Sacrifice is one of the best games ever - the way each time you play you get a different piece of the same story is brilliant.soladrin said:
And I just loved Abominations: "The PAIN! When.. will the suffering... end?"
photorealism, arent you tired of it?
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And I just loved Abominations: "The PAIN! When.. will the suffering... end?"
One of the things that always ruins the realistic looks of games is how 3D objects interact with each other. Games always seem to end up with polygons going through the walls, or objects floating above a table instead of resting on it. Normal objects don't bend or compress at all and human objects have extremely limited movements and flexibilities. Seeing a person pick up an item from the ground and use it *always* looks ridiculous.
I think that gaming's attempt to be realistic often show how far from real they actually are. And while some games do look somewhat close to realistic, game artists should probably "work with what they have" as opposed to "looking for a golden chalice of realism" I look at TF2 and it's directX 8 compatibility, and look at what they did with it, and it really outshines the likes of Crysis. Though Bioshock gives it something of a run, though it's art is at odds with reality as well.
You know the fact that I could still quite easily tell I was in a game put me off to Crysis. I mean if you need a render farm just to run the game at decent fps the colour balance should not give this away so easily.
That is what I meant by 'super-realism'. Bloom does not exist in the real world. Lightbloom is an effect that sometimes occurs in photography. However, people often take super-realism oer real realism. Is is the same thing that makes impossibly long legs on women sexier, and females find pictures of babies with bigger heads cuter, even if such a headsize was deadly.Kirkkit said:
People don't want realism, they want what they *think* is realism, and that is a big difference.
Another funfact; often several objects are too big in a game compared to the game model. If they would be the size that they had to be, gamers would think they were too small. This is mostly due to the use of a 3rd person camera.
I think, after seven generations, we've finally reached the point where the graphics aren't really going to get a hell of a lot better, so I think it's time we all stopped trying to outdo each other in terms of who can make the prettiest graphics, and start making games with some actual gameplay content to them. Aside from graphics, name me one significant difference between the actual GAMEPLAY of the FPS's on the Nintendo 64 and the FPS' of today. Maybe if we stopped devoting more and more and more disc space to graphics, we could start using the gaming hardware to get some real potential.
As strange as it seems, the new movie "Beowulf", with ps3 standard graphics just didn't work for me. The "graphics" (yes, i know it's weird describing a movie's graphics.) seemed pretty realistic, but you could tell they weren't. Strangely, i preferred the style of Monsters Inc. or Toy Story, because they weren't meant to be real. If your going to have photorealistic graphics, actually make them photorealistic. Otherwise it just looks like you are a try-hard who just failed. And that is why i really like WindWaker / Okami graphics, because they succeeded in being artistic. The only game that's done a good job of photorealism is Crysis, but no-one has dual 8800GTX's in SLI and a quad core processor, with 4gb of RAM Crytek (a.k.a. Cry-Assholes-who-make-shit-games-tek.)
First I'd like to get one point out of the way. Gears of War was lack-luster not only in art-style but in it's graphical rendering in general. I'm trully unimpressed with Epic's Unreal Engine 3. Up close and in motion everything, characters, textures, lighting, lookes bland and robotic, UT3 included. Anyway, back on topic. Photorealism, I believe, is something that will inevitably be pushed for, if ever achieved, but should be secondary to a games art direction. The fact is, as many have stated, photorealism is only as good as the art direction behind it. You can create a hyper-detailed character model with more polygons than someone could count in their lifetime, but if you fail to make the surroundings around said character look interesting, varied and unique (and more importantly, ANIMATE the character in a believable way) then it will still feel as though that character is fake. Case in point, in games like Half-Life 2 and it's ilk, you see characters with probably half the poly-counts of characters from the newest games, like Crysis, and sans the new-fangled shaders. Yet, despite this, why is it the HL2 characters are more believable and seem more organic than the others? Simple, animation. They stand like a person would, shifting weight from one leg to the other. They glance around at objects of interest, not just randomly. They lean to one side as they run around a corner. It is unfortunate (and ironic) that most companies now a days rely so heavely on motion-capture for animations, which make for less real looking and indeed robotic, motions for ingame characters. Another thing to consider is, if the number of pologons, texture details and shaders is progressively pushed the, the production costs and most importantly timelines will inevitably grow to epic proportions. So the question then becomes, can anyone but the big commercial game companies even afford to make them, and can the average consumer afford to buy the friggin' game? Then there's the hardware needed to process and display this glorious new "graphical revolution", which again ups the price for consumers and producers alike. On the opposite end, if a company only concentrates on the art but never creates an engine that can even run what they want, they'll have to make sacrifices to complete the game, which only bodes ill for them. So the only hope is to find a decent balance between the two. Something only a few have grasped so far. One can only hope it's an ideal that catches on. EOR - end of rant
Photorealism is an easy sink of a game's budget allocation and I think it should decrease nowadays.
But that's mise en scene for you. The grey adds to the mood, and doesn't really detract from it either. Gears of war and GTA IV aren't games that are supposed to be full of colour and life. they're dark and depressing, and the graphics reflect this. Sometimes, it even makes the few moments of colour that bit more impressive (Star Junction in GTA IV for example).eggdog14 said:
So really, i'm not on board that whole "Photorealism sucks" bandwagon, but then again, I'm not put off by cartoony or unrealistic graphics either. Jet Set radio is awesome, but that looks about as realistic as Joan Rivers face.
I don't have a problem with "photorealistic" graphics but I would definetly prefer the focus to shift to higher quality gameplay.
Photorealism only works when everything else looks and sounds plausible.
In my opinion, it should be ignored. Every second spent making a realistic looking world is wasted when an NPC gets stuck behind a rock.(once you see this, you will notice other, even smaller mistakes)
In my opinion, it should be ignored. Every second spent making a realistic looking world is wasted when an NPC gets stuck behind a rock.(once you see this, you will notice other, even smaller mistakes)
It all depends on the kind of atmosphere you want for your game. Shadow of the Colossus had some of the best graphics I've ever seen, and the sheer vastness of the landscape contributed to the atmosphere of riding along on your horse drinking in the scenery as you searched for your next Colossus to kick the crap out of, but on the other hand, stylized graphics can also be nice now and then as illustrated by Team Fortress 2, Psychonauts, and Little Big Planet.
If I want photo realism I just need to look behind my laptop. Personally the cartoony cel-shading graphics of LoZ The Wind Waker is my favorite game in terms of visuals and everything else except difficulty unless you purposely make it so like me
