Don’t make me point at the TitanFall 2 and MGSV sign again.
Its just that that’s hard for developers to develop, for management to allow, so, instead, use horrifically unoptimized UE5!
Comment on Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists
saigot@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
These aren’t mutually exclusive
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
High-fidelity and artfully stylized aren’t, but photorealism is like… a photo.
CubitOom@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Photo realism still requires art direction.
Think of a movie.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
aight this scene takes place in Mexico so lemme color grade it very Mexican, but also it’s a flashback to the 50’s so I’m gonna dial down the color saturation and digitally add some film grain
CubitOom@infosec.pub 2 months ago
What if it was neo mexico city? Need some cyberpunk chihuahuas
starman2112@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yup. Take that one body cam game. Making an object look realistic is a matter of slapping a high resolution texture on it. Making a game look realistic involves a lot of effort. Making a game look realistic and still be playable is insane. Pay attention to the size of the doors in the next “photorealistic” game you play, and laugh at the fools who say photorealism doesn’t require art direction
mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I think we’re talking about different things, but I see your point.
By stylized “graphics” I took it to mean like the actual resolution, polygons, draw distance, etc, and then aesthetics goes on top of that.
CubitOom@infosec.pub 2 months ago
Art direction isn’t purely aesthetics either. There’s so many things that go into makeing art, be it a game or something else.
Art should help us feel what the artist intended or sometimes something more personal to ourselves. Many aspects will facilitate or detract from that.
You can have stylized photorealism the same as other styles of art. You mght see pixel art of a realistic scene. Or you can have extremely detailed animation.
I think the better question is does the community allow for and reward that expression? Are there trends we don’t find too appealing universally? Are there styles of art that maybe seem overused?
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
What they’re talking about is what I call “The Wind Waker Effect.” When the GameCube was first announced, they showed off a trailer that included a realistic looking Link fighting Ganondorf to show off the power of the system. When the Wind Waker was announced and shown to the public, fans were furious. They didn’t want some cartoony Zelda game, they wanted that photo-realistic Zelda game that they had been teased with years before! When Wind Waker came out, it was universally criticized for its graphics. Today, it’s considered one of the best looking Zelda games of all time and was the main inspiration for the art direction of almost every Zelda game after it - including Breath of the Wild.
If Nintendo had made that “photo-realistic” Zelda game, it would look nowhere near as good nor be as fondly remembered today, because “photo-realistic” in terms of video game graphics is an obsession with graphical fidelity, not artistic quality. That’s why photo-realistic games from the same era are remembered as the “real = brown” era of games. It’s a technical or hardware question of “how many polygons can we fit in this character’s facial pores”, not taking something fake and making it seem real through art direction.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
The Neverhood literally consists of photographs, it is as photorealistic as it is possible to be, and yet it has a very strong art direction. More modern titles like The Midnight Walk, Keeper, and Felt That Boxing are similar, though they are actually rendered rather than consisting of photographs and video. On the other side of the coin there are some visual effects that are quite stylized but also very GPU intensive, showing that just because an image doesn’t look like a photo doesn’t mean that its necessarily easy to render (note, that video is a human authored algorithm, not AI, though they do compare it to AI video generation and it does have a mode where you can make your own paint strokes for an example scene and it tries to set its parameters to mimic yours).
I used to have the same opinion that you express, but I think this was only ever really true in practice during the brown era, and not before or after. In fact some games like Thief 1&2, Half Life 1&2, and the Chronicles of Riddick were trying to be as photorealistic as possible at the time of their release, but are now pretty commonly praised for their “stylization” today. For example, the deep blacks and stark contrast of stencil shadows vs what you get with more modern lighting. I am reminded of a Brian Eno quote:
We are even seeing some nostalgia now for the pissfilter era, though that’s not an enthusiasm that I share. I suspect that we will eventually see TAA ghosting and ray tracing artifacts, that are currently much hated, be recreated in a controlled way as a stylistic choice. In particular I think that Control will eventually be praised for the way that it basically incorporated ray tracing artifacts into its art style, by using shimmery walls and a dreamlike atmosphere.
lobut@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Expedition 33 has great graphics fidelity but it has amazing art direction too. When people said all Unreal games just feel the same … I like the art style they chose to give it their own feel.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I think they mean that you can like both, you don’t have to choose only one to like
mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Oh well then there is no conflict at all, yeah