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Photorealism in games
This video presents a point that I've been trying (but haven't figured out how) to make for years now.
Summary: Photorealism is unattainable, because it's not just about making things look realistic in a static sense but also about making them behave realistically--and the gap between the two causes a severe uncanny valley. This gets worse the more brilliantly realistic the static graphics get, because the systems demands needed to support the complexity of simulating a photorealistic world just go completely through the roof.
It also makes a point about how a game's graphics suggest its mechanics--or that's how it ought to work, at least.
Finally, it suggests that games should stop trying to look like movies, and should strive to...well, be more like games.
I agree with this video, broadly speaking. I found this courtesy of this thread at the Caves of Narshe forums, and in it, I commented this about comparing Final Fantasy VI (the last sprite-based FF) and VII (the first 3D FF):
I always felt that the 3D graphics felt into an "uncanny valley" of sorts. Not the same one as a face looking too real and being creepy, but more of a mismatch between the fact that stuff looked very detailed but didn't quite "behave" right. It's like the game was graphically trying to promise me that the game had a very realistic interface, but then didn't deliver on it. Alternatively, the game was trying to tell me to take its graphics as is, rather than as an abstraction with which to use my imagination--but then showing me stuff that really should be an abstraction rather than an explicit display of whatever.
I've also wanted games to return to using sprite-based graphics more, for a while now. They just look nicer than polygons because they don't try to be more than just abstractions of stuff. Unfortunately they don't work very well with 3D.
Discuss.
Comments
I don't see it, sorry.
Don't see what?
Um...Final Fantasy VII isn't exactly cutting-edge.
Come to think of it, this issue of abstraction vs. realism has come up before in something other than graphics: gameplay controls.
Compare, say, Super Mario World with Out Of This World. Both are SNES games. The former has a much more intuitive, accessible, and fun-to-use control scheme. The latter feels far more clunky and hard-to-learn.
At the extreme end of the latter you have something like QWOP but that's admittedly a satire. Still, Master Karateka for GB was something along those lines, and it wasn't really that fun of a game (even if some might argue it was well-made).
^ I replied about that over in that thread because the OP had posted about FFVII. The video presents some more recent examples, which, despite being far smoother, still display the issue I highlighted.
Unless graphics are the focus of the game (which is rarely done well, I can think of a single example--EXO--where it worked in the game's favor, and EXO is more of a virtual art gallery anyway), you really do not need to strive for photorealism. There are a variety of looks that can "work" with a given genre, what you use depends on what you're going for.
If this is seriously your opinion on Out of This World I have no idea what to tell you.
How a game striving for a sense of photorealism inherently makes the game's graphics creepy, and how striving for photorealism makes a game worse rather than allowing the player to connect the game's images to reality.
Skyrim, for example, shoots for photorealism because it helps the game's immersion better than the graphics of Oblivion did, and it's better off for that; see the screenshot above.
First, you posted a screenshot, while the guy in the video talked about animation.
Second, it doesn't necessarily have to be creepy; it's just that the more photorealistic something is, the more noticeable the unrealistic bits get, which results in what I called a mismatch of expectations and what that guy called the game not suggesting its mechanics well enough, or something like that.
I don't have the time to sit here and watch a twelve-minute video. Dinner cooking, etc.
So, basically, he's calling it out because he prefers abstraction of graphics without noting the times when realism of graphics services the games better.
^^ I think one of the examples was L.A. Noire, which he praised for its photorealism efforts, but you can still see that it's just not quite there, and that's his point.
Well if you want to call that photorealism, the rocks are too smooth for that level of vegetation, water doesn't cascade like that, there's no "dampness" modifier on the surfaces near the fall, and the plants on the lower left look flat and at a lower resolution than everything else because you're seeing it from closer.
That said, it's still beautiful.
All I am going to say is that that's a very loose and very subjective point.
I don't feel like watching the entire video, to be honest. So maybe I'm missing something, but yeah, I don't think this holds up too well.
Graphics are over-hated on anyway, too many modern games are boring because they're all very samey, not because it's inherently a bad formula.
Also, seriously get EXO. It's free, and it's the shit.
Presumably he used the tells as an example of this. Here's the thing: in the beta, the game had perfectly realistic, well-acted, well-captured tells. The testers were unable to spot them, so they artificially exaggerated them. Because the game was make under working conditions so disastrous that its developers were barely able to function, this was done badly.
This is a photorealistic painting in real life.
Photorealism doesn't mean "Exactly like it looks in real life"; it means "It looks like it was taken by a camera."
Something like Shadow of the Colossus, for example, is photorealistic.
Yep. And that's what the photorealism in the game set out to achieve; a sense of beauty in the world. It serves the game very well.
> So, basically, he's calling it out because he prefers abstraction of graphics without noting the times when realism of graphics services the games better.
Well, for what it's worth, he does say that it depends on what the game is supposed to be. If your game is meant to be very realistically-immersive simulation of, say, a natural habitat, then it makes more sense, though it should be conscious of its limitations, such as those Bee pointed out.
That said, before he got to making that point, the guy in the vid highlighted the crazy ballooning of game budgets and noted the increasing impracticality of increasingly photorealistic graphics.
^^ I'm not personally familiar with L.A. Noire.
That said, what's a tell?
Perhaps you should actually make the points, then, as I can't watch the video to hear his points.
...I don't think this is a significant enough thing that I ought to go to the trouble of...
...you know what, I don't feel enough like arguing this to make a transcript and one-page summary of the video. Feel free to discuss it without watching it but what the video says still counts as fair game. Or whatever. Not really my fault you can't watch the video, for what it's worth.
A sign that you're lying.
Well, you're relying on the video to make your points. That's usually not great etiquette.
As someone who's actually worked in this industry, I have to say it's irritating when people expect developers to constantly crank out top-quality graphics for every single project. Not because I don't think it's an admirable goal -- it is -- but because pragmatically most of them aren't on the AAA budgets that can afford them.
Words cannot describe the frustration when your early pre-alpha gets castigated by a focus group for not looking Valve-quality when your client was only willing to pay for one artist, or when they spend all the resources on art and then wonder why a single programmer couldn't hook up and extensively debug the whole thing in three months. If you're Squenix, sure you can spend as much money as you want on looking pretty -- but for smaller developers, every dollar you spend on art is one you're not spending on basic construction, and vice versa.
Yeah, I'll agree that the notion that everything has to have the same level of graphical quality is damn stupid.
Yes, definitely. Not every game could strive for photorealism- beyond the impracticality and expense of that, not every game needs it. Many games are fine with more stylised graphics, or even just sprite-based graphics. Pokemon's a great example there.
However, some games are; Skyrim probably wouldn't be half as great without its graphics, for example.
I'm also expecting a discussion, not an argument where I'm being forced to back up my points with detailed logical reasoning and rigorous inferences and such or concede them. I didn't mean this thread to be trying to convince anyone of anything. It was just for me to mention my opinion and open the floor for discussion. This isn't a high-stakes debate, sheesh.
@Juan: Oh, I thought it was a graphical design or animation term.
Making the thread title extremely confrontational probably didn't help achieve that.
If you didn't expect that reaction, you really don't know this website very well
Glenn: Despite the GTA-style sandbox it took place in and the occasional chase or shootout, the crux of L.A. Noire was interviewing suspects and witnesses and determining how reliable their testimony was by reading their face, gestures, etc. You could take their testimony as Truth, call them on a Lie and present evidence, or if they're lying but you lack proof, select Doubt to get mildly up in their face and press them.
As was said, the original version actually had really accurate stuff, but testers were dimwits and the game had to be dumbed down by making them make these ridiculous smug faces when they were lying. In the final version, your Truth/Doubt/Lie choice was accompanied by stuff like this:
> Making the thread title extremely confrontational probably didn't help achieve that.
Point, I'll go fix it.
@Bee: Ooh, I see. Still, that looks like a great effort on the designers' part.
I do agree with the points made in the video, the trend of making games that look just like the real world is something that has to stop and 100% true to real world graphics is near impossible and really expensive, the graphics of the game should match the gameplay and developers should experiment more with art styles.
A related issue I have that the video did not bring up is the almost standard set of post processing effects that AAA games have now. I don't care for most of them mainly because they are designed to make the game look more like a movie and are poor imitations of what actually happens in film.
Here's the essential content of the video:
The narrator points out that true photorealism is technically impossible right now or at any point in the near future. In addition, photorealism demands realism in the systems as a game's presentation conveys information about its mechanics. Furthermore, game development budgets are already huge, and the mad rush towards photorealism can only raise them higher, forcing development studios to converge their resources more and thereby produce less content -- both in terms of how much content each of their games has, but also in terms of how many games they develop.
What we essentially have in the games industry right now is a conflict between realism and abstraction, where realism is sometimes taken to be automatically better. But abstraction plays a very important role; as immersive as any game may be, visual abstraction helps justify mechanical abstraction, where a complex real life function (or even fantasy function) is represented by a tiny amount of player inputs. There's also narrative abstraction to take into account; we can accept a more unrealistic story under a more abstracted presentation (and therefore a more abstracted system).
This video isn't a blanket statement against semi-photorealistic games or development of more photorealistic graphics. It's a plea for caution in an industry that's nearly deadlocked by homogeneous presentation and design. Abstraction brings a range of options to game designers, developers, artists, animators, sound engineers, musicians and whatnot that realism can never match, and the industry as it exists has failed to take advantage of those opportunities.
The idea isn't "photorealism is bad". It's not, inherently. But nor is it inherently better than abstraction, and the push for photorealism has done more damage and is continuing to do more damage to this industry than it's worth.
Oh certainly the exaggerated faces still looked like very much like extraordinarily faithfully-animated people...just ones who decided getting interviewed by a detective was a good time to pass a gallstone or something.