visible range. To my eyes, it’s too flat and too low contrast, not too high contrast.
One problem with photorealism is a lot of players are on bad displays, or in bad viewing environments. Games often take this into account in their visual direction so that they will be more legible in these different environments. It used to be even worse when designing a game for say the Gameboy Advance or original Nintendo DS where you knew the screen wasn't backlit or wasn't particularly bright so your images needed to be bright and colorful. Even now, a Nintendo Switch game might be played on the bus.
For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.
and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones.
I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.
The zelda screenshot he uses as an example of how good things look without HDR, looks terrible to me. It is all washed out with brightness and bloom, and all the shadows in the landscape that in reality would almolst be black, are very light grey.
For me games being too dark and not being able to see anything is a pet peeve. I can see the point in a horror game, but I will set the gamma or turn up the brightness if it makes the game hard to play.
Oh I agree. The art director needs to be exposing the important gameplay elements to be visible. That doesn’t mean they should avoid blacks for everything though, and that’s what all images except the RE7 image are doing.
Out of my mind, the destiny 2 is the biggest offender of this category. If I can't see shit at all, how does the feeling artist trying to convince even matter? I will just turn the brightness in graphic card setting all the way up. Because the cap in in game setting is insanely low.
Plus isn't not even a horror game. Come on, you are a shooter game. How does a shooter game that you can't see anything even make sense?
You're arguing that game engines should imitate photographic cameras, but they should imitate our eyes, which will never blow out whites outside in the sun.
Our eyes absolutely blow out whites in the sun. Doubly so when looking at the sun or even reflections immediately after being in the dark for a while, and when looking at bright that is very near dark in your visual field.
I’m not necessarily arguing games should imitate cameras, I really only think over-compressing the dynamic range is bad, and I don’t understand why the author is arguing for that.
> The RE7 image is the only one here that looks ‘realistic’, and at a glance could be mistaken for a photograph, and he says it’s got way too much contrast.
It looks like a cheap film camera or a home video screenshot. So it gives off a feeling of nostalgia to a sufficiently old person, but this is also the kind of photo you'd reject as a pro, because it's totally overexposed.
I found this video to visualise what tone mapping is trying to achieve, and why "photorealism" is hard to achieve in computer graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AT7H4GGrA
And I indirectly taught me how to use the exposure feature in my iPhone camera (when you tap a point in the picture). It's so that you choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process, using your eyes which have a much greater dynamic range than a CCD sensor. TIL.
> the exposure feature in my iPhone camera…choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process
No, it uses that to set the physical exposure via the shutter speed and ISO (iPhones have a fixed aperture, so that cannot be changed). It literally says this in the video you linked. This is not tone mapping. Tone mapping in a way may also happen afterwards to convert from the wider dynamic range of the sensor if the output format has a more limited dynamic range.
I've heard a good point that our eyes have, in fact, a boring 1:100 range of brightness. Eyes can rapidly adjust, but the real game changer is our ability to create an image in our video memory, which has an unlimited brightness range. Eyes give us maybe a 2d uint8 framebuffer, but our mind creates and updates a float32 3d buffer. This is why this experience cannot be reproduced on a screen.
I feel like this is very much a personal preference thing.
They even called out Horizon Zero Dawn for looking very bad, and Zelda for looking very good.. while in my opinion the exact opposite is true.
I do see the point of the author: HZD goes for a "realistic", high-fidelity 3D fantasy world, yet the lighting makes no sense in physical terms. The contrast and brightness shown in the picture are all over the place, and can only be an artifact of visualising a world through a computer screen which has a very limited dynamic range - it is immersion-breaking. The Resident Evil 7 picture below looks much better. The video I linked in another comment explains why: in the physical world, the stronger the light, the more washed-out the colour will become. HZD is a saturated, high-contrast mess with too much compression in the low light, because of a bad colour mapper in their pipeline.
One can claim HZD's look is an "artistic choice" and that's inarguable, but the author believes it's simply not enough attention to the tone mapping process, which is a very complicated topic that's not usually taken seriously in game dev compared to film production.
To be fair - if I remember the location correctly - that screenshot is somewhat misleading because it's camera position is from the inside of a large ruin, with the ceiling and right wall of the "cave entrance" being just outside the frame.
I think with enough exposure to the overdone contrast ratios, you start to get tired of it. It sacrifices a lot of clarity.
I agree it does look good in some cases, for example I enjoy the look of Battlefield 1 a lot, but when playing it I often noticed I had issues seeing detail in darker areas.
One game that actually puts a lot of effort into this is X-plane. They use physics based rendering and with recent updates they have done quite a bit of work on this (clouds, atmosphere, natural looking colors and shadows, HDR, etc.
There's a stark contrast here with MS Flight Simulator which looks great but maybe a bit too pretty. It's certainly very pleasing to look at but not necessarily realistic.
One thing with flying is that visibility isn't necessarily that good and a big part of using flight simulators professionally is actually learning to fly when the visibility is absolutely terrible. What's the relevance of scenery if visibility is at the legal minimums? You see the ground shortly before you land, a few feet in front of you.
And even under better conditions, things are hazy and flat (both in color and depth). A crisp, high contrast, saturated view is pretty but not what a pilot deals with. A real problem for pilots is actually spotting where the airport is. Which is surprisingly hard even when the weather is nice and sunny.
An interesting HDR challenge with cockpits is that the light level inside and outside are miles apart. When flying in the real world, your eyes compensate for this when you focus on the instruments or look outside. But technically any screenshot that features a bright outside and clearly legible instruments at the same time is not very realistic but also kind of necessary. You need to do some HDR trickery to make that work. Poor readability of instruments is something X-plane addressed in one of their recent updates. It was technically correct but not that readable.
X-plane rendering has made some big improvements with all this during the v12 release over the last three years.
Overuse of reflective surfaces are the same kind of fad we saw with bloom in the
mid 2000s and early 2010s. Now that SSR everywhere is technicaly feasible gamedevs want to use them everywhere. I think this started 5-10 years ago and RTX has renewed the meme, unfortunately.
Specular highlights are cheap (frame time and artist time) and beautiful when done right, so everyone tries to do them and they get overcooked.
There is a secondary problem in big budget games where modeling work gets farmed out leading to selection for "what looks good in the preview pic." In the preview pic, the asset artist gets to choose background/scene/lighting, and it's an easy trick to choose them to make the specular highlights pop. The person doing integration buys the asset, drops it in wildly different background/scene/lighting, and now the specular highlights are overcooked because the final scene wasn't chosen for the specific purpose of leveraging specular highlights.
"Mann sprayed down the city’s nocturnal streets with tens of thousands of gallons of water, so that they took on an unreal, painterly glow." - New York Times
Recently, some of it seems to be just to highlight raytracing hardware. Cyberpunk uses a lot of metal reflective surfaces to give a futuristic/tech vibe. But that's one sort of futurism. There'll be plenty of use of natural stone, wood, and tile far far into the future.
The common wisdom is that it's more difficult to make sunny and dry environments look pretty than it is overcast and wet ones. I tend to agree with this based on the end results I've seen over the many years.
That's what I used to think too.. but Spec Ops: The Line is entirely based in desert, even has a shot of sarin horror and while 'pretty' isn't the word I'd use, it is stunning.
It is amusing now that you point it out. There are always trends that come and go in these large scale industrial artforms. As others point out in this case likely a response to technical advancements and desire to emphasize those. Another example that would come to mind here is is the orangey-sunlit ears that seemed to show up everywhere to show off subsurface scattering.
Thinking back - films also are always doing some new exciting thing all at once. That wild colored lighting aesthetic of the past decade comes to mind. That's a result of refined color correction software and awesome low-cost LED lights. Or drone shots. So many drone shots.
It's usually a group-think phenomenon where everyone was previously unable to do something and now they can and everyone wants to try it. And then there are successes and management points at those and yells 'we want that, do that!', and distribution follows, and if becomes mandatory. Until everyone is rolling their eyes and excited about another new thing.
It's a silly phenomenon when you think about it - any true artist-director would likely push back on that with a coherent vision.
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But why though? I suspect that either I am not good at this kind of thing, or this is a purist thing, like „don’t put pineapples on pizza because they don’t do that in Italy“.
I don’t want games to look realistic. A rainy day outside looks gray and drab, there is nothing wrong with rainy days in games not looking like the real thing, but awesome and full of contrasts.
I don't know what the author wants, but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything, and the dialog is quiet mumbling and the sound effects are ear-shattering. Perhaps there's an equivalent to that in games.
But the biggest problem with the screenshots is they literally aren't HDR. So how can we judge their HDR?
If only they had written an article about what they wanted...
> but perhaps it's some kind of industry insider view similar to where "true artists' make movies that are so dark you can't see anything
Nope, it's not that.
In photography and cinematography contrast and color curves are near ubiquitously modified artistically to evoke a certain feeling. So even without 3D renderings added colors are adjusted for aesthetic over raw realism.
So both of these mean you have to jack up the sensation so people can feel something.
And the photography comparison does come to mind immediately, because that kind of thing is in fact what you’ll get from a DSLR on a sunny day if you don’t know what you’re doing, and to some extent from a film camera too (I’m speaking about the sky only—the HZD shot has much too large a dynamic range to capture on a real camera without compositing). Photographers have a huge bags of tricks to deal with the problem, from taking photos in early morning light to darkening parts of a shot with a graduated ND filter to underexposing and fixing it up in post (before digital, that meant chemistry).
I think it is fair to hold games to this standard. It’s not that they have to look like photos. It’s that they shouldn’t have flaws in their look that have been recognized and solved for photos for more than a century.
You can get a bit of a feel for what the author meant though if you compare them with the "good" examples further below, in particular the Zelda one.
They look fine to me and good, these aren’t films or photos, and you’ll need to convince me that they _should_ look like them.
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'.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.
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.
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"
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".
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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.
All I see is opinions though. And the internet is full of them. You just have to Google "why does this game look so ...". At least if the author had compared the search stats of "good/bad/beautiful/washed out" it would've carried some weight.
The GTA 5 screenshot is a terrible example. It looks like a cheap, dead, video game environment, reminding me how far we've come.
And we need some examples of good, cinematic, artful tone mapping, like any scene of a Hollywood movie set in Mexico...
That's not tone mapping, but color grading
And I agree that it would be nice to have some positive examples. I think there were a bunch of SNES games which did it well, but that may just be nostalgia.
No other image here comes anywhere even close, definitely not Zelda nor GTA5.
Personally I think the whole problem with the first 5 images is that they don’t have enough contrast, and they have too much detail. The color handling isn’t the only reason they don’t look realistic, but making sure every single pixel’s nicely exposed and that nothing gets too dark or too bright is allowing to let all the CG fakeness show through. One of the reasons the RE7 image looks better is you can’t clearly see every single thing in the image.
If you take photographs outside and the sun is in the shot, you will absolutely get some blown out white and some foreground blacks, and that’s realism. The CG here is trying too hard to squeeze all the color into the visible range. To my eyes, it’s too flat and too low contrast, not too high contrast.
For big budget games the solution for this is typically to have brightness calibration when the game first boots up, but the game itself still needs to be designed adaptively so that it's not Too Dark or Too Bright at critical points, otherwise the playability of the title is jeopardized. This runs counter to a goal of photorealism.
https://safebooru.org/index.php?page=post&s=view&id=1821741
and found they did really well because the art was designed to look good on bad screens and poor viewing conditions. I think of it in terms of Ansel Adam's Zone theory in that the ideal image is (1) legible if you quantize it to 11 tones of grey (looks OK printed in the newspaper), but (2) has meaningful detail in most or all of those zones.
I'm kinda disappointed that the Nintendo 3DS version didn't use the stereo effects but they would have had to decided if her hair forms a sheet or a cone.
The zelda screenshot he uses as an example of how good things look without HDR, looks terrible to me. It is all washed out with brightness and bloom, and all the shadows in the landscape that in reality would almolst be black, are very light grey.
Plus isn't not even a horror game. Come on, you are a shooter game. How does a shooter game that you can't see anything even make sense?
I’m not necessarily arguing games should imitate cameras, I really only think over-compressing the dynamic range is bad, and I don’t understand why the author is arguing for that.
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It looks like a cheap film camera or a home video screenshot. So it gives off a feeling of nostalgia to a sufficiently old person, but this is also the kind of photo you'd reject as a pro, because it's totally overexposed.
And I indirectly taught me how to use the exposure feature in my iPhone camera (when you tap a point in the picture). It's so that you choose the "middle gray" point of the picture for the tone mapping process, using your eyes which have a much greater dynamic range than a CCD sensor. TIL.
No, it uses that to set the physical exposure via the shutter speed and ISO (iPhones have a fixed aperture, so that cannot be changed). It literally says this in the video you linked. This is not tone mapping. Tone mapping in a way may also happen afterwards to convert from the wider dynamic range of the sensor if the output format has a more limited dynamic range.
One can claim HZD's look is an "artistic choice" and that's inarguable, but the author believes it's simply not enough attention to the tone mapping process, which is a very complicated topic that's not usually taken seriously in game dev compared to film production.
There's a stark contrast here with MS Flight Simulator which looks great but maybe a bit too pretty. It's certainly very pleasing to look at but not necessarily realistic.
One thing with flying is that visibility isn't necessarily that good and a big part of using flight simulators professionally is actually learning to fly when the visibility is absolutely terrible. What's the relevance of scenery if visibility is at the legal minimums? You see the ground shortly before you land, a few feet in front of you.
And even under better conditions, things are hazy and flat (both in color and depth). A crisp, high contrast, saturated view is pretty but not what a pilot deals with. A real problem for pilots is actually spotting where the airport is. Which is surprisingly hard even when the weather is nice and sunny.
An interesting HDR challenge with cockpits is that the light level inside and outside are miles apart. When flying in the real world, your eyes compensate for this when you focus on the instruments or look outside. But technically any screenshot that features a bright outside and clearly legible instruments at the same time is not very realistic but also kind of necessary. You need to do some HDR trickery to make that work. Poor readability of instruments is something X-plane addressed in one of their recent updates. It was technically correct but not that readable.
X-plane rendering has made some big improvements with all this during the v12 release over the last three years.
If it is an attempt at realism, reality is not constantly shiny and wet.
If it a subjective artistic choice, it is objectively wrong and ugly.
Is there an expectation that everything look shiny and wet to make it seem more "dynamic"?
Is it an artists' meme, like the Wilhelm Scream in cinematic sound design?
There is a secondary problem in big budget games where modeling work gets farmed out leading to selection for "what looks good in the preview pic." In the preview pic, the asset artist gets to choose background/scene/lighting, and it's an easy trick to choose them to make the specular highlights pop. The person doing integration buys the asset, drops it in wildly different background/scene/lighting, and now the specular highlights are overcooked because the final scene wasn't chosen for the specific purpose of leveraging specular highlights.
tl;dr artists ship the org chart too
"Mann sprayed down the city’s nocturnal streets with tens of thousands of gallons of water, so that they took on an unreal, painterly glow." - New York Times
Thinking back - films also are always doing some new exciting thing all at once. That wild colored lighting aesthetic of the past decade comes to mind. That's a result of refined color correction software and awesome low-cost LED lights. Or drone shots. So many drone shots.
It's usually a group-think phenomenon where everyone was previously unable to do something and now they can and everyone wants to try it. And then there are successes and management points at those and yells 'we want that, do that!', and distribution follows, and if becomes mandatory. Until everyone is rolling their eyes and excited about another new thing.
It's a silly phenomenon when you think about it - any true artist-director would likely push back on that with a coherent vision.