Not impressed with modern graphics

Vanilla World of Warcraft with everything maxed out still looks good today(looks like a consistent world), while most "modern" MMOs look like a jumbled collection of high-res assets gotten from the lowest bidder. Except for Guild Wars 2, which serves as proof that you don't need low-res graphics to have a great art style.

 

The thing is, the better the resolution the more the things you can accomplish. But to do that, you need to have a good judgment into what makes interesting graphics style. It is completely possible to make the worst looking game from the best of engines. And that is a pity.

 

Well, DX:HR accomplished it's art style of JPEG compressed low-res textures painted by chinese boy after the ecstasy overdose. I was surprised when I found out that the actual game data takes around 4 gbs (other 4 are for the movies).

 

You certainly shouldn't run IE games at 1920x1200, but modestly increasing resolution while expanding to widescreen is glorious. Something like 1280x800. Put your pinky finger down.

 

That I find most GCN/PS2 games look better in an emulator with an increased resolution/AA/AF/ect than a lot of actual modern PC games says a lot.

 

To me, depth of field really looks good, realistic and immersive... because I have strong myopia and when I don't put my glasses on, the world looks exactly like that.

 

Guild Wars 2 has great art style?



Guild Wars 2 has horrible graphical design...for example all the armors I saw are in that fucking stupid "EPIC SPIKEY SHOULDERS!"-style. I also remember seeing WoW and thought "WOW this looks cartoony shit!". I can't understand how anyone can say that they look good.

 

I have that too and I despise DOF with a passion. Don't see the appeal of wandering around the gameworld without my glasses on.

 

Depth of field works when it's the far, far distance. Witcher 2 has good depth of field, as an example.

 

Cartoony in and out of itself isn't bad. Trine and Trine 2, for instance, use a cartoony style as well, but they look really good. The problem a lot of fantasy MMOs suffer from specifically, is a lack of consistent art design, and completely messed up proportions of everything in the world. The environments in GW2, for instance, don't look bad so much as weird, because they're essentially a bunch of HUGE AND EPIC objects packed very tightly in a relatively small space.

To be fair, that second problem plagues a lot of single player open world games as well. I remember Daniel Vavra writing a blog post about it, how difficult it was to produce realistic-looking maps while also not making content ridiculously sparse. Removing the fog in Morrowind is an extreme example of this.

 

Did you walk around the environments? Everything fits together seamlessly, but you only start appreciating that after witnessing a fair share or games like LOTRO, Warhammer Online and RIFT. It's not about sizes of objects, it's about shit having different detail levels from other shit, about lighting/contrast not matching between areas and character, it's about weird sharp contrast between art assets that were clearly designed in environments isolated from one another.

Yeah I thought so at first. Now I see that WoW's art style essentially prevented its visuals from being dated, and everything in the world - from environment to characters to the game's freaking interface - feels like a part of a world.

This is very hard to do. Contrast this with RIFT, which has much higher quality assets, and looks like a jumble of disconnected shit.

 

It's even better when it's turned off. That shit works splendidly.

 

DoF only works when the range you can see sharply increases with increasing distance, so:
-you focus on something right in front of your nose, everything else is blurry shit.
-you focus on something close-by and see objects a bit closer or further out pretty clearly, everything else is blurry shit
-you focus at anything from few meters away to infinity and see everything from few meters away to infinity sharp as fuck, stuff right in front of your nose is blurry shit.

Any other use, unless highly situational (blurring out menu background, underwater, while being mindfucked psionically, cinefaggic finisher, etc.) is just plain fucking wrong.

 

The next major hurdle towards increased realism will be a viable way of doing true, real time raytracing in games, allowing for stuff like true reflection/refraction/caustic effects, global illumination, subsurface scattering and so on.

 

That's why I hate GW2 style because I hate HUGE AND EPIC-school of design because it looks ridiculous. True, the problem with many 3D games is the disjointed design but shit design without disjointedness is still shit design. Cartoony style isn't bad on itself but I hated how it looked in WOW...that being said I hate how early-mid era 3D games looks due low-polycount which makes them look ugly even if the artists have tried to pull off more unique look.

Getting 3D to look good takes a LOT of work and I'm not sure I've ever seen one, games which try to look whimsical, eccentric and unique fails because of the limitations of the 3D graphics which makes it basicly impossible to pull off and games which try to achieve the realistic look looks shit because of the uncanny valley-effect as no matter how hard they try they can't (at least yet) go past that.

Not much, and even though they managed to avoid the disjointed design, their graphical desing is still shit because it's that fucking stupid "OMFG FUCKING EPIC LOL!" which I can't just stand.

Granted, they managed to get unified shit look into the game.

 

Is there any mod that fixes the horrible texture tiling at longer distances?

 

Yea, that's the point.

Even with this gen they are spending silly money trying to chase graphics, you think next gen isn't going to be even worse, even more focused on graphics.

 

I don't agree. Far away distances in real life have a hazy lack of detail to them that depth of field can replicate. The mountain range 50 miles outside of town while you're standing on main street, for example. When depth of field replicates this very distant effect I think it works well, and Witcher 2 as far as I remember is a good example of that.

The problem is most games use it waaaaaaay too close up.

 

gameplay > art direction > photorealiism

that sums up my thoughts

 

Notice how all three of these were pursued equally during the so called "golden age" of PC gaming, often independently of one another, where as today developers suck at all three categories. The dichotomy between graphics and gameplay has been obsolete for a while now, since most developers today are too popample to do anything creative with either of those.

 

Far from a monster, but decent enough to max those games with playable fps.

CPU: Intel i5 2500k oc'ed to 4.0 Ghz

GPU: GTX 560 Ti 448 Classified Ultra in 2x SLI

PSU: Rosewill Lightning 800

RAM: Corsair 8GB 1600Mhz

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68X-UD3-B3

Case:Antec 900 Black Steel

Windows 7 64 bit and Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm hard drive

 

Interesting perspective. You're saying that the limited hardware capabilities of consoles force devs to be more creative with what they have to work with. That's usually true in most forms of art: Limitations only enhance the creativity. In my experience though, the complete opposite has happened.

Since devs have to design with a "consoles first" mentality, this gives us low resolution textures from the get go. As Darth Slaughter said, high res textures are a key component of decent loking graphics. That blurry, washed out mess of textures that consoles use look fine on a TV screen, but they look horrendous on PC's due to the higher resolutions and sharpness of LCD monitors. Thus PC gamers lose out there. Then since they are forced to work with low res texture, they then focus on "cool" lighting and hollywood style camera effects, "smearing the screen" with all sorts of shit just to hide the blurry textures. Not cool and certainly not artistic.

It's not about being a graphics whore. On the contrary, I love the hand drawn look of 2-D games particulary the Icewind Dales and TOEE, or the stylized graphics of indie games ike LIMBO and Kentucky Route Zero. It's the PC exclusive indies that are focusing on art style not the multi-platform games.

 

You forgot light level too. The DOF our eyes produce decreases with pupil dilation.

 

Ah, yes. That's true, though rather pedantic - I would be happy if devs got *something* right for change, let alone *everything*.

 

Devs aren't trying to get things right. They are trying to cover up the things that are much, much more wrong (textures @ 256 megs of GRAM lol).