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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 s

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.