I can't into modern 3D

[Lilura]

Pity you didn't make your OP more RPG-focused. It could have been a good thread that stimulated interesting discussion. Instead, it's irrelevant because it's been moved to General Gaming.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

My mind filters most crap out it's the sheer ugliness that puts me off.

 

[Danikas]

Time to drive your wheelchair into the sunset grandpa.

 

[JarlFrank]

Look at new levels made for old games, with high levels of detail in the architecture, but still very readable:

These are pretty high detail, but still extremely easy to read since they're not overloaded with shitty post-processing effects.

Compare that to modern EVERYTHING IS GLOWY visual design:

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Compare that to modern EVERYTHING IS GLOWY visual design:

this is some serious cherrypicking
for over a decade we had nothing but desaturated brown games with various shades of desaturated poo brown and grey everywhere

 

[DalekFlay]

This thread is "old man yells at cloud" to an extreme degree.

Same thing killed Deus Ex Mankind Divided for me.

Your screenshot is from that weird ghetto thing, which was supposed to look insanely cluttered and messy. That was the point. It's not an issue generally with that game. Also if you ran it at higher res than your screen shot it would have crisper detail.

 

[Tehdagah]

2D games don't have this problem

I see you've never played DDP DOJ

Or Dragon's Crow

 

[sser]

Devs rarely trust players to be sharp and intuitive on their own. And designing UI is actually very difficult and I find a crazy number of devs don't invest in it despite, arguably, being the most important part of an experience. So the opposite is to take the mobile route of overwhelming the player with information, #'s, sounds, etc. The new Doom game is a prime offender on pretty much all fronts - the UI is very overloaded, the graphics reminiscent of the casino type games, and when a level progresses it will show cutscenes to direct players to the next spot.

 

[RNGsus]

Clagius Clanler has steel balls.

 

[forumvisitor#451]

Is a bad design, is what it is.

 

[Excommunicator]

It's just a fact, it's aesthetically more pleasing to be in an environment that isn't cluttered. A fact that has been lost on almost everyone from the last 20 years who has been taught to believe "more is better"

 

[Melcar]

Shiet nigga, just don't play games then.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

i hate 3D isometric and 3D platformers/metroidvanias games, i'm fine with everything else.

 

[RNGsus]

Modders are just as bad, they love to over clutter. They also seem especially challenged matching the size of interior spaces to the exterior model.

 

[DraQ]

They also seem especially challenged matching the size of interior spaces to the exterior model.

That's kind of iso standard in gamedev since forever.
The only way you can reasonably expect devs to match exterior and interior sizes and layouts is by having both coexist in their matching locations within worldspace.

Else interiors are going to be much bigger than exteriors and likely fail to match the layout completely.

 

[Zombra]

It's just a fact, it's aesthetically more pleasing to be in an environment that isn't cluttered. A fact that has been lost on almost everyone from the last 20 years who has been taught to believe "more is better"

Agree, but aesthetics isn't the question.

Except in the sandiest of sandboxes, when you're playing a game, any game, you're generally trying to achieve an objective through the navigation and application of various game rules. Obviously those rules can take a thousand forms depending on the type of game.

The real crime of all this clutter is that it adds another rule to any game system where it's present - the player must visually discern things that are relevant to the objective from those that aren't - without design intent. The art team is throwing in more obstacles - constant, distracting ones - the actual game designer didn't ask for.

 

[V_K]

Turn the shadows off

This is actually an interesting suggestion. I'll try that, thanks.

I, too, prefer older 3D over modern 3D. The problem with modern 3D is the clutter of visual effects. Hundreds of different gleamy and glittery post-processing shenanigans that make things hard to make out. I don't mind clutter of objects - there are plenty of fan-made maps for older games that have very detailed environments, but these environments are still clear and easy to read. The main issue with modern 3D is the huge amount of different post-processing effects that turn everything into a blur.

Well, what do you know, that did the trick. I turned off shadows and as much postprocessing as possible - et voila, I can see again! Thanks, bros, I knew I could count on you!

 

[Bad Sector]

Look at new levels made for old games, with high levels of detail in the architecture, but still very readable:

Eh, those aren't really that detailed... e.g. the entire Tomb Raider scene you show has less polygons than the tail in that bat thing in the "new games" scene. They might be more detailed than the base game, but not really as highly detailed as what you'd see in a AAA game, even from the late 2000s.

TBH i do not think it is so much detail or post processing that is the problem, but contrast (if anything, post processing effects like SSAO can add depth to an otherwise flat scene and make shapes and volumes more readable - though i guess you had bloom effects in mind which often do wash out things if they're not set up properly to match the area's lighting).

I was playing Dishonored 2 just now and had the same issue - the game tries to alleviate that by adding white outlines in everything you can interact with, but it can still be hard to read a scene, especially when the game decides it is a nice idea to randomly making everything shiny and "bloomy".

It isn't a new thing for me either, i had the same issue since the first time i tried to play Unreal Tournament 3 - there was too much detail everywhere and i just couldn't focus on anything so i had a hard time reading the scene. Initially i thought it was due to the detail and the clutter in the scene but after playing other games that had more detail, i think it is because UT3 had awful contrast - everything was either uniformly shiny or uniformly muted with barely any contrast.

As a sidenote, i do not think turning off shadows would help - shadows give hints for the position, size and volume of objects, so having them enabled, even at the lowest resolution, should make the scene more readable. In terms of post processing you most likely want to disable bloom and sharpening (unless the latter is applied per-object, but i haven't seen many games do that). You most likely also want some form of SSAO (preferably something like HDAO or HBAO since those take surface direction into account instead of just distance from the camera and thus are a bit more accurate), especially if the scene has large geometric clutter as it helps to add some depth to it instead of having everything mesh together (but the quality of SSAO varies a lot from engine to engine... some games, especially older Unreal Engine based games, have horrible SSAO implementations).

 

[V_K]

As a sidenote, i do not think turning off shadows would help - shadows give hints for the position, size and volume of objects, so having them enabled, even at the lowest resolution, should make the scene more readable.

The problem with shadows is mostly in the outdoor scenes, where shadows of large objects cover smaller parts of the level geometry. I both makes the shape of the level hard to discern, and the non-shaded objects, too bright by contrast and annoying.
Plus I never really cared for shadows in the first place.

helps to add some depth to it instead of having everything mesh together

See, my problem is not so much with things being meshed together. My problem is with objects fighting for my attention. So having unimportant things mesh together is actually something I find desirable.

 

[Melcar]

Going outside must be a real trip for you then.

 

[V_K]

Depends on the weather. My eyes started hurting in bright sunlight a few years ago, but thankfully I live in Scandinavia, so it's rarely a problem.

 

[Bad Sector]

The problem with shadows is mostly in the outdoor scenes, where shadows of large objects cover smaller parts of the level geometry.

Yeah, outdoor areas can be a bitch when the game uses the sun as a gigantic spotlight and completely ignores that stuff in the shadows also get indirect lighting - so you get both dark *and* flat results. However this is where SSAO can help a lot. Though having better lighting is... well... a better solution :-P.

(it is actually trivial to implement more readable lighting but some graphics programmers are a bit anal about being theoretically correct... regardless of how being correct doesn't always mean things will look better)

TBH i had mainly indoor games in mind... largely because i was playing indoor games lately :-P.

See, my problem is not so much with things being meshed together. My problem is with objects fighting for my attention. So having unimportant things mesh together is actually something I find desirable.

Wouldn't that make things harder when the object you are looking for is among the stuff meshed together?

 

[V_K]

Wouldn't that make things harder when the object you are looking for is among the stuff meshed together?

Neither is ideal, but I'll take hard over irritating any day.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Depends on the weather. My eyes started hurting in bright sunlight a few years ago

same since I was a kid

 

[Excommunicator]

It's just a fact, it's aesthetically more pleasing to be in an environment that isn't cluttered. A fact that has been lost on almost everyone from the last 20 years who has been taught to believe "more is better"

Agree, but aesthetics isn't the question.

Except in the sandiest of sandboxes, when you're playing a game, any game, you're generally trying to achieve an objective through the navigation and application of various game rules. Obviously those rules can take a thousand forms depending on the type of game.

The real crime of all this clutter is that it adds another rule to any game system where it's present - the player must visually discern things that are relevant to the objective from those that aren't - without design intent. The art team is throwing in more obstacles - constant, distracting ones - the actual game designer didn't ask for.

When it comes to having non-essential/interactable objects filling the environment I'd say the vast majority of games are guilty of this - even ones that aren't known for clutter - to the point where it has become an acceptable standard, sadly. It was really only Ultima/Lord British that actually heeded the design principle that everything must be interactable