7 ms·

At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that graphics have plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are more polys, sure, there are higher re

by simias 6y ago

At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that graphics have plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights. But you don't really have the kind of gap we used to have between, say, the PS1 and PS2 for instance. Diminishing returns and all that. The problem is that, in my experience, this eye candy only matters for about 10 minutes when you get into a game, then you stop really paying attention to how it looks and you focus on the gameplay and story etc... Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO. At around 4 minute in the video they briefly mention the water effects. They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good. When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games to look a lot better, but I also expect gameplay and world interaction to progress massively. Fully interactive environments you can interact with like in the real world. You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc... It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost entirely focused on eye candy first and foremost. That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority, after all the Uncharted games are generally considered to be good games when I find them incredibly boring. I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games they'll have to come up with something new to keep pushing the envelope.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Your only commentary here is that it doesn't live up to your expectations. You wanted more. And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics? > That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game. All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me wrong, it looks decent!" could be predicted the second I read the submission title.
- skohan 6y ago
  Maybe it's just because I am old enough to remember playing Super Mario on a CRT, but that attitude sometimes astounds me. Like I have read many assessments that the latest Doom game's incredible framerates are nothing to be impressed by, because the game is "visually underwhelming". I think a lot of people don't understand how difficult real-time computer graphics are to implement, and I have difficulty viewing the world through their eyes.
  - geddy 6y ago
    You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the graphics in a game (which you play to escape real life) begin to mimic real life, it can feel underwhelming. For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.
    - tekknik 6y ago
      I love some pretty gfx as well, but I have the same feeling. Lately I’ve been finding the simplistic gfx of minecraft and terraria just fine especially given the mechanics are rather deep and enjoyable (for me at least). The simple graphics even add a bit of charm
      - geddy 6y ago
        Same here! Minecraft captured the hearts and minds of nearly every demographic, even with "rudimentary" blocky graphics. Never would have happened it went for realism. Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully. Sometimes the simpler, the better.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    I'm old enough to remember playing games on a CRT with a 32x24 screen resolution (ZX80, ZX81) and whilst I am thoroughly impressed with graphics technologies of today, I do have to echo the feeling that AAA games have slumped to a local minimum of effort in gameplay and story. But on the flipside, there's literally thousands of indie games with innovative, interesting gameplay, if not sparkling graphics.
- cargoshipit 6y ago
  It's the usual HN: pretentiousness abound. Can't even be excited about a wonderful tech demo.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Or maybe it takes thoughtfulness to read that comment for what it is: an opinion about priorities of game studios. And it resonates with me. I like eye candy like almost everyone and can appreciate technological marvels in CGI (and currently working with UE4 after hours, creating my own assets, I can appreciate how much work goes into modern game graphics). At the same time, I do feel many games these days try to use high-resolution textures and pretty shaders to paper over incoherent storylines and lack of gameplay depth. I think it's an entirely valid point to make.
- simias 6y ago
  I must have expressed myself poorly, my point was not that I don't think it looks good, my point is that I feel like all this effort is focused on a single metric, making stuff look good in trailers. Remember when HL2 was announced you had this super fancy physics engine? How objects would bounce and realistic react with each other, how you could stack things and come up with puzzles that would just use the physics engine without hardcoded scripts? HL2 was gorgeous looking but it was more than bump-mapping and complicated light models. You couldn't port HL2 to goldsrc and have it play the same. Meanwhile almost 2 decades later we're back to fully scripted puzzles, mostly non-interactive environments and AI that's generally limited to a glorified A* algorithm. This tech demo doesn't look decent, it looks really good, there's no arguing about it.
  - kevstev 6y ago
    I will even go farther and say that I feel like I have now been playing the same game for 25 years. The FPS genre gets some new tricks, but it's still the same basic game with a few new mechanics and tricks- I can pick up a game I have never played before and generally be reasonably competent at it within a few minutes- a stark contrast to when I picked up tribes for the first time and was completely useless in online play for at least a week. Graphics increases have been both incremental and with diminishing returns in recent generations.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much control over your physical space you can have with a mouse and keyboard while still allowing good character movement, so there are limitations on what can easily be done. On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience. So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).
- needs 6y ago
  I kinda agree with you, but I think it's expected: demos are just ads for technical people. So in a way you know that it's too good to be true. Plus they don't actually explain how it works, how the demo was made and what's the limits of their technology. They only show the good side, so people naturally wants to know the not-so-good side as well.
skohan 6y ago
I think raytracing has the potential to be a big leap forward. Real-time lighting and shadows are still incredibly limited, and most games are only able handle dynamic shadows from a hand-full of light-sources at a time. I think we don't see the difference yet because baked lighting gets a really good result, but I think after we live for a while in a world where every flickering candle, and every emissive texture in a game is a fully-fleged, shadow-casting, dymamic light source, then we are going to look back at current gen games and see how static and artificial the lighting is. But I do agree with you in general that more advanced simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Raytracing with anything resembling real environments with very large amount of details is not for tomorrow. Maybe 10-20 years down the road. So far most tech demos for current Raytracing happen with low-polygon use-cases.
danso 6y ago
That's funny you bring up the PS3, because my first reaction to the parent commenter and the OP video was how I remember thinking things couldn't get much better than the PS3 demos [0] – which now look comparatively primitive – but I've had that same feeling with PS4 and now PS5. But PS5 really does seem to be getting close to real-time interactive realism. But I agree with you that I expected games to be much "better" by 2020, back when I was a kid playing 7th Guest. I guess I couldn't understand back then how much manual, hard-to-scale labor and budget would have to go into story, dialogue, art, acting (plus salaries of A-list movie stars), mo-cap, etc. I expected in-depth scripted NPC behavior, like in 1992's Ultima VII [1], to be extremely commonplace and basic by now, but I obviously didn't understand back then what actual AI and emergent simulation requires (versus manual scripting, and testing of that scripting) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0 [1] https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/ https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Final Fantasy VII Remake characters are amazing - skin tone, hair, animation. Beautiful, beautiful sets. I can't imagine anything better.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I lost my mind when I saw the announcement for Killzone https://youtu.be/PDfu1mYQXEg https://youtu.be/PDfu1mYQXEg
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    The video that reignited Xbox360 vs PS3 forum battles around the internet.
    - esoterica 6y ago
      That was the Killzone 2 trailer, not the Killzone: Shadow Fall trailer the parent posted.
setpatchaddress 6y ago
I find that the best PS4 games look and play markedly better than the best PS3 games.
cargoshipit 6y ago
Not sure what you're on about. While playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War I was constantly admiring and enjoying the visuals.
ksec 6y ago
I agree that Story telling and Game Play is still the top priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the best graphics looking game ) more so than most "photorealistic" game in recent years. ( I will also admit I am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming ) But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years ago.
- pythonaut_16 6y ago
  The Zelda games (and Nintendo in general) are the perfect proof that great graphics are about way more than more sophisticated or technically advanced graphics. Many games on the Switch look way better than generic AAA games on PS4 and Xbox. Granted the Switch games are still somewhat held back by limited hardware. Personally I'd take Breath of the Wild over some generic UE4 game any day.
BorisTheBrave 6y ago
The UE5 demo show realtime GI. Current systems often rely on baking. So this feature really allows games to have more dynamic environments at the same visual quality as last gen. That's surely a win for gameplay.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
staticassertion 6y ago
I think there's just an obvious law of diminishing returns on certain things. If you double the number of triangles, it doesn't take long to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double it, it doesn't look that much better unless you're zooming way in on it. So there's two things here, I think: * There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic lighting. This turns into more of an immersion/ realism thing, and less of a "detail" thing. It's weird when your characters shadow doesn't move the way you expect with the light sources, it's weird when one part of the room is totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a light source, and the light isn't bouncing around it. * With VR, this will all matter way more. You're going to have people taking objects in the game and putting them right up to their face - suddenly the difference between X triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again, relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that's at least a foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR, so optimizing there makes a lot of sense. So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they open up possibilities for new mediums.
lasagnaphil 6y ago
However I see the new features in this particular demo as a game changer in many practical ways other than just eyecandy: - Realtime dynamic GI makes baking lights unnecessary, increasing iteration time for environment artists. - Also using this dynamic GI it is possible to create new gameplay mechanics based on dynamic lighting (for example in the demo the roof of the cave falls down and the area becomes lit, making more things visible) - The new animation system makes developers able to create natural motions that automatically adjust to the environment, which would also save a lot of developer time. - The demo explanation video mentions that the statue model assets are imported directly from ZBrush without any postprocessing (with the original triangle count, without baking any normal maps/LODs), which also saves time for artists importing their work to Unreal (although the file size costs might probably be a bit high to practically use this in every scenario)
ekianjo 6y ago
> They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good. Even CGI water looks typically very fake (except from afar), because we don't really have very good models for water/liquids. That's certainly not the priority for games either.
dmos62 6y ago
I agree. Many projects seem to spend so much resources on graphics, which are getting quite impressive (not photoreal, though who cares), but game mechanics aren't getting better. Netcode has improved, allowing for more variety in multiplayer experiences, but other than that I get a sense of a game-mechanics winter.
floatboth 6y ago
> there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights What I'm noticing is there's too much focus on fancy lights, over-the-top postprocessing effects with annoying crap like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections that hog a lot of performance for just reflecting your character in water puddles placed everywhere just to show the effect off, and so on. And not enough focus on good old textures and polygons. Approaching spherical objects closely still makes the polygons very very obvious. Staring directly at walls still shows how low res textures are. > You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things You might be looking for Minecraft! :D

by simias 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Your only commentary here is that it doesn't live up to your expectations. You wanted more. And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics? > That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game. All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me wrong, it looks decent!" could be predicted the second I read the submission title.

skohan 6y ago
Maybe it's just because I am old enough to remember playing Super Mario on a CRT, but that attitude sometimes astounds me. Like I have read many assessments that the latest Doom game's incredible framerates are nothing to be impressed by, because the game is "visually underwhelming". I think a lot of people don't understand how difficult real-time computer graphics are to implement, and I have difficulty viewing the world through their eyes.
- geddy 6y ago
  You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the graphics in a game (which you play to escape real life) begin to mimic real life, it can feel underwhelming. For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.
  - tekknik 6y ago
    I love some pretty gfx as well, but I have the same feeling. Lately I’ve been finding the simplistic gfx of minecraft and terraria just fine especially given the mechanics are rather deep and enjoyable (for me at least). The simple graphics even add a bit of charm
    - geddy 6y ago
      Same here! Minecraft captured the hearts and minds of nearly every demographic, even with "rudimentary" blocky graphics. Never would have happened it went for realism. Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully. Sometimes the simpler, the better.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  I'm old enough to remember playing games on a CRT with a 32x24 screen resolution (ZX80, ZX81) and whilst I am thoroughly impressed with graphics technologies of today, I do have to echo the feeling that AAA games have slumped to a local minimum of effort in gameplay and story. But on the flipside, there's literally thousands of indie games with innovative, interesting gameplay, if not sparkling graphics.
cargoshipit 6y ago
It's the usual HN: pretentiousness abound. Can't even be excited about a wonderful tech demo.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Or maybe it takes thoughtfulness to read that comment for what it is: an opinion about priorities of game studios. And it resonates with me. I like eye candy like almost everyone and can appreciate technological marvels in CGI (and currently working with UE4 after hours, creating my own assets, I can appreciate how much work goes into modern game graphics). At the same time, I do feel many games these days try to use high-resolution textures and pretty shaders to paper over incoherent storylines and lack of gameplay depth. I think it's an entirely valid point to make.
simias 6y ago
I must have expressed myself poorly, my point was not that I don't think it looks good, my point is that I feel like all this effort is focused on a single metric, making stuff look good in trailers. Remember when HL2 was announced you had this super fancy physics engine? How objects would bounce and realistic react with each other, how you could stack things and come up with puzzles that would just use the physics engine without hardcoded scripts? HL2 was gorgeous looking but it was more than bump-mapping and complicated light models. You couldn't port HL2 to goldsrc and have it play the same. Meanwhile almost 2 decades later we're back to fully scripted puzzles, mostly non-interactive environments and AI that's generally limited to a glorified A* algorithm. This tech demo doesn't look decent, it looks really good, there's no arguing about it.
- kevstev 6y ago
  I will even go farther and say that I feel like I have now been playing the same game for 25 years. The FPS genre gets some new tricks, but it's still the same basic game with a few new mechanics and tricks- I can pick up a game I have never played before and generally be reasonably competent at it within a few minutes- a stark contrast to when I picked up tribes for the first time and was completely useless in online play for at least a week. Graphics increases have been both incremental and with diminishing returns in recent generations.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much control over your physical space you can have with a mouse and keyboard while still allowing good character movement, so there are limitations on what can easily be done. On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience. So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).
needs 6y ago
I kinda agree with you, but I think it's expected: demos are just ads for technical people. So in a way you know that it's too good to be true. Plus they don't actually explain how it works, how the demo was made and what's the limits of their technology. They only show the good side, so people naturally wants to know the not-so-good side as well.

skohan 6y ago

I think raytracing has the potential to be a big leap forward. Real-time lighting and shadows are still incredibly limited, and most games are only able handle dynamic shadows from a hand-full of light-sources at a time. I think we don't see the difference yet because baked lighting gets a really good result, but I think after we live for a while in a world where every flickering candle, and every emissive texture in a game is a fully-fleged, shadow-casting, dymamic light source, then we are going to look back at current gen games and see how static and artificial the lighting is. But I do agree with you in general that more advanced simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.

ekianjo 6y ago
Raytracing with anything resembling real environments with very large amount of details is not for tomorrow. Maybe 10-20 years down the road. So far most tech demos for current Raytracing happen with low-polygon use-cases.

danso 6y ago

That's funny you bring up the PS3, because my first reaction to the parent commenter and the OP video was how I remember thinking things couldn't get much better than the PS3 demos [0] – which now look comparatively primitive – but I've had that same feeling with PS4 and now PS5. But PS5 really does seem to be getting close to real-time interactive realism. But I agree with you that I expected games to be much "better" by 2020, back when I was a kid playing 7th Guest. I guess I couldn't understand back then how much manual, hard-to-scale labor and budget would have to go into story, dialogue, art, acting (plus salaries of A-list movie stars), mo-cap, etc. I expected in-depth scripted NPC behavior, like in 1992's Ultima VII [1], to be extremely commonplace and basic by now, but I obviously didn't understand back then what actual AI and emergent simulation requires (versus manual scripting, and testing of that scripting) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0 [1] https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/ https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/

sergeykish 6y ago
Final Fantasy VII Remake characters are amazing - skin tone, hair, animation. Beautiful, beautiful sets. I can't imagine anything better.
renewiltord 6y ago
I lost my mind when I saw the announcement for Killzone https://youtu.be/PDfu1mYQXEg https://youtu.be/PDfu1mYQXEg
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  The video that reignited Xbox360 vs PS3 forum battles around the internet.
  - esoterica 6y ago
    That was the Killzone 2 trailer, not the Killzone: Shadow Fall trailer the parent posted.

setpatchaddress 6y ago

I find that the best PS4 games look and play markedly better than the best PS3 games.

cargoshipit 6y ago

Not sure what you're on about. While playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War I was constantly admiring and enjoying the visuals.

ksec 6y ago

I agree that Story telling and Game Play is still the top priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the best graphics looking game ) more so than most "photorealistic" game in recent years. ( I will also admit I am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming ) But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years ago.

pythonaut_16 6y ago
The Zelda games (and Nintendo in general) are the perfect proof that great graphics are about way more than more sophisticated or technically advanced graphics. Many games on the Switch look way better than generic AAA games on PS4 and Xbox. Granted the Switch games are still somewhat held back by limited hardware. Personally I'd take Breath of the Wild over some generic UE4 game any day.

BorisTheBrave 6y ago

The UE5 demo show realtime GI. Current systems often rely on baking. So this feature really allows games to have more dynamic environments at the same visual quality as last gen. That's surely a win for gameplay.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

staticassertion 6y ago

I think there's just an obvious law of diminishing returns on certain things. If you double the number of triangles, it doesn't take long to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double it, it doesn't look that much better unless you're zooming way in on it. So there's two things here, I think: * There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic lighting. This turns into more of an immersion/ realism thing, and less of a "detail" thing. It's weird when your characters shadow doesn't move the way you expect with the light sources, it's weird when one part of the room is totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a light source, and the light isn't bouncing around it. * With VR, this will all matter way more. You're going to have people taking objects in the game and putting them right up to their face - suddenly the difference between X triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again, relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that's at least a foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR, so optimizing there makes a lot of sense. So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they open up possibilities for new mediums.

lasagnaphil 6y ago

However I see the new features in this particular demo as a game changer in many practical ways other than just eyecandy: - Realtime dynamic GI makes baking lights unnecessary, increasing iteration time for environment artists. - Also using this dynamic GI it is possible to create new gameplay mechanics based on dynamic lighting (for example in the demo the roof of the cave falls down and the area becomes lit, making more things visible) - The new animation system makes developers able to create natural motions that automatically adjust to the environment, which would also save a lot of developer time. - The demo explanation video mentions that the statue model assets are imported directly from ZBrush without any postprocessing (with the original triangle count, without baking any normal maps/LODs), which also saves time for artists importing their work to Unreal (although the file size costs might probably be a bit high to practically use this in every scenario)

ekianjo 6y ago

> They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good. Even CGI water looks typically very fake (except from afar), because we don't really have very good models for water/liquids. That's certainly not the priority for games either.

dmos62 6y ago

I agree. Many projects seem to spend so much resources on graphics, which are getting quite impressive (not photoreal, though who cares), but game mechanics aren't getting better. Netcode has improved, allowing for more variety in multiplayer experiences, but other than that I get a sense of a game-mechanics winter.

floatboth 6y ago

> there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights What I'm noticing is there's too much focus on fancy lights, over-the-top postprocessing effects with annoying crap like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections that hog a lot of performance for just reflecting your character in water puddles placed everywhere just to show the effect off, and so on. And not enough focus on good old textures and polygons. Approaching spherical objects closely still makes the polygons very very obvious. Staring directly at walls still shows how low res textures are. > You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things You might be looking for Minecraft! :D