Triangles that are just one pixel in the screen, dynamic lightning and overall rendering this close to photorealism, it's the all the other aspects of the games that limit the experience.
Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be improved.
The quality of the graphics make the lack of realism in the animations more jarring for me. When the character touches a surface it just doesn't look in the slightest. It's quite frustrating actually. My brain seems ready to see realistic contact but instead sees a body moving around unnaturally near a surface that its supposed to be in contact with.
And that's a big part of why video games suck these days. Creating a photorealistic or cinematic experience is extremely difficult and requires a huge amount of artistic assets, and even then the illusion only holds up under certain tight constraints. So game developers do as much as possible to enforce these constraints all throughout the game.
no offense to nintendo and fans, but fidelity wise the game looks like an early ps3 game and runs at 30 fps with dips in certain areas and very regular dips when using certain game mechanics.
I can count the triangles on a lot of geometry visibly, and the textures are so blurred it looks like you take any modern PC game and only render the lowest available level of detail of all the textures. I can count the pixels in the shadows on the floor and lighting wise the game is extremely basic (it doesn't need to be more because of the art style). most effects you see in the game are literally blurry billboarded (but granted alpha blended) sprites, including the clouds that are so important in this games visuals.
and to top it off we're in 2023 with half the people or more on 4k screens and the game doesn't even manage native 900p most of the time.
the art design of the game is just designed well around those constraints. very well. but the devs likely did nothing super special to make it run well.
No, it wasn’t hyper–optimized, it just doesn’t draw many triangles or use many light sources. There is simply a lot less for the renderer to do than in a modern game.
I think your eye condition may exaggerate the effect. Even the most highly-realised modern games are still noticeably unrealistic, but we're certainly heading in that direction. As we get closer and closer to realism, I'm sure more and more people will start to experience what you describe.
apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago.
I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.
Yeah having actually played it you run into this immediately. NPC cars will deform in a crash, but a street lamp will bring your car to an immediate stop.
That’s far from an unsolvable problem though, and this is a graphical tech demo, not a full game with the associated staff, budget, time, etc.
The Demon’s Souls remake (which I think actually looks nicer) has tons of destructible boxes, tables, stone work, etc (the original had much of this as well). I’m more interested high graphical fidelity being used in these smaller, authored spaces than in massive, often empty open worlds.
> It's also more difficult to concentrate on the gameplay when all details are rendered on screen.
I‘ve noticed that as well. I much prefer say Tomb Raider 2 with its clear edges and flat surfaces to the modern ones with all the foliage and clutter and lighting effects. But I put that down to getting old.
Photorealism does not equal immersion. Immersion happens in the mind, not the eyes. The games I've been most immersed in were made in the 90s, when the graphics were not as good but the gameplay was better.
As someone who is most definitely not a gamer but with coworkers and friends that get big into high cost gaming systems, here’s where I see the biggest deltas between real life and the screen:
- Hair. Up until very recently hair was downright awful. Nowadays it’s acceptable-ish, but there’s still lots of room for improvement, in particular in natural motion of long hair.
- Water. I spend a big chunk of my time on the water, so I’m probably more attuned to how it moves than most. Games just don’t have it down. In particular, I think a lot could be gained by embracing it’s fractal nature: in my experience, at every human scale (mm to dam and everything in between) very similar wave patterns exist, but games tend to have just a small fixed number of “wave-layers” at various scales stacked together.
- Clouds. I can easily spend hours just observing clouds, looking at things like their shape, overall motion, internal motion, composition, edge behaviors, etc, and how they change over time. Game clouds are lacking in all these regards, particularly the time-sensitive nature of a cloud.
- Foliage. In games I’ve seen, individual plants/etc. in isolation generally look really quite decent. But the second an physical object interacts with them, they very clearly don’t respond in the right ways. There’s a lot about how branches bend and leaves rustle and more that is lost. Additionally, in groups of plants it’s often clear that some small number of models are being reused, possibly with some generated randomness added. But the variety doesn’t come close to matching what one would really see.
- Human faces and expressions. These are generally really bad, especially in normal gameplay (cut-scenes are sometimes better)
Again, this is probably all just really weird stuff I notice because I spend the vast majority of my time outdoors and only see “HiFi” games being played very infrequently. I don’t think games are worse for not implementing these, but I am very interested in what they’ll look like 10-20 years down the road.
I suppose that's true. I just find it jarring that they've made their decisions for that based on reactivity whereas the entire visual style/physics etc are all "realistic".
Once we figure out how to render games in true photorealism, it's gonna be so interesting to see how often studios make these sorts of stylistic/practical choices with animation.
Pre-rendered? Sure. In-game? No.
I think the art direction is half of the problem here. You can place lighting much better and the textures are lacking.
Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be improved.
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