This is kind of the reason why TF2 ages well because it's not trying to be hyperreal.

I also miss the age of detail textures 🙁, shame that hasn't adapted into the next generation that well.

also my reason for going anime style in OA3, which is something many players disagree with

The only bad graphics are those that you rush to get done.

In my case, graphics dont mean shit if there is a lot of glitches and the gameplay/sound/atmosphere is bad.

I am not someone obsessed with graphics, I wouldn't be a fan of retro games if I were, but I am talking technological sophistication. Personally I don't expect old graphics to "age" well, but it doesn't spoil the game for me at all. The issue is different - people noticing that games are not really getting any more photorealistic, then incorrectly assuming that this is "as good as it gets" and giving up, while trying to rationalize it as "eh, this is as good as it gets". It has a lot to do with stagnation of high performance computing and focus on "ultra thin" tablets and mobile devices with shit graphics chips driving "Retina" screens at ridiculous resolutions in order to display poorly compressed online video. I think a lot of the "4K" hype is distracting from the fact that it is asset quality that makes graphics photorealistic, not a ridiculous number of pixels per inch.

Compared to UE3, the only major 'next gen' thing I really notice in UnrealEngine4 are reflections plastered on everything, and the slower performance from it, and some seemingly realtime light. but it just looks more of the same to me really, with the current UE4 games out there that don't have a strong art direction, and the nonsense of dropping older consoles for it.

I really liked Rage, I didnt mind texture load lag at all, it was beautiful.
I personally love low poly graphics with nice sprite/render effects.

Hardware is too weak for some ultra HD ray tracing (easy programming) so they are leaving that out.
I think whats wrong is that people dont want to work on something a lot till its done. Why go with the most perfect example, find the middle and do it.

Stojke wrote:

Hardware is too weak for some ultra HD ray tracing (easy programming) so they are leaving that out.

I don't think ultra HD is really necessary at the time. 1080p or so raytracing would be sufficient.

It is a common myth that these nice CGI images are all raytraced through. Many 3D artists and modelers use regular rasterization or ray casting (not the Wolfenstein 3D kind) to render images. What makes these images so nice is not raytracing magic, but artistry and lots of computing power. Most importantly, they don't use any cheap "cheats" such as billboarding, level of detail etc. that is used to make quick and dirty realtime graphics. Many people associate Pixar with raytracing, but the first raytraced Pixar film was Cars.

Modern high end GPUs can play modern console ports smoothly at 4K. Why not stop wasting this power and use it to create better 1080p graphics instead?

m1so wrote:

I am not someone obsessed with graphics,

m1so wrote:

When I play a game, I always look at the walls/ground/grass from up close for a second to see how it REALLY looks like.

Just sayin' 😜

I am not constantly looking at the walls, just saying that every game I've seen so far has blurry textures. Filtered textures were impressive in 1996, not now.

I know, just pullin' your leg. 😜

What games do you mean? If you look at Wolfenstein New Order with the megatextures installed, you'll be hard pressed to find blurry textures. Be prepared to fork out on a $700 video card to run it well, though.

Graphics is nice, but only when it doesn't come at the expense of gameplay, which seems to be more and more the case these days.

That being said, I think Metro Last Light is an incredible example of a well-made modern game. It's an example of a game designed by game designers, so the game focuses on the storyline rather than the minutia. Rage, and to a greater extent Daikatana were games designed by programmers. You should never let a programmer design anything, because programming can become incredibly monotonous and boring, and that's when they begin to obssess with the minutia to make it more interesting for themselves, and the overall product suffers because of it.

Still waiting for GTA5 for the PC. I think we'll be pleasantly surprised.

mockingbird wrote:

Graphics is nice, but only when it doesn't come at the expense of gameplay, which seems to be more and more the case these days.

I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, I don't think it's even this. I'd say many games released today have both mediocre console port graphics and bad gameplay.

I think it's more that we're all getting a little burned out on sequels and more of the same genres / game types. Graphics don't really make the dumb AI, mind-numbing teenager-level stories, and cheesy-but-proven gameplay mechanics all fresh and new.

I'd take DOS graphics with sentient AI over FarCry 4 photorealism and robot people. 😀

Yeah I agree, this is kinda why I started playing all the click to adventure games I had passed up back in the day. The stories on some of them are freaking fantastic and they all have no real graphics at all. Some of them like Grim Fandango left me thinking about them for weeks afterwards. Great game.

I recently searched youtube for a modern video game, to see what they were looking like in 2014, and I didn't like what I saw.

There's something about PPL/Bloom-infested polys looking like bad B movies that's terribly offensive to me.

leileilol wrote:

I also miss the age of detail textures 🙁, shame that hasn't adapted into the next generation that well.

Yes, detail textures and super high resolution texture maps for large surfaces. IMHO, relatively low-poly games using those technologies (and no over-use of bloom) looks better than high-poly games with low resolution textures. I blame this on the previous generation of consoles, with their limited RAM available for texture storage.

Another "modern" rendering trend that often looks bad is specular shaders. These invariably introduce shader aliasing that isn't correctable with conventional anti-aliasing techniques. Shader-based anti-aliasing filters like FXAA can help, but modern games still have a lot more visible "jaggies" than older games with effective anti-aliasing. And the thing is, the real world isn't all that "shiny" anyway, why does every single texture need a specular component?

King_Corduroy wrote:

Yeah I agree, this is kinda why I started playing all the click to adventure games I had passed up back in the day. The stories on some of them are freaking fantastic and they all have no real graphics at all. Some of them like Grim Fandango left me thinking about them for weeks afterwards. Great game.

I agree, but point and click adventure games do have graphics 😀 . Grim Fandango is realtime polygons overlayed on prerendered backgrounds, giving a nice look to a game that runs well even in pure software rendering or on ancient 3D cards like the ATI Rage I or S3 Virge. Most other adventure games are 2D, but many are famous for their beautiful drawn or prerendered backgrounds. Not every type of graphics has to tax your GPU, that doesn't mean that it is "not real".

You know what I mean, they are usually pre rendered scenes or flat 2D environments. No real 3d graphics is what I meant, graphics that don't require a high end graphics card. Ironically these 2d games seemed to have aged much better than the in your face action games with all the fancy graphics of the day. 🤣

I corrected you because there actually are adventures without any graphics, text adventures, but those aren't point and click 😉.

It depends. I don't mind early 1990s 3D graphics as long as the gameplay is solid, PSX games look a lot better if you're using a CRT TV like me, of course it will be unwatchable on a LCD. I'm not jumping on the "old 2D graphics is better than 3D" bandwagon, I played 1985-1991 DOS games as a kid with mostly EGA graphics and compared to that the PSX seemed like virtual reality to me. Everyone always compares jerky PS1 games to "60 fps SNES sprite goodness", but they're forgetting that old DOS 2D games from before the SVGA era were even choppier while having very ugly 2D graphics (and I still love them despite that, they're my childhood). But then, I have a weakness for "bad 3D/CGI". What is sad however is that modern games mostly look worse than prerendered 1997 graphics and if you don't believe me, look at Riven (which looks better than many modern games in my opinion and is freaking beautiful), yet I see people thinking we have "lifelike graphics".

But then, I read scans from 1990s gaming magazines which call Voodoo 1 graphics "almost confusable with video", and realize that the newest games for a given time are always considered "photorealistic" by gamers until something newer comes along when it becomes "horribly ugly, my eyes are bleeding". Total lack of perspective.

Good graphics aren't just putting into a game what's technically possible at the moment though AAA gamedevelopers will likely go for that because it helps to sell a game in most cases.
I remember that Strike Commander was one of the first games to use textured polygons, sure it was impressive to look at it on tiny pictures on the box but in game it didn't look good at all, it ran slow and there was 100 meters fogdistance. 😵
Then a few years later a game called Su-27 Flanker came out and used clean polygons, something no one was using anymore, but it ran smooth and I thought it looked great, still do.

There is also the matter of taste, personally I don't like the use of heavy colorfilters like in Far Cry 2 where everything seems to be made out of poo, or like in Assassin's Creed where they think the game takes place in the afterlife. Racedriver Grid was another offender, you could paint your car in any color as long as it was brown. 😵