20 ms·

Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping

374 points by megaman22 9y ago

theprotocol 9y ago
Some pretty bold and controversial (and subjective) statements, but I think the author makes a good case! Very interesting article.
- kevlar1818 9y ago
  "ventspace" indeed, but I agree--it's an interesting perspective.
deleted 9y ago
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Raphmedia 9y ago
I've always said (as a joke) that all game developers must have bad eyesight and dirty glasses. Everything is blurry, you can't see far, you get dirt over your vision and there are glares and lens-flares all over. What's worst is that this is done on purpose and on almost all the games. They must think that this is what real life look like.
- turc1656 9y ago
  I rarely play games but the most recent game I played was Alien: Isolation. It had been quite a while since I played a game before that so I was surprised to see a lot of these things on by default. Specifically, chromatic aberration. Why the hell would anyone add in a setting for that? I get that they were going for the Super8/VHS type of look but it's just really distracting. I forgot what the other settings were but I turned off a lot of those junk visual effects and then things looked beautiful.
  - potatolicious 9y ago
    I also can't stand chromatic aberration in games - especially because it's so freakishly exaggerated compared to actual CA you would experience with old video/photo gear. A lens that completely separates color channels is defective. It was defective in 1950 and it's defective today, so unless your goal was to replicate the look of hopelessly broken hardware, it's in no way "vintage". Which I think goes more generally into my issue with game graphics - the taking of interesting effects (depth of field, chromatic aberration, lens flares, etc) and cranking it up to 11 for its own sake.
  - taw55 9y ago
    Epic added chromatic aberation to the new Unreal Tournament at some point and the mob started sharpening their pitchforks. The reason given afterwards was that they think it’s important to break the “sterile” cg look by roughening the image slightly. I can see their point, games are at the point where they look “photoreal”, but not like a photo. I find the almost-but-not-quite realism jarring, personally, I even prefer playing older games usually because of it. so I can understand why devs try all kinds of tricks to alleviate it.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  In the past draw distances were much worse. But those restrictions spurred creativity. For example, the miserable draw distance of the PlayStation 1 resulted in the developers of Silent Hill to hide faraway rendering with a thick fog, which soon became an iconic theme for all Silent Hill games, even as the hardware far surpassed the need to keep it.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Tons of games in that era had dense fog for that reason.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      Yes but in silent hill they gave a reason for it as opposed to just being something the player was supposed to ignore. They took the limitation and used it in world.
- acchow 9y ago
  They do this in many action movies (especially Michael Bay) as well. They believe the audience prefers these over-the-top effects. Based off the revenue of entire film franchises with millions of people returning for sequels of more of the same, I think they nailed what consumers want?
- aerique 9y ago
  The first thing I turn off in most games is Bloom. I actually do have glasses and the bloom effect in most games just looks like my glasses are greasy, no thanks. Also, AA is another thing I generally turn off. It gives quite a performance boost and the resolution these days is high enough that I'm not bothered by it.
NathanKP 9y ago
A lot of the oversaturation problem can be attributed to bad displays. Think about early Instagram. Everyone used terrible super saturated filters on their photos because the early smart phone screens were so bad, and got washed out so easily in the sunlight. By overcompensating with filters you got a photo that looked good on a bad screen, even in sunny conditions. The same was true of early games. Gamers love the bright colors of World of Warcraft for instance because displays were bad, and it was easier to watch bright colors for hours on end while gaming. Even today my modern TV looks pretty bad in the sunlight. As much as I love the muted colors of Breath of the Wild I have to admit that without closing my curtains its really hard to tell what's going on if a sunbeam is hitting the TV. I think as gamer's screens get better we will start to see a transition away from exaggerated brightness and a trend toward more realism, just like Instagram has transitioned largely from a platform that overcompensated for bad smartphone screens to a #nofilter style.
- fulafel 9y ago
  WoW was released the same year as LCD monitor sales first surpassed CRTs (2003). So in the early days of WoW, people actually got better colors than a few years later when most people had dumped CRTs for the relatively poor consumer LCD monitors of the day.
  - tomxor 9y ago
    I was just a kid, but as far as I remember the transition to LCD brought worse colour not better. To be clear, i'm not talking about early professional colourists LCD displays that were £5000 or whatever. Surely everyone is familiar with those horrible TN panels in laptops... desktop LCDs used the same tech once.
    - pilsetnieks 9y ago
      That's the point - that in the first years while CRTs were still quite widespread, people had better displays than a few years later when many had switched to terrible early LCD screens.
chrisseaton 9y ago
> We would need 20 bits of just luminance to represent [the range 1,000,000:1 I don't understand this statement. Why do you need a certain number of bits to represent a large range? You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower. Representing a large luminance range isn't a problem of resolution though is it? It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. If I represented the same luminance range with a thousand bits it doesn't do anything to solve the core problem, does it? So why does the number of bits matter? Not a graphics programmer, so genuinely asking, not saying the article is wrong!
- ttoinou 9y ago
  It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 If you have such a high contrast ratio, it also means you have discretized amount of light in such amount or more. Talking about the number of bits minimum needed indeed makes the assumption you are storing and manipulating light in a linear way (hypothesis not true for most 8 bpc rgb values).
- sandofsky 9y ago
  The larger the dynamic range, the more bits you need to represent the possible values in between. Imagine a gradient that smoothly transitions from black to white. 8 bit color means only 256 shades of luminance, which would quickly show banding artifacts. In fact, the entire reason we gamma encode images is because 256 is too small for even a low dynamic range monitor. Gamma encoding is a clever technique to give us more bits to represent shadows, which humans are more sensitive to than highlights.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    I think O.P. understand that since he wrote "You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower.", applying a curve solves high dynamic range but lowers the resolution
  - deleted 9y ago
ndh2 9y ago
I feel like this post does nothing in terms of educating readers. It all sounds very interesting, but I didn't learn anything. It alters between putting the blame on technical limitations and ignorance, so I would have liked to see a suggestion on how to address either of these.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  It's a well-written and informative post, it deserves a little more praise than "does nothing in terms of educating readers". What he is discussing is about aesthetics. There are two things at play here: the big studio business model relies on making blockbusters, so you pack together a few hundred devs and artists and try to pop out the biggest game you can. The other is that many devs are technically trained but not especially artistically educated. They have a limited understanding of lighting, color, framing a scene, etc. Someone who has made some great criticisms of this as well as provided real solutions is Eskil Steenberg.
  - Aperson4321 9y ago
    Link please to Eskil Steenbergs writings!
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      I'd suggest this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ
      - Aperson4321 9y ago
        Thank you! Eskil is such a wizard.
      - corysama 9y ago
        That entire presentation is amazing. I recommend it every chance I get.
  - xigency 9y ago
skybrian 9y ago
It makes sense for artists to concentrate on the details of how games look, and this article provides some good insight into that world. But using stark moral terms for aesthetic judgements seems rather insular at best. When I think about games like Minecraft, Factorio, RimWorld, and so on, I wonder if maybe imitating movie-quality graphics is really as important as the author thinks it is? It's only a small part of the experience.
- fhood 9y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the author was protesting against the misuse of techniques for imitating movie quality graphics. He held up BOTW for not attempting such imitation.
jdlyga 9y ago
Half Life: The Lost Coast, this is all your fault!
deleted 9y ago
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coldcode 9y ago
I play World Of Tanks and tried every one of their mappings (forget what they call them). Even the one I can tolerate makes the tanks look like toys in a sandbox. Never feels like a real tank.
Kiro 9y ago
> But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. Until graphics and animation are photorealistic I prefer my games to look videogamey. All those 4 screenshots are beautiful and I wouldn't want them any other way.
ttoinou 9y ago
Related to that, colors of videos on the internet (and YouTube) are always kinda ugly and (I think) not very faithful of what the color artists intended to show... I'm not sure but I think one of the issues are from the 16 - 235 channel remapping
- nts34nhteo90 9y ago
  It's probably more likely due to the fact that codecs for videos on YouTube tend to have lower resolution in the red and blue channels, which leads to very bad blocky artifacting around bright red and bright blue areas.
  - andrewf 9y ago
    I think everything else (Blu-Ray, DVD, cable TV) is using the same technique.
- anentropic 9y ago
  YouTube don't seem to handle colour profiles correctly or there is some problem in the pipeline between uploading your video and it getting reproduced on screen by the player inside a web browser videos exported from e.g. FCPX have colour profile attached and look right when played back in Quicktime desktop player, but the contrast always gets messed up when it comes back through YouTube this is a separate issue from compression artefacts
vinistois 9y ago
This article makes me appreciate the balance struck in GTA. IMHO this type of scene is better than any of the examples shown in the article: http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB4SamD3UmQ1HF7Qf1bsg_0_0.jpg http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB...
- ttoinou 9y ago
  This picture is from a video game ?!
  - NoodleIncident 9y ago
    Look at the white brick pillars in the background behind the car; they're exactly the same. Some other stuff like the soda bottle pops out as well. It does look nice though.
    - megaman22 9y ago
      I don't know if there's supposed to be some depth-of-field effect going on here, or what, but I find it really jarring that the resolution of the textures applied to objects in the scene are so different. The car and that one section of wall are super-sharp and high-resolution, then right next to them some of the trash is fuzzy, blurry lo-res textures.
      - vinistois 9y ago
        well, yeah. do you have any idea how massive the world map is in GTA??? Of course they have to scale the textures.
      - bananicorn 9y ago
        In this case it seems it's some sort of DoF-Effect, since the lines between the objects seem to blur too.
  - distantsounds 9y ago
    Yes, there are mods out there that make GTA look like a photo-realistic adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cbL3HUqAJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cbL3HUqAJU
jasonlotito 9y ago
From part 0, they make the claim and question: > So why the heck do most games look so bad? And then they go on to pick a game that people specifically calling out for looking amazing: HZD. In fact, the problem seems to be: > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. To which I would reply: because they are video games. A photograph doesn't pass as film, and film doesn't pass as a photograph (though the nature of the two, film essentially being a lot of photographs). A video game must serve a different purpose than a photograph or a film. The players interact with the game, and therefore the intent and purpose is different. Glares on the screen aren't just there to add lens flare, but to make it harder to see because that's part of the challenge. It is harder to see, and you have to deal with that to overcome the challenge. That can be offset by keeping the sun to your back. Same with grime in the screen, or other such things. You want to highlight the things players need to react to, and in such a way that allow them to react quickly. There is so much more, and yet so far this article is only referencing the pure look and seems to ignore the goals of the medium. I'll reserve judgement until I read the next parts of the articles, but until then, I can't help but wonder if this really matters.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  Most games attempt to look realistic, and they fail. They definitely try to look like film, so comparing them to film is perfectly fair: it is an impossible standard that masochist, mannerist or hopeless game art directors have freely chosen for their projects and by which they deserve and demand to be judged. Failure at realistic game graphics is so common, so taken for granted, that the scale of artistic accomplishment shifts downwards: if HZD looks only slightly bad, not constantly, and without disgusting the player too much, it's considered to have "amazing" graphics.
imcrs 9y ago
Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability. A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD." We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  > We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. It's been a while, but last I looked, it seemed that the temptation was to use ever muddier and desaturated visuals, with as much glare and shiny surfaces as possible.
  - subwayclub 9y ago
    It comes and goes in phases according to the available technology. The first Quake was all muddy brown and gray. Quake 2 and Unreal both introduced color lighting and looked like a disco on Saturday night. Mid-2000s games added a lot of new lighting and post-processing effects but they had limitations causing harsh shadows and highlights, hence another round of gray/brown photorealism came through. But in this decade things are finally feeling more evened out. Lighting models are sophisticated enough to allow for designs similar to a film set or photo shoot, and post-processing is getting past basic glows and filters and into a spectrum of quality/performance tradeoffs. Of course, the games that don't aim for photorealism always age better. That's been the case since people started digitizing photographs for games.
- bo1024 9y ago
  I think this is a great point. It's why even cartoon-art games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) can age really well visually while games that put so much effort into graphics still age poorly. If the main goal in a game is to make the graphics of yesterday look and feel obsolete, then that game will probably look and feel obsolete tomorrow...
- 9y ago
gilbetron 9y ago
The point of most video games is to be distinct, not to look like reality. Furthermore, they use high-contrast to help distinguish game elements. Games are not movies.
- zanny 9y ago
  Came looking for this. Unnatural contrast is good in games because it can help players distinguish different set pieces easier. This is also why a lot of people prefer older FPS titles or games like TF2 used stylized profiles of the characters that stand out. In some games, you want interpretation of the game scene to be a challenge, but in most games, you want players to easily tell what they are looking at. Using high contrast / distinct models / distinct animations / color differentiation all help to achieve that.
  - desertrider12 9y ago
    TF2 is very pretty and it’s clear that a lot of thought went into the color palettes and visual effects. The examples of bad effects in this article are the result of developers thinking “this is how games look”. I don’t think they got as far as planning how to guide the player’s attention.
  - cousin_it 9y ago
    Photos and film need to be readable too. I think gaming culture has poor taste in art for historical reasons. Here's some games that were called "gorgeous": https://www.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/COW-IW_E3_Ship-Assault-Zero-G-Combat_WM.jpg https://www.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/COW-... http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust-an-elysian-tail-xbox-360-1345475788-020.jpg http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust-an-... But there's a small minority of games that do look great: http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gallery/the-order-1886-release-day-screens/the-order_-1886_20150215102558.jpg http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gall... https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow-knight/screenshots/hollow-knight-screenshot-0.jpg https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow-knight/screensh... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/08/cupheadcarrot.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/...
AcerbicZero 9y ago
As a fairly avid gamer, but there is a reason why my top 10 games are all fairly mediocre in the graphics department. High end Triple-AAA games with "Great" graphics usually lack depth in their mechanics, and while this isn't always true, it happens enough to keep me from enjoying them. There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.
- megaman22 9y ago
  > There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion. Those are all sandbox games that you effectively never stop playing. People tell me that there's a story and an endgame in Skyrim, but I've played a few hundred hours without doing any main-line quests past the first city. Mount&Blade I've sunk even more into - there isn't even the pretense of a story there, so you're pretty much on your own if you want to role-play, or just take in the enjoyment of riding around, hacking at people, and looting their corpses.
  - AcerbicZero 9y ago
    Those were just 3 of the more mainstream games with semi-limited graphics I could think of, but you're right they do share a sandbox style. Overwatch would be another example of a game where they put "good enough" graphics combined with much more refined mechanics (depending on who you ask, this last patch...eh) to achieve success Anyway, the point I was going for the last thing we need is having them spend even more effort trying to make pretty looking but mediocre playing games.
- eduren 9y ago
  You may have already tried it, but from this comment I think you'd really enjoy The Witcher 3.
  - AceJohnny2 9y ago
jdright 9y ago
I hate this idea that it should be photo realistic. > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. Thanks, if they didn't looked at least "videogamey" I wouldn't have any interest. Stop this terrible trend of being a film!
- rcthompson 9y ago
  The point is that the lack of photorealism in the given examples is not intentional, but happens because of a lack of proper attention to the HDR aspects of rendering. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally deviate from photorealism in order to achieve a specific effect.
  - jdright 9y ago
    HZD is intentional the way it is and it is perfectly good on my not-HDR tv. So he is missing the point.
HellDunkel 9y ago
The author makes a point of Nintendo opting out of HDR but does not realize thats due to hardware limits not allowing deferred shading. The HDR techniques he does not like are all made possible by the use of deferred shading. These techniques may be sometimes used to overky stylize the look but it is undisputed they create more realistic images.
- eropple 9y ago
  Promit Roy has been being knowledgeable about graphics since before I was in college. I kind of doubt he "doesn't realize" it. The dude is really, really good. And HDR doesn't really do anything to materially aid what he's calling out as well done in the first place. It's ancillary. It's not important. What's important is actual artistic intent and structure. That's what's lacking, along with a misunderstanding of why certain techniques work in film and don't when they are uncritically applied to games.
  - HellDunkel 9y ago
    I dont know what kind of HDR you refer to. My point was that for realistc rendering or physically based, whatever you might call it, a linear workflow (light calc in linearized space) is crucial. It is very important for the artist too if you aim at realism. Of course it brings challenged such as exposure correction and managing dyamics. These challenges are not yet fully solved but to say we ought to abandon HDR and go back to SRGB is at least questionable... we might as well go back to mode 13.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  What kind of esoteric hardware can't do deferred shading? I really doubt that the switch lacks the ability, and I know it doesn't lack the processing power.
- Promit 9y ago
  The Switch is perfectly capable of both deferred shading and HDR, which are themselves independent unrelated techniques. You can make an argument about whether or not those are the best implementation trade-offs for that hardware, taking performance and desired visuals into account. But there's nothing inherently preventing you from doing it on the Switch and it's a fairly capable GPU in its own right. P.S. Unreal Engine reintroduced forward (non-deferred) rendering as an option last year because it's more efficient in VR.
bitwize 9y ago
The first game to feature (pseudo) HDR was actually Shadow of the Colossus, and it's still a beautiful game despite its washed out colors, super high contrast, and "that dynamic exposure adjustment effect nobody likes". It may have been the template for most or all of the "bad" games in the article. These effects are beautiful in Colossus because they were chosen for artistic reasons and they are artistically used. The lack of color saturation complements the game's lush, but somehow bleak and foreboding, natural environment. The extreme contrast highlights the differences between the dark and dank indoor environments of the various ruins and temples, and the raw untamed wilderness that lies outside them. And the dynamic exposure adjustment effect is, vaguely, supposed to parallel the main character's eyes adjusting as he moves from one kind of environment to another. (Either that or just "hey look, we can do this on a PS2!") It's kinda like how the parallax line-scrolling effects in Shadow of the Beast were amazing in that particular game at that particular time, but take the same effect in a shitty game -- like, say, Bubsy -- and it just looks awful and tiresome.
rcthompson 9y ago
Everyone commenting here that they don't care about photorealism in their games is missing the point. The example games (and movie) given at the start of the article lack an appearance of photorealism not because they were going for something else, but because they either didn't pay enough attention to the HDR rendering, or else they didn't have the expertise to do it right. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally went with a non-photorealistic look to achieve a specific effect. So the point is not "these games look bad because they aren't photorealistic", it's "these games look bad because their HDR rendering is bad". I don't know enough myself about HDR rendering to have an opinion on whether the author is right or wrong about any of this, but people arguing that the author is wrong because games shouldn't look photorealistic are attacking a straw man.
- gt_ 9y ago
  I can confirm everything except gamer audience concerns. I don’t game. I have worked in film production camera department, post-production and now CGI. Color grading and compositing in particular are not specialties of mine, but I know the systems well, and I can confirm the technical critique in the text. This author does an impressive job of cutting out the bull and getting to the bare issues.
  - zeta0134 9y ago
    As a gamer, I can also confirm that I tend to have a tough time with dark areas in a lot of mainstream games. If I can get the game to realize that I'm trying to look at them (usually by getting the bright sky out of my viewport so it does the "HDR adjust" fake thing) then the darks come out of the contrast floor and I can suddenly make out the detail. The problem with the game doing fake-HDR is that while it looks great in trailers (or... at the very least, looks like the engine is doing something fancy with lighting, "great"-ness notwithstanding) it doesn't match what my real eyes would do in a situation. Unlike film, a video game doesn't have control over where I'm going to point the camera. I do. And sometimes, I need to see over that ridge, but the detail in the shadows is important too, and the game camera can't see what I'm actually looking at (with my eyes) and adjust accordingly. Breath of the Wild is a great counter example, because it doesn't really try to do the HDR adjust thing at all. It doesn't really need to; sure its daylight scenes are a bit washed out, but real daylight is a bit washed out too. My eyes adjust, just like they would outside, and I can actually see what I'm doing. That's important! With games, tempting though it is to control the camera effects just like you would when shooting film, you can't control the player's actions. It's usually better for gameplay to mellow out the effects, so the player can focus on their actions without being distracted by the 'pretty' effects.
andrewguenther 9y ago
Maybe I just play too many video games, but I don't think any of those "terrible" screenshots look bad. If anything, the foggy image from Breath of the Wild looks worse than any of them. What am I missing? What is supposed to be bad about these?
- pls2halp 9y ago
  The attempts at photorealism brings them barely into the uncanny valley, but overdone HDR pulls them firmly into the bottom of the valley. To think they look bad, you have to be the sort of person who didn't like Tarkin's CGI in Rogue One.
- djur 9y ago
  Some of it is just one's personal taste, but I would say that a practical difference is that I find it difficult to pick out details in the images called out as "bad". My eyes feel overwhelmed by the huge shifts in contrast and it's hard to visually identify objects in the very dark areas and the very shiny, bright areas. I also get a very strange sense of depth from those images -- it feels like everything is either very close or very far away, without having a sense of how far apart objects actually are. In comparison, in the BOTW screenshot, I can clearly identify objects of interest (a shrine, a tower, a volcano, a river, a bridge) and have a sense of where they are compared to each other and myself. That said, I feel like it's not a completely fair comparison -- the "bad" images all seem to have the camera in a dark area looking out and up into a bright area, while the BOTW camera is on top of an exposed mountaintop looking out into the sunset. The lighting is going to look a lot different regardless. However, the HZD image after _that_ is really quite garish and harder to justify.
- itronitron 9y ago
  That particular BotW screenshot isn't entirely representative, what is remarkable about BotW is that going for a non-photorealistic aesthetic makes the game more compelling as there are fewer details competing for your visual attention. I highly recommend playing or viewing it at 1080p on a very large screen.
gilrain 9y ago
It's amazing how many commenters seem to be embarrassing themselves by trying to be the first to wildly misunderstand the problems being discussed and reduce them to trite memes. You're not even disagreeing with the thrust of the article in your vehement objections. Yes, this indicates the article was poorly written. I advise you move on rather than reflexively attack nothing.
reiichiroh 9y ago
HDR is the new "next-gen Brown!"
lanius 9y ago
I would guess this isn't a priority for the industry because gamers themselves don't care. Case in point: gaming monitors. Gaming monitors advertise high-refresh rates and low input lag but rarely color quality. What percentage of gamers use wide gamut monitors or even perform color calibration?
- ancientworldnow 9y ago
  FWIW, I'm a colorist and have very expensive color critical monitors and calibration probes. For GUI monitors I've started recommending gaming panels for suites that don't want to invest in professional graphics displays. Once calibrated these monitors are surprisingly accurate and hold the calibration well (at least as good as professional displays many times more expensive - though still a far cry from color critical displays). The expanded refresh rates are a nice bonus for eye relief as well.
puzzlingcaptcha 9y ago
As HDR panels used for TVs 'trickle down' to PC displays the HDR part of the problem will solve itself. Perhaps then people will focus more on color grading (although I suspect over-saturation will always be a staple in some genres).
supernintendo 9y ago
This can really be attributed to a general rule of thumb in game development: aesthetics are more important than graphics.
hasenj 9y ago
The resident evil screenshot looks incredibly realistic. I thought that was a real photograph placed there to contrast reality with games. Until I read the paragraph below it.
mozumder 9y ago
Some films are absolutely just as contrast-y as these HDR images. In particular, Fujiilm RDP-III slide film. See: https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/ https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/ But yes, Arri does have a beautiful soft look along with Fuji digital cameras, and plenty of film stocks do as well. It all depends on the tastes. Gamers aren't going for soft reality. A lot of hard-edged gamers are going to go for the high-contrast, desaturated ExTreMe ChaLLeNgE look.
pasta 9y ago
Isn't this just a matter of taste? There are a lot of tone mapping algorithms everybody know about. So it's just a matter of taste choosing the one you like. Edit: As far as I know render engines use the complete dynamic range until the last step which converts it to a 16 bit output range. So maybe games can let the user decide which tone mapping algorithm to use.
- pasta 9y ago
  *24 bit output range
taw55 9y ago
While on the subject of graphics in games... Another pet peeve of mine: ambient occlusion (crude GI approximation) and especially SSAO (crude approximation of a crude approximation). Corners don’t look like that: http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/ http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/ (Ambient occlusion proper and in moderation I think looks fine, but most games really overdo it.)
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Latch on to that idea -- corners don't look like that -- and follow it to its logical conclusion: no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality. That's a huge leap, but it has the benefit of being true. (To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.)
  - taw55 9y ago
    My main problem with it isn’t that it’s unrealistic per se, just that it looks bad on static geometry. But SSAO is typically sold as a “realism” feature.
  - sdwisely 9y ago
    > (To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.) Out of curiosity is this from something? it sounds like you're citing something and for realtime I'd agree. I think people are fooled everyday by raytraced images (movie cg etc). > no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality. I'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it fast.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      I'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it fast. If all I do here today is hatch an egg of doubt in your head, I would be delighted. Someone needs to carry the torch.. My life has turned to other interests. It's the central problem. It's as hard as AGI, and it might be as impactful as the invention of the airplane. Think of it. Fully-simulated video, indistinguishable from reality. In many ways, it was my first love. The desire to be a gamedev drove me to learn programming. I ended up a graphics dev -- Carmack's old path. My job was to make a certain game engine look better. What an innocent problem... 12 years later, I still feel the pull, the need to blow off everything in my life and bend a computer to my will. To our will. The human mind has never once achieved this goal. And it was the perfect problem... I never cared much about fame or money. But to be the first. Think of it... How can you not want to spend the rest of your life on this? The solution is out there, taunting us. Everyone is pursuing physics, when all we need to do is pursue the fact that video cameras can already generate images that look identical to real life. The ancients have made up stories about the sky and stars since long before civilization. Put yourself in their shoes, if they even had shoes. Look up. It's the night sky, far brighter than anything we can see today. Imagine staring up at the infinite complexity, wondering, how does it work? Why do the stars go the way they go? We tell stories; could one of the stories be right? A few millennia later, one person had an idea: What if we watch the stars very, very carefully, and collect the stories very carefully? We could compare the movements of the stars to the stories, so that the alternative theories might be distinguished from one another. This was the key to modern science, and the root of wisdom. When you stop thinking about what everyone else is doing, you're free to hit on solutions that everyone else overlooked. And think of the feeling you'd get when you finally solved it. Can you imagine? You'd get the same rush as the Wright brothers, or Ford when he made the assembly line, or McCarthy when he stumbled across Lisp. If you or anyone else intends to take on this challenge, know this: The fact that no one believes you when you say "No one has ever done this, and no one has any idea how to do it," is your biggest advantage. It means you're free to spend the next five years figuring out that solution that everyone else missed because they were too busy chasing the pipe dream that if you throw enough physics+time at a computer, it will produce synthetic video that fools people into thinking it's real. The moment people realize that it's probably not that hard, you'll lose your advantage, because every top tech company will start exploring your problem space. Like if in 1902 you'd hinted to a top university the gist of Einstein's thesis. No one would take you seriously. Lucky for you. So, what's the secret technique? Well, if I knew that, I'd have fulfilled my 12-year dream. But I know a few things that will move you (12-N) years toward the goal. There is one rule, and one rule alone. You have to force yourself to stay true to it, or else nothing else you do will matter. Here it is: If you get a dozen people together, and show them a mix of 10 real videos and 10 simulated videos, and those videos are reasonably complex, like clips from a nature documentary, then 12 out of 12 people will effortlessly call out your fake videos as fake and your real videos as real. It's not even close. That's how far away we are from the goal of fully-simulated video indistinguishable from reality. Maybe I've hooked you at this point. Maybe not. But if anyone comes up with a way to fool those 12 people so completely that their responses are no better than random chance, you win. Let's call this the "Carmack criterion." If you tried administering the above test to a dozen clones of Carmack, here's how they'd sound: "That's a fake. That one's real. Fake. Fake. Real. Real." No matter how much ornament or showmanship you throw into the video, you can't fool Carmack. He'll report whatever his eyes are telling him. And as of 2017, he'll be right 100% of the time. His eyes would shout: "None of those fakes were even close to real! Are you kidding? One of the real videos was of a lion taking down a gazelle. I know every artist in the gamedev industry. None of them have ever produced anything approaching that level of quality, even working together." That, and that alone, is the game. Literally nothing else matters. If you can fool people until their responses are statistically identical to RNG, you've done it. You're world-famous. Yer a wizard. Corollary: you can use the Carmack criterion like a compass for every decision you face. Should you research physically-based rendering, or try to apply machine learning? The latter seems unpromising. Yet Hollywood has been administering the Carmack test to millions of people, most recently with Avatar, which completely rules out physically-based rendering. So we know to spend zero time on it. As you can see, that razor is so sharp that it will cut away every illusion you might try to cling to that humans are anywhere close to achieving the Carmack criterion. Or that some smart hacker somewhere has a pretty good idea of how to achieve it, or that it's just a matter of letting computers advance another few decades, or any other false reason that those around you like to tell themselves. But if mainstream ideas are dead-ends, then what should we research? I hesitate to give concrete suggestions, because the history of science demonstrates that progress isn't made like that. Whatever the real solution is, it's far beyond anything you or I can imagine today. People were forced by mathematics to believe that planets' orbits were elliptical. An ellipse is the only shape that makes the numbers come out right. Yet how many of our ancestors came up with that idea? Even by accident, it's probably too bizarre for anyone to seriously consider it. Not without mathematics. Yet that's a positive statement: It meant that if someone were audacious enough to trust in mathematics alone, they could determine the right answer. The solution was always there, waiting for you to find it. To make any progress at all, your ideas will need to seem shockingly different. The whole world has spent two decades going over every inch of physically-based rendering -- presumably hoping that if they put on a different pair of glasses, maybe they'll spot anything other than a mountain of evidence that it doesn't work. So you have to let yourself consider every angle, no matter how strange. 720 frames of 720p video. That's all you need. That's 30 seconds of HD footage. Get a computer to conjure up those 720 frames. Summon DaVinci's ghost, and you win. Whenever someone finally solves this, you'll think "Oh, right. That technique makes sense." But it only makes sense because you see it works. Till then, that correct answer will seem to be a complete waste of time. Think of Airbnb, and how awful their idea sounded. Yet when someone spent a couple years exploring the problem space, shazam! Out popped a billion-dollar company. Since there is ~zero chance these ideas are anywhere close to the right answer, here are the two avenues I left off with: 1. A video camera generates images that pass the Carmack criterion. Ask yourself: why do those videos look real? And why is it so important to judge video, not photos? (It's crucial.) This is key: Are you absolutely certain you should be ignoring the fact that any old camcorder's videos look real? Whip out your phone. Take a video. That video looks real. Why? Quantify the difference vs footage of the latest game engine. (Try to avoid using the latest movies as a basis of comparison, because movies mix real-life footage into their VFX. Our criteria of "fully-simulated video" is strict by design: it keeps us honest about our progress. Especially to ourselves.) 2. After meditating for a year on why crappy cellphone videos look real, you may start thinking along the lines of "how can I write a program to mimic the essence of that realism?" It looks real because the colors are exactly right. Think of evolution, and how long we've been evolving. That whole time, every single one of our ancestors were staring at images that they believed were real. Our brains are wired to notice even a hint of strangeness. ("When we notice there's something strange about a video, what exactly is going on there? What do we mean by that?" is another "fun" question.) Now, wouldn't it be handy if someone knew how to write a program that can mimic real-life data? If only such a technique were possible... We even have an infinite stream of pre-classified data to feed it: phones and webcams. Hmmm. :)
pizza234 9y ago
Does anybody know what's the technical ground for some games to have dark areas turn brighter (typically, of a squashed, dark, green/blue) instead of darker? I remember one game ("Through the woods") which had this problem in a very aggressive form. It was very visible while playing, but it's hard to find a screenshot. Here, for example, the house on the left (but also the cabin in the center: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0ff9c9c29ba576d021b2332a3547800a35f2.600x338.jpg?t=1477404343 http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0... What's the exact issue? Is it a tone mapping problem? I'm curious, because I have a rather good monitor, and some dark games (eg. "Alien: Isolation") are equally dark, but don't look as bad as this.
- pasta 9y ago
  Looks like environment lighting to me. I'm not sure this is the case in your example, but a lot of render engines use an environment light when rays don't detect collision. So the camera is looking at the wall of the house and bounces into oblivion. Therefore the environment values are used. And since the stones of the house are gray a lot of environment light bounces back to the camera. But when the camera is looking at the trees a lot of rays bounce to leaves and the ground returning almost no light back to the camera. I would even say that your example looks realistic (although way to dark).
mstade 9y ago
Compelling article, but I can’t help but feel the author hasn’t appreciated some of these games on an HDR capable screen. They call out Battlefield 1 and Horizon Zero Dawn, both of which look stunning in HDR mode on an LG OLED screen. BF1 only got HDR mode implemented in a patch fairly recently, and before then was unplayable on an OLED with its deep blacks, it was a contrast fest with no luminance range what so ever. After the patch however, that all changed. I’ve never played HZD in anything but HDR mode (in fact, I bought the game specifically to test HDR) so admittedly I don’t know the difference there. All I know is in HDR mode, HZD is one of the prettiest games I’ve ever played, with fantastic colors and brilliant transitions in luminance. HDR I feel is one of those things you just can’t appreciate in screenshots or comparison videos. You have to get a good screen (I can’t see myself coming back from OLED, it’s – no pun intended – a game changer) capable of HDR and just appreciate it for yourself, it’s really something. I’m sure it’ll be even better as technology matures and game developers become more familiar with it, and as well the market penetration of HDR capable screens increase, but to say they don’t know what they’re doing now seems a bit of a stretch. Especially if all you have to go on are screenshots.
Bodell 9y ago
Honestly, I'm tired of the race for games to just 'look' better. Most of the time it seems as if it is a detriment to actual gameplay and frame rate. I would definitely prefer games to look bad (or preferably stylized in a way that works for the game) over having a somewhat realistic looking game ( only when your standing still so the frame rate doesn't dip) and terrible mechanics and a bad story. Far to much information and talk about making games look better and very little about how to make games actually better. Modern gaming to me has become the same as clicking the X on hundreds of popups from your windows 98 machine. Just with somewhat realistic looking ugly faces instead of X's.

374 points by megaman22 9y ago

Some pretty bold and controversial (and subjective) statements, but I think the author makes a good case! Very interesting article.

kevlar1818 9y ago
"ventspace" indeed, but I agree--it's an interesting perspective.

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Raphmedia 9y ago

I've always said (as a joke) that all game developers must have bad eyesight and dirty glasses. Everything is blurry, you can't see far, you get dirt over your vision and there are glares and lens-flares all over. What's worst is that this is done on purpose and on almost all the games. They must think that this is what real life look like.

turc1656 9y ago
I rarely play games but the most recent game I played was Alien: Isolation. It had been quite a while since I played a game before that so I was surprised to see a lot of these things on by default. Specifically, chromatic aberration. Why the hell would anyone add in a setting for that? I get that they were going for the Super8/VHS type of look but it's just really distracting. I forgot what the other settings were but I turned off a lot of those junk visual effects and then things looked beautiful.
- potatolicious 9y ago
  I also can't stand chromatic aberration in games - especially because it's so freakishly exaggerated compared to actual CA you would experience with old video/photo gear. A lens that completely separates color channels is defective. It was defective in 1950 and it's defective today, so unless your goal was to replicate the look of hopelessly broken hardware, it's in no way "vintage". Which I think goes more generally into my issue with game graphics - the taking of interesting effects (depth of field, chromatic aberration, lens flares, etc) and cranking it up to 11 for its own sake.
- taw55 9y ago
  Epic added chromatic aberation to the new Unreal Tournament at some point and the mob started sharpening their pitchforks. The reason given afterwards was that they think it’s important to break the “sterile” cg look by roughening the image slightly. I can see their point, games are at the point where they look “photoreal”, but not like a photo. I find the almost-but-not-quite realism jarring, personally, I even prefer playing older games usually because of it. so I can understand why devs try all kinds of tricks to alleviate it.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
In the past draw distances were much worse. But those restrictions spurred creativity. For example, the miserable draw distance of the PlayStation 1 resulted in the developers of Silent Hill to hide faraway rendering with a thick fog, which soon became an iconic theme for all Silent Hill games, even as the hardware far surpassed the need to keep it.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Tons of games in that era had dense fog for that reason.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Yes but in silent hill they gave a reason for it as opposed to just being something the player was supposed to ignore. They took the limitation and used it in world.
acchow 9y ago
They do this in many action movies (especially Michael Bay) as well. They believe the audience prefers these over-the-top effects. Based off the revenue of entire film franchises with millions of people returning for sequels of more of the same, I think they nailed what consumers want?
aerique 9y ago
The first thing I turn off in most games is Bloom. I actually do have glasses and the bloom effect in most games just looks like my glasses are greasy, no thanks. Also, AA is another thing I generally turn off. It gives quite a performance boost and the resolution these days is high enough that I'm not bothered by it.

NathanKP 9y ago

A lot of the oversaturation problem can be attributed to bad displays. Think about early Instagram. Everyone used terrible super saturated filters on their photos because the early smart phone screens were so bad, and got washed out so easily in the sunlight. By overcompensating with filters you got a photo that looked good on a bad screen, even in sunny conditions. The same was true of early games. Gamers love the bright colors of World of Warcraft for instance because displays were bad, and it was easier to watch bright colors for hours on end while gaming. Even today my modern TV looks pretty bad in the sunlight. As much as I love the muted colors of Breath of the Wild I have to admit that without closing my curtains its really hard to tell what's going on if a sunbeam is hitting the TV. I think as gamer's screens get better we will start to see a transition away from exaggerated brightness and a trend toward more realism, just like Instagram has transitioned largely from a platform that overcompensated for bad smartphone screens to a #nofilter style.

fulafel 9y ago
WoW was released the same year as LCD monitor sales first surpassed CRTs (2003). So in the early days of WoW, people actually got better colors than a few years later when most people had dumped CRTs for the relatively poor consumer LCD monitors of the day.
- tomxor 9y ago
  I was just a kid, but as far as I remember the transition to LCD brought worse colour not better. To be clear, i'm not talking about early professional colourists LCD displays that were £5000 or whatever. Surely everyone is familiar with those horrible TN panels in laptops... desktop LCDs used the same tech once.
  - pilsetnieks 9y ago
    That's the point - that in the first years while CRTs were still quite widespread, people had better displays than a few years later when many had switched to terrible early LCD screens.

chrisseaton 9y ago

> We would need 20 bits of just luminance to represent [the range 1,000,000:1 I don't understand this statement. Why do you need a certain number of bits to represent a large range? You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower. Representing a large luminance range isn't a problem of resolution though is it? It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. If I represented the same luminance range with a thousand bits it doesn't do anything to solve the core problem, does it? So why does the number of bits matter? Not a graphics programmer, so genuinely asking, not saying the article is wrong!

ttoinou 9y ago
It's a problem of presenting that contrast ratio on a screen that is not capable of a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 If you have such a high contrast ratio, it also means you have discretized amount of light in such amount or more. Talking about the number of bits minimum needed indeed makes the assumption you are storing and manipulating light in a linear way (hypothesis not true for most 8 bpc rgb values).
sandofsky 9y ago
The larger the dynamic range, the more bits you need to represent the possible values in between. Imagine a gradient that smoothly transitions from black to white. 8 bit color means only 256 shades of luminance, which would quickly show banding artifacts. In fact, the entire reason we gamma encode images is because 256 is too small for even a low dynamic range monitor. Gamma encoding is a clever technique to give us more bits to represent shadows, which humans are more sensitive to than highlights.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  I think O.P. understand that since he wrote "You can encode a range using any number of bits you want, but if you use fewer bits the resolution within may be lower.", applying a curve solves high dynamic range but lowers the resolution
- deleted 9y ago

ndh2 9y ago

I feel like this post does nothing in terms of educating readers. It all sounds very interesting, but I didn't learn anything. It alters between putting the blame on technical limitations and ignorance, so I would have liked to see a suggestion on how to address either of these.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
It's a well-written and informative post, it deserves a little more praise than "does nothing in terms of educating readers". What he is discussing is about aesthetics. There are two things at play here: the big studio business model relies on making blockbusters, so you pack together a few hundred devs and artists and try to pop out the biggest game you can. The other is that many devs are technically trained but not especially artistically educated. They have a limited understanding of lighting, color, framing a scene, etc. Someone who has made some great criticisms of this as well as provided real solutions is Eskil Steenberg.
- Aperson4321 9y ago
  Link please to Eskil Steenbergs writings!
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I'd suggest this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ
    - Aperson4321 9y ago
      Thank you! Eskil is such a wizard.
    - corysama 9y ago
      That entire presentation is amazing. I recommend it every chance I get.
- xigency 9y ago

skybrian 9y ago

It makes sense for artists to concentrate on the details of how games look, and this article provides some good insight into that world. But using stark moral terms for aesthetic judgements seems rather insular at best. When I think about games like Minecraft, Factorio, RimWorld, and so on, I wonder if maybe imitating movie-quality graphics is really as important as the author thinks it is? It's only a small part of the experience.

fhood 9y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the author was protesting against the misuse of techniques for imitating movie quality graphics. He held up BOTW for not attempting such imitation.

jdlyga 9y ago

Half Life: The Lost Coast, this is all your fault!

deleted 9y ago

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coldcode 9y ago

I play World Of Tanks and tried every one of their mappings (forget what they call them). Even the one I can tolerate makes the tanks look like toys in a sandbox. Never feels like a real tank.

Kiro 9y ago

> But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. Until graphics and animation are photorealistic I prefer my games to look videogamey. All those 4 screenshots are beautiful and I wouldn't want them any other way.

ttoinou 9y ago

Related to that, colors of videos on the internet (and YouTube) are always kinda ugly and (I think) not very faithful of what the color artists intended to show... I'm not sure but I think one of the issues are from the 16 - 235 channel remapping

nts34nhteo90 9y ago
It's probably more likely due to the fact that codecs for videos on YouTube tend to have lower resolution in the red and blue channels, which leads to very bad blocky artifacting around bright red and bright blue areas.
- andrewf 9y ago
  I think everything else (Blu-Ray, DVD, cable TV) is using the same technique.
anentropic 9y ago
YouTube don't seem to handle colour profiles correctly or there is some problem in the pipeline between uploading your video and it getting reproduced on screen by the player inside a web browser videos exported from e.g. FCPX have colour profile attached and look right when played back in Quicktime desktop player, but the contrast always gets messed up when it comes back through YouTube this is a separate issue from compression artefacts

vinistois 9y ago

This article makes me appreciate the balance struck in GTA. IMHO this type of scene is better than any of the examples shown in the article: http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB4SamD3UmQ1HF7Qf1bsg_0_0.jpg http://prod.hosted.cloud.rockstargames.com/ugc/gta5photo/YjB...

ttoinou 9y ago
This picture is from a video game ?!
- NoodleIncident 9y ago
  Look at the white brick pillars in the background behind the car; they're exactly the same. Some other stuff like the soda bottle pops out as well. It does look nice though.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    I don't know if there's supposed to be some depth-of-field effect going on here, or what, but I find it really jarring that the resolution of the textures applied to objects in the scene are so different. The car and that one section of wall are super-sharp and high-resolution, then right next to them some of the trash is fuzzy, blurry lo-res textures.
    - vinistois 9y ago
      well, yeah. do you have any idea how massive the world map is in GTA??? Of course they have to scale the textures.
    - bananicorn 9y ago
      In this case it seems it's some sort of DoF-Effect, since the lines between the objects seem to blur too.
- distantsounds 9y ago
  Yes, there are mods out there that make GTA look like a photo-realistic adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cbL3HUqAJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cbL3HUqAJU

jasonlotito 9y ago

From part 0, they make the claim and question: > So why the heck do most games look so bad? And then they go on to pick a game that people specifically calling out for looking amazing: HZD. In fact, the problem seems to be: > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. To which I would reply: because they are video games. A photograph doesn't pass as film, and film doesn't pass as a photograph (though the nature of the two, film essentially being a lot of photographs). A video game must serve a different purpose than a photograph or a film. The players interact with the game, and therefore the intent and purpose is different. Glares on the screen aren't just there to add lens flare, but to make it harder to see because that's part of the challenge. It is harder to see, and you have to deal with that to overcome the challenge. That can be offset by keeping the sun to your back. Same with grime in the screen, or other such things. You want to highlight the things players need to react to, and in such a way that allow them to react quickly. There is so much more, and yet so far this article is only referencing the pure look and seems to ignore the goals of the medium. I'll reserve judgement until I read the next parts of the articles, but until then, I can't help but wonder if this really matters.

HelloNurse 9y ago
Most games attempt to look realistic, and they fail. They definitely try to look like film, so comparing them to film is perfectly fair: it is an impossible standard that masochist, mannerist or hopeless game art directors have freely chosen for their projects and by which they deserve and demand to be judged. Failure at realistic game graphics is so common, so taken for granted, that the scale of artistic accomplishment shifts downwards: if HZD looks only slightly bad, not constantly, and without disgusting the player too much, it's considered to have "amazing" graphics.

imcrs 9y ago

Artstyle is far far more important than graphical capability. A game like Team Fortress 2, released in 2007 (!) looks so much better than many modern games because there is a coherence and style to the art. It's not "HD" for the sake of "HD." We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. But some restraint really works wonders.

theandrewbailey 9y ago
> We're in a period where the graphical canvas is getting larger every year, and the temptation is to fill it with as much color and pop as possible. It's been a while, but last I looked, it seemed that the temptation was to use ever muddier and desaturated visuals, with as much glare and shiny surfaces as possible.
- subwayclub 9y ago
  It comes and goes in phases according to the available technology. The first Quake was all muddy brown and gray. Quake 2 and Unreal both introduced color lighting and looked like a disco on Saturday night. Mid-2000s games added a lot of new lighting and post-processing effects but they had limitations causing harsh shadows and highlights, hence another round of gray/brown photorealism came through. But in this decade things are finally feeling more evened out. Lighting models are sophisticated enough to allow for designs similar to a film set or photo shoot, and post-processing is getting past basic glows and filters and into a spectrum of quality/performance tradeoffs. Of course, the games that don't aim for photorealism always age better. That's been the case since people started digitizing photographs for games.
bo1024 9y ago
I think this is a great point. It's why even cartoon-art games like Super Mario Brothers (1985) can age really well visually while games that put so much effort into graphics still age poorly. If the main goal in a game is to make the graphics of yesterday look and feel obsolete, then that game will probably look and feel obsolete tomorrow...
9y ago

gilbetron 9y ago

The point of most video games is to be distinct, not to look like reality. Furthermore, they use high-contrast to help distinguish game elements. Games are not movies.

zanny 9y ago
Came looking for this. Unnatural contrast is good in games because it can help players distinguish different set pieces easier. This is also why a lot of people prefer older FPS titles or games like TF2 used stylized profiles of the characters that stand out. In some games, you want interpretation of the game scene to be a challenge, but in most games, you want players to easily tell what they are looking at. Using high contrast / distinct models / distinct animations / color differentiation all help to achieve that.
- desertrider12 9y ago
  TF2 is very pretty and it’s clear that a lot of thought went into the color palettes and visual effects. The examples of bad effects in this article are the result of developers thinking “this is how games look”. I don’t think they got as far as planning how to guide the player’s attention.
- cousin_it 9y ago
  Photos and film need to be readable too. I think gaming culture has poor taste in art for historical reasons. Here's some games that were called "gorgeous": https://www.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/COW-IW_E3_Ship-Assault-Zero-G-Combat_WM.jpg https://www.dualshockers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/COW-... http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png http://assets1.ignimgs.com/2014/01/22/capture9png-e9804c.png http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust-an-elysian-tail-xbox-360-1345475788-020.jpg http://www.gamesknit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/dust-an-... But there's a small minority of games that do look great: http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gallery/the-order-1886-release-day-screens/the-order_-1886_20150215102558.jpg http://cdn3-www.playstationlifestyle.net/assets/uploads/gall... https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow-knight/screenshots/hollow-knight-screenshot-0.jpg https://www.gamegrin.com/assets/games/hollow-knight/screensh... https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/08/cupheadcarrot.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/...

AcerbicZero 9y ago

As a fairly avid gamer, but there is a reason why my top 10 games are all fairly mediocre in the graphics department. High end Triple-AAA games with "Great" graphics usually lack depth in their mechanics, and while this isn't always true, it happens enough to keep me from enjoying them. There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion.

megaman22 9y ago
> There is a reason why Skyrim, Mount&Blade, GTAV, etc are still dominating playtime charts years after release. Good enough graphics + deep, flexible mechanics is a much better combination in my opinion. Those are all sandbox games that you effectively never stop playing. People tell me that there's a story and an endgame in Skyrim, but I've played a few hundred hours without doing any main-line quests past the first city. Mount&Blade I've sunk even more into - there isn't even the pretense of a story there, so you're pretty much on your own if you want to role-play, or just take in the enjoyment of riding around, hacking at people, and looting their corpses.
- AcerbicZero 9y ago
  Those were just 3 of the more mainstream games with semi-limited graphics I could think of, but you're right they do share a sandbox style. Overwatch would be another example of a game where they put "good enough" graphics combined with much more refined mechanics (depending on who you ask, this last patch...eh) to achieve success Anyway, the point I was going for the last thing we need is having them spend even more effort trying to make pretty looking but mediocre playing games.
eduren 9y ago
You may have already tried it, but from this comment I think you'd really enjoy The Witcher 3.
- AceJohnny2 9y ago

jdright 9y ago

I hate this idea that it should be photo realistic. > But all of them feel videogamey and none of them would pass for a film or a photograph. Thanks, if they didn't looked at least "videogamey" I wouldn't have any interest. Stop this terrible trend of being a film!

rcthompson 9y ago
The point is that the lack of photorealism in the given examples is not intentional, but happens because of a lack of proper attention to the HDR aspects of rendering. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally deviate from photorealism in order to achieve a specific effect.
- jdright 9y ago
  HZD is intentional the way it is and it is perfectly good on my not-HDR tv. So he is missing the point.

HellDunkel 9y ago

The author makes a point of Nintendo opting out of HDR but does not realize thats due to hardware limits not allowing deferred shading. The HDR techniques he does not like are all made possible by the use of deferred shading. These techniques may be sometimes used to overky stylize the look but it is undisputed they create more realistic images.

eropple 9y ago
Promit Roy has been being knowledgeable about graphics since before I was in college. I kind of doubt he "doesn't realize" it. The dude is really, really good. And HDR doesn't really do anything to materially aid what he's calling out as well done in the first place. It's ancillary. It's not important. What's important is actual artistic intent and structure. That's what's lacking, along with a misunderstanding of why certain techniques work in film and don't when they are uncritically applied to games.
- HellDunkel 9y ago
  I dont know what kind of HDR you refer to. My point was that for realistc rendering or physically based, whatever you might call it, a linear workflow (light calc in linearized space) is crucial. It is very important for the artist too if you aim at realism. Of course it brings challenged such as exposure correction and managing dyamics. These challenges are not yet fully solved but to say we ought to abandon HDR and go back to SRGB is at least questionable... we might as well go back to mode 13.
Dylan16807 9y ago
What kind of esoteric hardware can't do deferred shading? I really doubt that the switch lacks the ability, and I know it doesn't lack the processing power.
Promit 9y ago
The Switch is perfectly capable of both deferred shading and HDR, which are themselves independent unrelated techniques. You can make an argument about whether or not those are the best implementation trade-offs for that hardware, taking performance and desired visuals into account. But there's nothing inherently preventing you from doing it on the Switch and it's a fairly capable GPU in its own right. P.S. Unreal Engine reintroduced forward (non-deferred) rendering as an option last year because it's more efficient in VR.

bitwize 9y ago

The first game to feature (pseudo) HDR was actually Shadow of the Colossus, and it's still a beautiful game despite its washed out colors, super high contrast, and "that dynamic exposure adjustment effect nobody likes". It may have been the template for most or all of the "bad" games in the article. These effects are beautiful in Colossus because they were chosen for artistic reasons and they are artistically used. The lack of color saturation complements the game's lush, but somehow bleak and foreboding, natural environment. The extreme contrast highlights the differences between the dark and dank indoor environments of the various ruins and temples, and the raw untamed wilderness that lies outside them. And the dynamic exposure adjustment effect is, vaguely, supposed to parallel the main character's eyes adjusting as he moves from one kind of environment to another. (Either that or just "hey look, we can do this on a PS2!") It's kinda like how the parallax line-scrolling effects in Shadow of the Beast were amazing in that particular game at that particular time, but take the same effect in a shitty game -- like, say, Bubsy -- and it just looks awful and tiresome.

rcthompson 9y ago

Everyone commenting here that they don't care about photorealism in their games is missing the point. The example games (and movie) given at the start of the article lack an appearance of photorealism not because they were going for something else, but because they either didn't pay enough attention to the HDR rendering, or else they didn't have the expertise to do it right. The article also gives examples of games that intentionally went with a non-photorealistic look to achieve a specific effect. So the point is not "these games look bad because they aren't photorealistic", it's "these games look bad because their HDR rendering is bad". I don't know enough myself about HDR rendering to have an opinion on whether the author is right or wrong about any of this, but people arguing that the author is wrong because games shouldn't look photorealistic are attacking a straw man.

gt_ 9y ago
I can confirm everything except gamer audience concerns. I don’t game. I have worked in film production camera department, post-production and now CGI. Color grading and compositing in particular are not specialties of mine, but I know the systems well, and I can confirm the technical critique in the text. This author does an impressive job of cutting out the bull and getting to the bare issues.
- zeta0134 9y ago
  As a gamer, I can also confirm that I tend to have a tough time with dark areas in a lot of mainstream games. If I can get the game to realize that I'm trying to look at them (usually by getting the bright sky out of my viewport so it does the "HDR adjust" fake thing) then the darks come out of the contrast floor and I can suddenly make out the detail. The problem with the game doing fake-HDR is that while it looks great in trailers (or... at the very least, looks like the engine is doing something fancy with lighting, "great"-ness notwithstanding) it doesn't match what my real eyes would do in a situation. Unlike film, a video game doesn't have control over where I'm going to point the camera. I do. And sometimes, I need to see over that ridge, but the detail in the shadows is important too, and the game camera can't see what I'm actually looking at (with my eyes) and adjust accordingly. Breath of the Wild is a great counter example, because it doesn't really try to do the HDR adjust thing at all. It doesn't really need to; sure its daylight scenes are a bit washed out, but real daylight is a bit washed out too. My eyes adjust, just like they would outside, and I can actually see what I'm doing. That's important! With games, tempting though it is to control the camera effects just like you would when shooting film, you can't control the player's actions. It's usually better for gameplay to mellow out the effects, so the player can focus on their actions without being distracted by the 'pretty' effects.

andrewguenther 9y ago

Maybe I just play too many video games, but I don't think any of those "terrible" screenshots look bad. If anything, the foggy image from Breath of the Wild looks worse than any of them. What am I missing? What is supposed to be bad about these?

pls2halp 9y ago
The attempts at photorealism brings them barely into the uncanny valley, but overdone HDR pulls them firmly into the bottom of the valley. To think they look bad, you have to be the sort of person who didn't like Tarkin's CGI in Rogue One.
djur 9y ago
Some of it is just one's personal taste, but I would say that a practical difference is that I find it difficult to pick out details in the images called out as "bad". My eyes feel overwhelmed by the huge shifts in contrast and it's hard to visually identify objects in the very dark areas and the very shiny, bright areas. I also get a very strange sense of depth from those images -- it feels like everything is either very close or very far away, without having a sense of how far apart objects actually are. In comparison, in the BOTW screenshot, I can clearly identify objects of interest (a shrine, a tower, a volcano, a river, a bridge) and have a sense of where they are compared to each other and myself. That said, I feel like it's not a completely fair comparison -- the "bad" images all seem to have the camera in a dark area looking out and up into a bright area, while the BOTW camera is on top of an exposed mountaintop looking out into the sunset. The lighting is going to look a lot different regardless. However, the HZD image after _that_ is really quite garish and harder to justify.
itronitron 9y ago
That particular BotW screenshot isn't entirely representative, what is remarkable about BotW is that going for a non-photorealistic aesthetic makes the game more compelling as there are fewer details competing for your visual attention. I highly recommend playing or viewing it at 1080p on a very large screen.

gilrain 9y ago

It's amazing how many commenters seem to be embarrassing themselves by trying to be the first to wildly misunderstand the problems being discussed and reduce them to trite memes. You're not even disagreeing with the thrust of the article in your vehement objections. Yes, this indicates the article was poorly written. I advise you move on rather than reflexively attack nothing.

reiichiroh 9y ago

HDR is the new "next-gen Brown!"

lanius 9y ago

I would guess this isn't a priority for the industry because gamers themselves don't care. Case in point: gaming monitors. Gaming monitors advertise high-refresh rates and low input lag but rarely color quality. What percentage of gamers use wide gamut monitors or even perform color calibration?

ancientworldnow 9y ago
FWIW, I'm a colorist and have very expensive color critical monitors and calibration probes. For GUI monitors I've started recommending gaming panels for suites that don't want to invest in professional graphics displays. Once calibrated these monitors are surprisingly accurate and hold the calibration well (at least as good as professional displays many times more expensive - though still a far cry from color critical displays). The expanded refresh rates are a nice bonus for eye relief as well.

puzzlingcaptcha 9y ago

As HDR panels used for TVs 'trickle down' to PC displays the HDR part of the problem will solve itself. Perhaps then people will focus more on color grading (although I suspect over-saturation will always be a staple in some genres).

supernintendo 9y ago

This can really be attributed to a general rule of thumb in game development: aesthetics are more important than graphics.

hasenj 9y ago

The resident evil screenshot looks incredibly realistic. I thought that was a real photograph placed there to contrast reality with games. Until I read the paragraph below it.

mozumder 9y ago

Some films are absolutely just as contrast-y as these HDR images. In particular, Fujiilm RDP-III slide film. See: https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/ https://www.flickr.com/groups/provia100f/pool/ But yes, Arri does have a beautiful soft look along with Fuji digital cameras, and plenty of film stocks do as well. It all depends on the tastes. Gamers aren't going for soft reality. A lot of hard-edged gamers are going to go for the high-contrast, desaturated ExTreMe ChaLLeNgE look.

pasta 9y ago

Isn't this just a matter of taste? There are a lot of tone mapping algorithms everybody know about. So it's just a matter of taste choosing the one you like. Edit: As far as I know render engines use the complete dynamic range until the last step which converts it to a 16 bit output range. So maybe games can let the user decide which tone mapping algorithm to use.

pasta 9y ago
*24 bit output range

taw55 9y ago

While on the subject of graphics in games... Another pet peeve of mine: ambient occlusion (crude GI approximation) and especially SSAO (crude approximation of a crude approximation). Corners don’t look like that: http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/ http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/ (Ambient occlusion proper and in moderation I think looks fine, but most games really overdo it.)

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Latch on to that idea -- corners don't look like that -- and follow it to its logical conclusion: no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality. That's a huge leap, but it has the benefit of being true. (To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.)
- taw55 9y ago
  My main problem with it isn’t that it’s unrealistic per se, just that it looks bad on static geometry. But SSAO is typically sold as a “realism” feature.
- sdwisely 9y ago
  > (To be precise: no one has ever created fully-simulated video capable of fooling human observers anywhere close to 50% of the time. The video has to be reasonably long (>30sec) and complex. But in a double-blind test, almost any nature video will handily beat any synthetic video.) Out of curiosity is this from something? it sounds like you're citing something and for realtime I'd agree. I think people are fooled everyday by raytraced images (movie cg etc). > no one knows how to make any fully-simulated video look indistinguishable from reality. I'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it fast.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    I'd say we know how to do it, we don't know how to do it fast. If all I do here today is hatch an egg of doubt in your head, I would be delighted. Someone needs to carry the torch.. My life has turned to other interests. It's the central problem. It's as hard as AGI, and it might be as impactful as the invention of the airplane. Think of it. Fully-simulated video, indistinguishable from reality. In many ways, it was my first love. The desire to be a gamedev drove me to learn programming. I ended up a graphics dev -- Carmack's old path. My job was to make a certain game engine look better. What an innocent problem... 12 years later, I still feel the pull, the need to blow off everything in my life and bend a computer to my will. To our will. The human mind has never once achieved this goal. And it was the perfect problem... I never cared much about fame or money. But to be the first. Think of it... How can you not want to spend the rest of your life on this? The solution is out there, taunting us. Everyone is pursuing physics, when all we need to do is pursue the fact that video cameras can already generate images that look identical to real life. The ancients have made up stories about the sky and stars since long before civilization. Put yourself in their shoes, if they even had shoes. Look up. It's the night sky, far brighter than anything we can see today. Imagine staring up at the infinite complexity, wondering, how does it work? Why do the stars go the way they go? We tell stories; could one of the stories be right? A few millennia later, one person had an idea: What if we watch the stars very, very carefully, and collect the stories very carefully? We could compare the movements of the stars to the stories, so that the alternative theories might be distinguished from one another. This was the key to modern science, and the root of wisdom. When you stop thinking about what everyone else is doing, you're free to hit on solutions that everyone else overlooked. And think of the feeling you'd get when you finally solved it. Can you imagine? You'd get the same rush as the Wright brothers, or Ford when he made the assembly line, or McCarthy when he stumbled across Lisp. If you or anyone else intends to take on this challenge, know this: The fact that no one believes you when you say "No one has ever done this, and no one has any idea how to do it," is your biggest advantage. It means you're free to spend the next five years figuring out that solution that everyone else missed because they were too busy chasing the pipe dream that if you throw enough physics+time at a computer, it will produce synthetic video that fools people into thinking it's real. The moment people realize that it's probably not that hard, you'll lose your advantage, because every top tech company will start exploring your problem space. Like if in 1902 you'd hinted to a top university the gist of Einstein's thesis. No one would take you seriously. Lucky for you. So, what's the secret technique? Well, if I knew that, I'd have fulfilled my 12-year dream. But I know a few things that will move you (12-N) years toward the goal. There is one rule, and one rule alone. You have to force yourself to stay true to it, or else nothing else you do will matter. Here it is: If you get a dozen people together, and show them a mix of 10 real videos and 10 simulated videos, and those videos are reasonably complex, like clips from a nature documentary, then 12 out of 12 people will effortlessly call out your fake videos as fake and your real videos as real. It's not even close. That's how far away we are from the goal of fully-simulated video indistinguishable from reality. Maybe I've hooked you at this point. Maybe not. But if anyone comes up with a way to fool those 12 people so completely that their responses are no better than random chance, you win. Let's call this the "Carmack criterion." If you tried administering the above test to a dozen clones of Carmack, here's how they'd sound: "That's a fake. That one's real. Fake. Fake. Real. Real." No matter how much ornament or showmanship you throw into the video, you can't fool Carmack. He'll report whatever his eyes are telling him. And as of 2017, he'll be right 100% of the time. His eyes would shout: "None of those fakes were even close to real! Are you kidding? One of the real videos was of a lion taking down a gazelle. I know every artist in the gamedev industry. None of them have ever produced anything approaching that level of quality, even working together." That, and that alone, is the game. Literally nothing else matters. If you can fool people until their responses are statistically identical to RNG, you've done it. You're world-famous. Yer a wizard. Corollary: you can use the Carmack criterion like a compass for every decision you face. Should you research physically-based rendering, or try to apply machine learning? The latter seems unpromising. Yet Hollywood has been administering the Carmack test to millions of people, most recently with Avatar, which completely rules out physically-based rendering. So we know to spend zero time on it. As you can see, that razor is so sharp that it will cut away every illusion you might try to cling to that humans are anywhere close to achieving the Carmack criterion. Or that some smart hacker somewhere has a pretty good idea of how to achieve it, or that it's just a matter of letting computers advance another few decades, or any other false reason that those around you like to tell themselves. But if mainstream ideas are dead-ends, then what should we research? I hesitate to give concrete suggestions, because the history of science demonstrates that progress isn't made like that. Whatever the real solution is, it's far beyond anything you or I can imagine today. People were forced by mathematics to believe that planets' orbits were elliptical. An ellipse is the only shape that makes the numbers come out right. Yet how many of our ancestors came up with that idea? Even by accident, it's probably too bizarre for anyone to seriously consider it. Not without mathematics. Yet that's a positive statement: It meant that if someone were audacious enough to trust in mathematics alone, they could determine the right answer. The solution was always there, waiting for you to find it. To make any progress at all, your ideas will need to seem shockingly different. The whole world has spent two decades going over every inch of physically-based rendering -- presumably hoping that if they put on a different pair of glasses, maybe they'll spot anything other than a mountain of evidence that it doesn't work. So you have to let yourself consider every angle, no matter how strange. 720 frames of 720p video. That's all you need. That's 30 seconds of HD footage. Get a computer to conjure up those 720 frames. Summon DaVinci's ghost, and you win. Whenever someone finally solves this, you'll think "Oh, right. That technique makes sense." But it only makes sense because you see it works. Till then, that correct answer will seem to be a complete waste of time. Think of Airbnb, and how awful their idea sounded. Yet when someone spent a couple years exploring the problem space, shazam! Out popped a billion-dollar company. Since there is ~zero chance these ideas are anywhere close to the right answer, here are the two avenues I left off with: 1. A video camera generates images that pass the Carmack criterion. Ask yourself: why do those videos look real? And why is it so important to judge video, not photos? (It's crucial.) This is key: Are you absolutely certain you should be ignoring the fact that any old camcorder's videos look real? Whip out your phone. Take a video. That video looks real. Why? Quantify the difference vs footage of the latest game engine. (Try to avoid using the latest movies as a basis of comparison, because movies mix real-life footage into their VFX. Our criteria of "fully-simulated video" is strict by design: it keeps us honest about our progress. Especially to ourselves.) 2. After meditating for a year on why crappy cellphone videos look real, you may start thinking along the lines of "how can I write a program to mimic the essence of that realism?" It looks real because the colors are exactly right. Think of evolution, and how long we've been evolving. That whole time, every single one of our ancestors were staring at images that they believed were real. Our brains are wired to notice even a hint of strangeness. ("When we notice there's something strange about a video, what exactly is going on there? What do we mean by that?" is another "fun" question.) Now, wouldn't it be handy if someone knew how to write a program that can mimic real-life data? If only such a technique were possible... We even have an infinite stream of pre-classified data to feed it: phones and webcams. Hmmm. :)

pizza234 9y ago

Does anybody know what's the technical ground for some games to have dark areas turn brighter (typically, of a squashed, dark, green/blue) instead of darker? I remember one game ("Through the woods") which had this problem in a very aggressive form. It was very visible while playing, but it's hard to find a screenshot. Here, for example, the house on the left (but also the cabin in the center: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0ff9c9c29ba576d021b2332a3547800a35f2.600x338.jpg?t=1477404343 http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/368430/ss_74ec0... What's the exact issue? Is it a tone mapping problem? I'm curious, because I have a rather good monitor, and some dark games (eg. "Alien: Isolation") are equally dark, but don't look as bad as this.

pasta 9y ago
Looks like environment lighting to me. I'm not sure this is the case in your example, but a lot of render engines use an environment light when rays don't detect collision. So the camera is looking at the wall of the house and bounces into oblivion. Therefore the environment values are used. And since the stones of the house are gray a lot of environment light bounces back to the camera. But when the camera is looking at the trees a lot of rays bounce to leaves and the ground returning almost no light back to the camera. I would even say that your example looks realistic (although way to dark).

mstade 9y ago

Compelling article, but I can’t help but feel the author hasn’t appreciated some of these games on an HDR capable screen. They call out Battlefield 1 and Horizon Zero Dawn, both of which look stunning in HDR mode on an LG OLED screen. BF1 only got HDR mode implemented in a patch fairly recently, and before then was unplayable on an OLED with its deep blacks, it was a contrast fest with no luminance range what so ever. After the patch however, that all changed. I’ve never played HZD in anything but HDR mode (in fact, I bought the game specifically to test HDR) so admittedly I don’t know the difference there. All I know is in HDR mode, HZD is one of the prettiest games I’ve ever played, with fantastic colors and brilliant transitions in luminance. HDR I feel is one of those things you just can’t appreciate in screenshots or comparison videos. You have to get a good screen (I can’t see myself coming back from OLED, it’s – no pun intended – a game changer) capable of HDR and just appreciate it for yourself, it’s really something. I’m sure it’ll be even better as technology matures and game developers become more familiar with it, and as well the market penetration of HDR capable screens increase, but to say they don’t know what they’re doing now seems a bit of a stretch. Especially if all you have to go on are screenshots.

Bodell 9y ago

Honestly, I'm tired of the race for games to just 'look' better. Most of the time it seems as if it is a detriment to actual gameplay and frame rate. I would definitely prefer games to look bad (or preferably stylized in a way that works for the game) over having a somewhat realistic looking game ( only when your standing still so the frame rate doesn't dip) and terrible mechanics and a bad story. Far to much information and talk about making games look better and very little about how to make games actually better. Modern gaming to me has become the same as clicking the X on hundreds of popups from your windows 98 machine. Just with somewhat realistic looking ugly faces instead of X's.