Yeah, looks pretty, I suppose. As good as it looks, though, it's still not photo-realistic by any stretch, and still falls prey to the uncanny valley much the same way most games have this past generation. All games look good these days. That's pretty much a given. If you have the budget to invest the resources into crafted a detailed world like the one presented in the demo, it's gonna look good.
So why exactly is everyone so excited about this demo? I can tell you that it's not because of the technical merits, like DX11 tessellation or support for Nvidia’s Physx, Apex and 3D Vision. Instead, it's likely the moody lighting, cinematic camera angles, and detailed textures that caught peoples' eyes, none of which say anything about games made using this engine.
Maybe I'm just a bit of a curmudgeon, but this video hardly seems like a revolution in any way. Rather, it's just more of the same of what we've seen out of Epic for the past five or six years.
I'm comparing to the graphics of games such as God of War, Outer Worlds, Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe not the latest or the best graphics but what I'm familiar with. I don't think people complain that those graphics are horrible.
Why would we have a negative bias? We bought the game. We wanted to enjoy it. I'm not in the habit of buying things simply to criticise them online.
You're trying to deny that it's possible to see difference in the visuals of video games, which is bizarre considering the whole point of new generations of consoles and GPUs is for the graphical improvements. I can see the difference in mesh density, texture resolution and lighting when I upgraded from an RTX 2070 to an RTX 3080. Do I have figures? No. But the obvious improvements were why I'd shell put so much for the card. Ditto for the PS5. And I can tell you with absolutely certainty: this game looks far worse on PS5 than Demon Souls does, or The Last of Us 2 does on my PS4 Pro.
Even people who really like the game generally will admit the graphics are not great. You can watch YouTube videos of people playing and there is plainly evident pop-in, low render distance and LOD issues. Also various other things like enemies walking through each other and so forth. None of it is critical, the graphics are perfectly playable, but it's well below what you'd normally expect in a highly reviewed AAA game on the latest hardware in 2022.
You can argue it's unimportant and the art direction makes up for it as many fans do, but instead you just seem to be sealioning.
They are? Are you referring to anything from the post or the comments here? I’ve never really seen any complaints about the graphics that weren’t from people who effectively only play AAA games. I certainly wouldn’t call that divisive though.
Very late to the discussion but I might be missing something; a majority of you are bashing this by saying "it's just a demo"/"games never end up looking like that":
a) If this demo is runnable at real time fps on ps5 hardware ($400-500 WITH markup)...that's a technologically phenomenal feat in itself.
b) If the engine IS capable of running something like this...they are not lying. The responsibility for "good looking games" then falls on to game studios to deliver instead of halfassing something just to hit a deadline.
I only looked at the gameplay. The graphics would only have entered into my decision if they were horrible. I'm a long-time incremental game fan and I've played a ton of them. Most of them have pretty bad graphics, and that's okay. The incremental portion, especially the choices you make (what to upgrade, when, etc) are the interesting parts.
So yeah, I expect a lot of incremental gamers will view it the same way.
And gamers that aren't fans of incrementals are going to be even harsher on the gameplay.
As someone who read your comment before reading the article, I took your comment to mean that the article was poor because it had bad graphics. That's not a criticism against you on my part btw, only an observation. So it might be that more people read your comment that same way due to how you phrased it.
You’re comparing it to what is probably the most realistic game since the PT Silent Hill demo came out, and heavily based on photogrammetry. The paper also focuses on natural textures, not built up environments, so it’s a pointless comparison in multiple ways.
Again, not a contest. The paper is exploring new techniques for generating content. Why all the negativity?
Whenever there is a sanctimonious comment like this at the top complaining about all the negative posts, I usually agree with the other posts. As in this case.
I actually don’t think this looks any less “like a video game”, but its color is more washed-out, and darker. It seems like a net loss to me, sorry. Not for fancy theoretical reasons, I just think the GTA looks better in all the examples.
The game owns and article makes a great point. These games around about high resolution graphics and densely packed pixels. It's about the atmosphere, story, setting, your personal struggle against seemingly impossible odds.
The fact people care about graphic quality is pretty funny to me. Go play the latest FPS online loot shooter if you want "triple A" graphics.
The game is a masterpiece in it's own right. Its like taking a dark souls game and making it bigger and bigger. Then just when you thought you were nearing the end. Oops sorry you are only 30% done with the game!
I'm at 100 hours on PC , getting close to finishing. Some graphic stutters near release but since then i've had no issues at all. Medium level rig.
That was actually my first reaction when I saw this video. The graphics are incredible, sure. The people don't entirely escape uncanny valley, but they partially do, and everything else looks awesome. No question.
Then we get to the game portion of the demo, and... it's a half-step above a quicktime event. Now, look, yes, I get it, this isn't actually a game, and the game is an afterthought and not the main point. (By that, I mean the game itself, not the cars, not the agents jumping around, but just the underlying mechanics.) Still, consider where we've come from. Think Atari 2600 graphics and the sheer staggering number of orders of magnitude improvement in the graphics since then. Even if they did have tons of people working on this, all those people were working at levels of efficiency undreamed of in the 2600 era, by almost any objective measure you can imagine. (Even though we'd never be able to agree on one.)
Yet the game itself used in this demo is basically something you could fit on the 2600. I mean, the game itself, the mechanics. Obviously not the graphics, or even a facsimile thereof, but just the game's mechanics. It's still "point at the thing you want to blow up". No generalized conversation engine. No generalized music engine. If you'd like to be generous, call it an order of magnitude better than the 2600 could handle.
The gulf between the graphics and the games we have with them keep getting larger and larger, and it doesn't help that in a lot of ways the AAA games have been boxed into what the engines do. It's not just that "open world sandboxy combat" is the only game they want to make... it's that these huge amazing engines almost require that sort of game, because that's what the engines do. The sameyness of AAA games is forced by this graphics focus because trying to do provide anything but the simplest game mechanics with this level of graphics is impossible.
Which is why I've basically abandoned AAA and go indie now. The lower graphics capability turns out to be a positive advantage, because it means they can make games that aren't The AAA Engine Game.
There's definitely tons of ps3 games that look better than any indie games I can think of, mine included (mgs4 comes immediately to mind, what a visual feast.) I don't think it's inappropriate to say my game and many other indies are visually competitive with horse racing 2016, a game with a ps4 release.
Hardly AAA competition -- I'm just charting the territory of the bands.
The conversation muddies between talking about rendering features and aesthetic execution. If all we're talking about is rendering capabilities, I'm confident saying this segment here is beyond what a PS3 could do. The fillrate alone! https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1455511983512436737
Regardless, of course it isn't reasonable to outcompete 100+ people teams solo, but we can be scrappy and punch above our weight. :D
I'm not saying he's not successful. He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics. But they're not the only two choices, and that's proven - there are successful games without AAA graphics that also don't look bad. If he's feeding his family on his games, changing his attitude to their appearance could expand his audience significantly for relatively minor effort.
"It looks nice(r)" is basically the end of that argument. Some people will care (I find easier to be immersed in a game when technical limitations aren't as apparent), others won't.
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.
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