Really? Cause I don’t know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
I would say GoW and SotC at least take realism as inspiration, but aren’t realistic. They’re like an idealized version of realism. They’re detailed, but they’re absolutely stylized. SotC landscapes, for example, look more like paintings you’d see rather than places you’d see in real life.
Realism is a bad goal because you end up making every game look the same. Taking our world as inspiration is fine, but it should almost always be expanded on. Know what your game is and make the art style enhance it. Don’t just replicate realism because that’s “what you’re supposed to do.”
Look, don’t take it personally, but I disagree as hard as humanly possible.
Claiming that realism “makes every game look the same” is a shocking statement, and I don’t think you mean it like it sounds. That’s like saying that every movie looks the same because they all use photographing people as a core technique.
If anything, I don’t know what “realism” is supposed to mean. What is more realistic? Yakuza because it does these harsh, photo-based textures meant to highlight all the pores or, say, a Pixar movie where everything is built on this insanely accurate light transfer, path traced simulation?
At any rate, the idea that taking photorealism as a target means you give up on aesthetics or artistic intent is baffling. That’s not even a little bit how it works.
On the other point, I think you’re blending technical limitations with intent in ways that are a bit fallacious. SotC is stylized, for sure, in that… well, there are kaijus running around and you sometimes get teleported by black tendrils back to your sleeping beauty girlfirend.
But is it aiming at photorealism? Hell yeah. That approach to faking dynamic range, the deliberate crushing of exteriors from interiors, the way the sky gets treated, the outright visible air adding spacing and scale when you look at the colossi from a distance, the desaturated take on natural spaces… That game is meant to look like it was shot by a camera all the way. They worked SO hard to make a PS2 look like it has aperture and grain and a piece of celluloid capturing light. Harder than the newer remake, arguably.
Some of that applies to GoW, too, except they are trying to make things look like Jason and the Argonauts more than Saving Private Ryan. But still, the references are filmic.
I guess we’re back to the problem of establishing what people mean by “realism” and how it makes no sense. In what world does Cyberpunk look similar to Indiana Jones or Wukong? It just has no real meaning as a statement.
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the “last gen still looked good” game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn’t believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays… well, like Silent Hill, and it’s still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn’t a zero sum game. You don’t trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
They clearly balanced the more detailed art design with the game play.
GTA didn’t have detail on cars to the level of a racing game, and didn’t have characters with as much detail as Resident Evil, so that it could have a larger world for example. Colossus had fewer objects on screen so it could put more detail on what was there.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that’s what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn’t that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you’d see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Except for the ones that don’t do a good job of balancing the two things. Like the games that have incredible detail but shit performance and/or awful gameplay.
Well, yeah, but again, that’s not new, and it’s something every game has to do, better or worse.
I’m aging myself here, but if you must know, the time that stands out most to me in the “graphics over gameplay” debate is actually… 8 bit micros, weirdly.
There was a time where people mostly just looked at how much of a screen a character filled, or whether the backgrounds scrolled and just bought that, while a subset of the userbase and press was pleading to them to pay at least some consideration to whether the game… you know, could be played at all.
Really? Cause I don’t know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
I would say GoW and SotC at least take realism as inspiration, but aren’t realistic. They’re like an idealized version of realism. They’re detailed, but they’re absolutely stylized. SotC landscapes, for example, look more like paintings you’d see rather than places you’d see in real life.
Realism is a bad goal because you end up making every game look the same. Taking our world as inspiration is fine, but it should almost always be expanded on. Know what your game is and make the art style enhance it. Don’t just replicate realism because that’s “what you’re supposed to do.”
Look, don’t take it personally, but I disagree as hard as humanly possible.
Claiming that realism “makes every game look the same” is a shocking statement, and I don’t think you mean it like it sounds. That’s like saying that every movie looks the same because they all use photographing people as a core technique.
If anything, I don’t know what “realism” is supposed to mean. What is more realistic? Yakuza because it does these harsh, photo-based textures meant to highlight all the pores or, say, a Pixar movie where everything is built on this insanely accurate light transfer, path traced simulation?
At any rate, the idea that taking photorealism as a target means you give up on aesthetics or artistic intent is baffling. That’s not even a little bit how it works.
On the other point, I think you’re blending technical limitations with intent in ways that are a bit fallacious. SotC is stylized, for sure, in that… well, there are kaijus running around and you sometimes get teleported by black tendrils back to your sleeping beauty girlfirend.
But is it aiming at photorealism? Hell yeah. That approach to faking dynamic range, the deliberate crushing of exteriors from interiors, the way the sky gets treated, the outright visible air adding spacing and scale when you look at the colossi from a distance, the desaturated take on natural spaces… That game is meant to look like it was shot by a camera all the way. They worked SO hard to make a PS2 look like it has aperture and grain and a piece of celluloid capturing light. Harder than the newer remake, arguably.
Some of that applies to GoW, too, except they are trying to make things look like Jason and the Argonauts more than Saving Private Ryan. But still, the references are filmic.
I guess we’re back to the problem of establishing what people mean by “realism” and how it makes no sense. In what world does Cyberpunk look similar to Indiana Jones or Wukong? It just has no real meaning as a statement.
Did those go for realism though, or were they just good at balancing the more detailed art design with the gameplay?
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the “last gen still looked good” game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn’t believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays… well, like Silent Hill, and it’s still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn’t a zero sum game. You don’t trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
They clearly balanced the more detailed art design with the game play.
GTA didn’t have detail on cars to the level of a racing game, and didn’t have characters with as much detail as Resident Evil, so that it could have a larger world for example. Colossus had fewer objects on screen so it could put more detail on what was there.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that’s what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn’t that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you’d see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Except for the ones that don’t do a good job of balancing the two things. Like the games that have incredible detail but shit performance and/or awful gameplay.
Well, yeah, but again, that’s not new, and it’s something every game has to do, better or worse.
I’m aging myself here, but if you must know, the time that stands out most to me in the “graphics over gameplay” debate is actually… 8 bit micros, weirdly.
There was a time where people mostly just looked at how much of a screen a character filled, or whether the backgrounds scrolled and just bought that, while a subset of the userbase and press was pleading to them to pay at least some consideration to whether the game… you know, could be played at all.