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IJBM: The Video Game Industry's Graphics Obsession
So, Bioshock is five years old. This obviously means its graphics are hideous and nobody would ever want to play it for any reason, so to demonstrate how amazing a rerelease would be, someone at Crytek whipped up some renders of what it would look like if released in the CryEngine 3.
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Those just look like Bioshock screenshots to me. I'm sure if you gave me a before/after comparison I could see the difference, but I don't think I would care even then. Bioshock is a gorgeous game. If they rereleased it with CryEngine 3, it would be just as gorgeous a game, but not really any more so.
I mean, I get that high-fidelity graphics are a great marketing tool these days, but there's going to come a point where developers are spending millions of dollars to make their games technically more advanced, but not actually look any better to the human eye.
Comments
This is basically everything that bugs me about Square Enix's new business model (Aside from their inability to hire writers that can write a coherent plot).
I mean, graphics are great, we can do a lot with them now, but what happened to creating unique artstyles and non-hyperrealistic characters?
What kind of dumbass says they're going to show what a game would look like on CryEngine 3... and then scales all their renders down to 800x424? That isn't even a real resolution.
I know it's probably The Escapist doing that and not the artist, but the artist's site is horrible and I can't be bothered to look for the renders anywhere else.
Well, that's not necessarily the point.
Putting something in an updated graphics engine could be done for many different reasons. Keep in mind that if you have a game that's already made, you don't have to write up a new script, scenario, and stuff, and worry about whether people will like it or not; you just have to re-render stuff which is mostly a technical issue that's easily dealt with.
So you do that as a relatively easy way to get attention, when you might or might not be able to produce something else to advertise to people to draw attention to your company.
That said...reposted from another thread:
...how is this boss at all fun? You just watch the same damn cutscene over and over again or something.
Even Metroid Prime had some of these issues--though the cutscene of Flagraah (spelling?) falling over was shorter.
Let's see if we can find any good /v/ flamewars on the subject.
http://sfw.chanarchive.org/4chan/v/53906/tfw-i-dont-care-about-graphics
Meh, close enough.
That's hardly a flamewar. That's the equivalent of several pyros attempting to snipe at each other with flare guns.
As I understand it, ultra high definition graphics are more about flexing developer muscles at this point.
Yeah, maybe I shouldn't be too hard on Crytek, given that they're most famous for releasing a game nobody could really run.
Eh, I would need to see side by side screenshots to tell the difference. I'm not a big fan over the obsession and current graphic trends. There is too much focus on realism.
Higher res pictures can be found here
-looks-
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That actually looks worse than the original. Way too clean. The Big Daddy looks like an action figure.
I'm pretty sure that was the 3D artist equivalent of fanart, and wasn't intended by the artist to denigrate the graphics of Bioshock or anything like that. This is something actually made by Crytek for promotional purposes.
My point is more that the implication of the exercise is that updating the graphics of a relatively recent game is this huge change that makes the game look so much better, when really, it just shows that it doesn't make much of a difference at all.
I mean, if you're going to do something like this, wouldn't it make more sense to do Deus Ex or something where graphics are actually lacking?
Based on the original posting, the artist is doing this as practice to learn more about Art Deco and to make a homage video. This is a personal project being made because the artist likes Bioshock, so of course if this person liked Deus Ex or something else, they would make a project based on that instead.
Oh. Well, that's fair enough, then. I guess it's more the reporters who are more at fault here, since they're framing the story as one about graphics when really it's one about fanart.
I can tell the difference, but it's mixed. On the downshot they lost some of the atmospheric active lighting effects because CryEngine was developed for outdoorsy high-ambient environments so they could focus on more surface rendering, but on the upshot it doesn't have quite as much of the raging specular-boner that made me enjoy Bioshock less than I should have, which makes the textures come out a bit better.
Seriously, most FPSes of the last decade or so need a lighter touch with the specular. It's already an exaggerated effect; no need to go completely batshit with it.
You know, it is funny.
All over the internet, I see people bemoaning how much the video game industry is spending on making their games look good instead of focusing on the games themselves. But when a game actually doesn't bother all that much with making itself look good (take The Old Republic, where the graphics are even worse than World of Warcraft's), there's always a lot of people complaining about how the game looks like crap.
Some people have different opinions than other people. Who'd have guessed?
They are? I never noticed, because WoW definitely looks worse than TOR.
World of Warcraft's graphics are definitely better, yeah. They're a lot more cartoony, though.
You can at least turn the graphics settings up significantly on WoW.
Granted, WoW has been continuously improving it's graphics, with big jumps during LK and Cataclysm. Classic WoW areas definitely look their age.
how many times have we had this thread already
Well, TOR kinda has the same problem in most of its worlds. You have... ice worlds, where everything looks like ice, you have giant buildings worlds, where everything looks like giant buildings, you have desolated landscape worlds, which are pretty in one of the worst ways, and you have forest worlds like Tython and Voss, which are possibly the only particularly visually engaging worlds in the game.
Granted, they at least tried to make everything look pretty, but after a while, you've come to see all of the landscapes.
I don't think it would have been that hard to differentiate between worlds. They could have at least made Nar Shadaa and Coruscant not look half-identical
They probably couldn't have done much more with it- it would have been pretty expensive to make completely dissimilar environments for every planet. It just gets kinda disappointing.
I feel that this article effectively communicates how ToR fails from artistic standpoint.
I dunno. Tython (The Jedi Knight- and Consular, but nobody ever mentions that- starting planet) is done quite well. Tatooine looks fairly nice, but it has a desert at the end that is huge for no apparent reason other than being huge (although it is the planet you generally first get a speeder on). Voss looks nice, and Alderaan is gorgeous.
The complaint about having no ambient noise is spot-on- that's something that's been bugging me for a while, although I couldn't pin it down until now. And the fact that planets are so large has been a consistent complaint for a long time now.
Otherwise... well, the article doesn't really say much except "It's a massive game that was rushed out of production early by EA, so it's kinda lacking in the artistic department when you look at the sterile areas."
The way I saw it, WoW's top end looks better than TOR's top end, but TOR doesn't optionally scale down nearly as much as WoW does for low-end systems either. As for graphics on the whole, it's not "looking good" that's the problem so much as spending a ton of development, art, and processing time trying to brute-force high fidelity visuals instead of going for reasonable compromises and good aesthetics (i.e., not BROWNBROWNBROWN).
I mean, look at something like Xenoblade -- the graphics are actually a few steps down from similar games, but its aesthetic sense and clever shortcuts mask it so well that it looks absolutely gorgeous anyway. Hell, the title screen probably took maybe a day and a half to put together, but it's probably the most effective I've ever seen.