Let’s compare two completely separate games to a game and a remaster.
Generational leaps then:
Good lord.
EDIT: That isn’t even the Zero Dawn remaster. That is literally two still-image screenshots of Forbidden West on both platforms.
Good. Lord.
Yeah no. You went from console to portable.
We’ve had absolutely huge leaps in graphical ability. Denying that we’re getting diminishing returns now is just ridiculous.
We’re still getting huge leaps. It simply doesn’t translate into massively improved graphics. What those leaps do result in, however, is major performance gains.
I have played Horizon Zero Dawn, its remaster, and Forbidden West. I am reminded how much better Forbidden West looks and runs on PS5 compared to either version of Zero Dawn. The differences are absolutely there, it’s just not as spectacular as the jump from 2D to 3D.
The post comes off like a criticism of hardware not getting better enough faster enough. Wait until we can create dirt, sand, water or snow simulations in real time, instead of having to fake the look of physics. Imagine real simulations of wind and heat.
And then there’s gaussian splatting, which absolutely is a huge leap. Forget trees practically being arrangements of PNGs–what if each and every leaf and branch had volume? What if leaves actually fell off?
Then there’s efficiency. What if you could run Monster Hunter Wilds at max graphics, on battery, for hours? The first gen M1 Max MacBook Pro can comfortably run Baldur’s Gate III. Reducing power draw would have immense benefits on top of graphical improvements.
Combined with better and better storage and VR/AR, there is still plenty of room for tech to grow. Saying “diminishing returns” is like saying that fire burns you when you touch it.
There’s no better generational leap than Monster Hunter Wilds, which looks like a PS2 game on its lowest settings and still chugs at 24fps on my PC.
Could’ve done your research before buying. Companies aren’t held to standards bc people are uninformed buyers.
This is what a remaster used to look like.
Pretty sick if you ask me
I agree whole heartedly
It was a remake not a remaster. The hit boxes weren’t the same.
The difference is academic and doesn’t affect my point.
Technically an original source code was adopted to SNES, even including some (most?) glitches, so I’d say it’s more like a port or remaster than remake, even though graphics and audio were remade.
Ironically, Zelda Link to the Past ran at 60fps, and Ocarina of Time ran at 20fps.
The same framerates are probably in the Horizon pictures below lol.
Now, Ocarina of Time had to run at 20fps because it had one of the biggest draw distances of any N64 game at the time. This was so the player could see to the other end of Hyrule Field, or other large spaces. They had to sacrifice framerate, but for the time it was totally worth the sacrifice.
Modern games sacrifice performance for an improvement so tiny that most people would not be able to tell unless they are sitting 2 feet from a large 4k screen.
Had to, as in “they didn’t have enough experience to optimize the games”. Same for Super Mario 64. Some programmers decompiled the code and made it run like a dream on original hardware.
The programming knowledge did not exist at the time. Its not that they did not have the experience, it was impossible for them to have the knowledge because it did not exist at the time. You can’t really count that against them.
Kaze optimizing Mario 64 is amazing, but it would have been impossible for Nintendo to have programmed the game like that because Kaze is able to use programming technique and knowledge that literally did not exist at the time the N64 was new. Its like saying that the NASA engineers that designed the Atlas LV-3B spacecraft were bad engineers or incapable of making a good rocket design just because of what NASA engineers could design today with the knowledge that did not exist in the 50s.
I don’t mind the graphics that much, what really pisses me off is the lack of optimization and heavy reliance on frame gen.
What I don’t understand is why games look prettier but things like NPC AI (which is really path-finding and decision trees, not actual AI), interactivity of the game world, destructability of game objects - all those things are objectively worse than they have been in a game of 10-15 years ago (with some exceptions like RDR2).
How can a game like Starfield still have all the Bethesda jank but now the NPCs lack any kind of daily routine?
Most enemies in modern shooters barely know how to flank, compare that to something like F.E.A.R. which came out in 2006!
The question is whether “realism” was ever a good target. The best games are not the most realistic ones.
Factorio and Balatro
So many retro games are replayable and fun to this day, but I struggle to return to games whose art style relied on being “cutting edge realistic” 20 years ago.
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.
Yeah. So like every other game.
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.
STALKER is good, though I played a lot of Anomaly mostly, and I’m not sure that STALKER was ever known for bleeding edge graphics
I dunno, Crysis looks pretty great on modern hardware and its 18 years old.
Also, CRYSIS IS 18 WHERE DID THE TIME GO?
Yeah, but it was about 15 years ahead of it’s time.
There’s a joke in there somewhere about Crysis being the age of consent but I just can’t land it right now.
Probably because I’m old enough to remember it’s release.
I guess the joke can’t run Crysis
Like cgi and other visual effects, realism has some applications that can massively improve the experience in some games. Just like how lighting has a massive impact, or sound design, etc.
Chasing it at the expense of game play or art design is a negative though.
Idk, I’d say that pursuing realism is worthy, but you get diminishing returns pretty quick when all the advances are strictly in one (or I guess two, with audio) sense. Graphical improvements massively improved the experience of the game moving from NES or Gameboy to SNES and again to PS1 and N64. I’d say that the most impressive leap, imo, was PS1/N64 to PS2/XBox/GameCube. After that, I’d say we got 3/4 of the return from improvements to the PS3 generation, 1/2 the improvement to PS4 gen, 1/5 the improvement to PS5, and 1/8 the improvement when we move on to PS5 Pro. I’d guess if you plotted out the value add, with the perceived value on the Y and the time series or compute ability or texture density or whatever on the x, it’d probably look a bit like a square root curve.
I do think that there’s an (understandably, don’t get me wrong) untapped frontier in gaming realism in that games don’t really engage your sense of touch or any of the subsets thereof. The first step in this direction is probably vibrating controllers, and I find that it definitely does make the game feel more immersive. Likewise, few games engage your proprioception (that is, your knowledge of your body position in space), though there’ve been attempts to engage it via the Switch, Wii, and VR. There’s, of course, enormous technical barriers, but I think there’s very clearly a good reason why a brain interface is sort of thought of as the holy grail of gaming.
It’s the right choice for some games and not for others. Just like cinematography, there’s different styles and creators need to pick which works best for what they’re trying to convey. Would HZD look better styled like Hi-Fi Rush? I don’t really think so. GOW? That one I could definitely see working more stylized.
Link has two hookshots?
What big shift do you expect? Even regarding 3D realism we are way past the point of diminishing returns in terms of development costs.
I can’t imagine what it would look like now. I just wish everyone could experience the same incredible growth.
I’d say there’s more progress on scale than visual fidelity. There’s greater ability to render complexity at scale, whether that’s real actors on screen or physics in motion. I agree that progress in detail still frame has plateaued.
And they’re shocked that no one bought the PS5 pro for 800 dollars
Eventually we hit a limit to how round we could make car tires.
We technically aren’t at max roundness. Almost every rendered now renders polygons, but it’s possible to make a rendered to other shapes. We can render a perfect cylinder if we want to, or whatever shape you can define mathematically.
Rush on the N64 had octagonal tires and real damage! I still play it every year or so.
Oh it’s a bit of a running joke that every time there’s a new Forza or Gran Turismo, they brag about how round the tires are and how wet the pavement looks.
NHL 2014 and NHL 2024 are probably the same game, only in NHL 2014 the players don’t spit out their mouthguards like they do in 2024.
But I need that level of realism /s
Have you played VR? You might get that feeling again.
VR is the one thing that feels similar to the old generational leaps to me. It’s great, but I haven’t set mine up in a few years now.
Fair. I haven’t played “No Man’s Sky,” yet, but apparently, it’s awesome in VR.
I’m waiting in a affordable VR setup that can let me run around at home without hitting a wall. Solutions exist but they as expensive as a car and I don’t have that kind of money lying around.
If anyone can optimize Disney’s omni directional walking pad, we’ll be there. I’d give it 3 decades if it goes that way. I’ve heard it’s not like real walking. It feels very slippery. All that being said, you don’t have to wrap yourself in a harness and fight friction to simulate walking like other walking pads. It also seems simple enough, hardware wise, that it could be recreated using preexisting parts/ 3d printing. I’m honestly surprised I haven’t seen a DIY project yet.
Slightly improved graphics while having worse enemy ai, unreal engine stutter, constant hand holding with in game puzzles, restricted character creation, all while having to wait for updates to fix issues that shouldn’t be there at launch.
Don’t forget how many modern AAA games feel like you’re playing a gamified version of your car’s navigation app.
Waypoint>cutscene>waypoint>cutscene>waypoint>cutscene
