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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 loo

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.

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.