Topic: Console graphics regression

Graphically impressive games for ps5 and Xbox series x/s have made me realize that we may have reached the peak of realistic graphics for games ( if graphics get any more real, they would reach uncanny valley levels of creepy and give deep fakes a run for their money)

The way I see it, is that developers have pretty much all the power they need to create whatever kind of graphics they want, a powerhouse sandbox if you will, And they will instead not use it for graphics, but for stylization and optimization. Slowly but surely, more games are coming out on these machines that are focusing on using their power to achieve a specific style and not to make the most realistic graphics imaginable.

Who knows, if this keeps up, we may have more companies deciding to delay and develop their games for longer. Hopefully leading to less rushed games on the market!

I remember saying that we have reached peak graphical fidelity at the end of the PS3/360 lifespan on a different forum a decade ago. I was told be another user at the time that they thought the same thing a decade prior in the PS2 era.

I absolutely think there is diminishing returns with each console generation, but it's really easy to ignore the shortcomings of modern realistic visuals when it's only the best we have to compare it with.

There's always another horizon. Also I'd argue that there's still a noticeable gap in fidelity between the best looking games and the best looking movies. Diminishing returns? Sure. But we're far from being at the end of the line

Take the best graphics you've seen in an insanely expensive movie and:

1. Make the graphics even better
2. Instead of a movie scene make it an enormous open world with tons of different things in it.
3. Make it so you can massively zoom in on everything, either small or large
4. Just for the heck of it make it fully immersive VR.

Game companies could use orders of magnitude more graphical power and figure out how to use it. Granted they would also need incredibly powerful (and power hungry) tools to even create a game like that.

I remember an interview with the Leader-designer of MDK (pc-game from late 1990’s) was into this subjekt to. His view was, that it would lead designers to be more inventing and less fokus on graphics. Today I guess he was both right and wrong. (There is a lot of indiegames beeing succesfuldt without amazing graphics).

Perhaps you're not aware, but the video game industry has been experiencing a mini collapse recently, due in some part to length of time graphically-intense games take to make. Hoping for developers to take longer on projects to make graphics more realistic seems like a bit of a misread of the room right now.

Work should should be, and likely is, going into improving game development engines, utilising AI and upscaling technologies to find new efficiencies so that development time is reduced, not increased.

@gcunit
Or at least remove crunch time forever.

As has been mentioned above, more power means more headroom for more detail and more interactions. A game can be more immersive.

Hardly any cartoons are photorealistic, so it could be said the same can apply to games

@Rambler Given the reported working conditions of the animators on the Spider-Verse movies, being a cartoon doesn't automatically mean less crunch.

I dunno, that U5 demo for The Matrix seemed like the next step in fidelity and mocap.

@dmcc0
Apologies - those were two separate points. There is some sort of dividing line, but it looks really faint on my screen!

The crunchy time was in reference to gcunit's point - I was trying to find a silver lining in the decimation of the industry. Smaller teams utilising AI may have more leverage to working conditions. Or maybe not.

My other point was rather obliquely comparing video games to cartoons rather than live action, for reasons you referenced. The idea of more power = moving further towards photorealism is not born out in movies (except that Jungle Book remake at its ilk). However, like you say, crunch in films is an issue. Hopefully animators' unions are stronger than the ones in the gaming industry.

Graphics peaked at end of 360/ps3 generation. Barely any improvement since then.

@Gimli The graphical arms race is also affecting the indie scene, perhaps even more than for AAAs. There is so much competition for indies and the bar has been set so high by the likes of Hades or Hollow Knight that I think that a lot of smaller studios will struggle to make their game stand out. Even some niche games like Wargroove 2 have graphics beyond most indie developers' capabilities.

@FancyJehuty

Of course - There is a stiff competition. But the average indiegame isn’t in the High end of the graphics-scale. And a lot of indiegames try to make a difference in playability (Dusk, Unsighted, Unawoved) or originality (Timelie, Inside, Fez). Of course it dosn’t need to be a rejection of graphics - but both playability and originality is a better way to make your game differ, since graphics alone isn’t enough.

It's weird watching games take an eternity to make so that they can look graphically impressive yet still fail to stand out to me compared to any HD-2D game or probably like half of the Sega Dreamcast's library. I actually remember what those games look like.

It feels like any new IP gunning for the AAA space is like that infamous image of every 2011 FPS looking the same. To be fair, some of those games are spectacle fighters so, that's an improvement, but then some of them are live service games which is objectively worse, so it evens out I guess.

@kkslider5552000
Part of why a lot of games look a bit samey is because they're trying to cut costs. A lot of games are using the same engines and in some cases same assets. A bit of an irony given a lot of the discussion in this thread is people saying that instead of high fidelity developers should go for a unique look and feel. The reality is a lot of the same-ness is about cutting costs and reducing risks

Also the comment about Dreamcast games having unique looks does say something I think. It does feel like that time period was the time where games could be the "most unique". Before then a lot of how a game presented was dictated to by the hardware. The sound chip, the sprite limitations, the specific graphical modes, way 3D was rendered, the media used etc, etc. After that games on the same platform could look dramatically different.....

.... then in the mid 00's there's the rise of off-the-shelf game engines. All of a sudden games started to look the same again because game engines are built to render stuff in particular ways. They'd have their own defaults, their own features. The question may well be why did so many games from the mid-00s look like Gears of War. It's at least partially answered with "because they were all made in Unreal"

Think about a game that's built with its own unique engine like Breath of the Wild (it uses Havok for physics but that's not really relevant here). Nintendo internally when making that engine would have been making decisions about the engine specific to their intents for BotW. It would've been optimised specifically for the things they wanted to do for BotW. And the end result is a game that has an entirely unique style to it and isn't just.... Zelda in the style of Fortnite or something

If that how you compare you forgot the PC gaming/laptop graphics blows ps5 and xbox away by long stretches here. PC gaming GPU already does this level of performance.

The Devs only have the power the GPU gives them not the other way around. Alot is going the way of DLSS, RT to push current GPU hardware based to higher levels of clarity in GPU outpout.

This by no means anything about Quality Games - if they started from beginning we wouldn't waiting just for a game to be released in the first place. Games already rushed to markets already from Big to Small to Indie Publishers. This won't change anytime for the foreseeable future.

There's still a long way to go, given the tendency to have "performance" and "quality" options as well as a whole host of other graphical options on PC. If we'd peaked, there'd be no options at all (aside from perhaps personal preference) and they would always run perfectly.

Handling a lot of high quality character models on screen, reflections, particles, various physics elements, lighting, animations, npc behaviours, wildlife, plants, buildings etc etc. There's a lot to do until there's no limits at all.

I think the next thing we could do with another leap in is clothing/armour. With how it sits on the body, slides over the body and other layers, how they crumple or how parts should be rigid instead of weirdly flexing when a character moves, preventing clipping with other pieces of clothing, weapons, hair etc. and how to alter its dimensions and physics if you're allowed to make a custom character with random proportions.

I feel that 7th gen power is the peak (PS3/360/Wii U/Switch). Maybe Switch’s successor changes my mind but at current it feels like the most visually impressive games across all platforms are generally games released on Wii U or Switch. Like MK8, 3D World, Mario Odyssey, Wind Waker HD, Pikmin 3/4, Metroid Prime Remastered, etc.

I’d definitely say 4K feels completely unnecessary, I’ve seen 4KTVs and I’m like why would I want this over my existing 1080p TV?

@Grumblevolcano you should play more titles beyond the Nintendo catalogue if you really think those games you listed are the most visually impressive across all platforms...

I speak from both PS and Switch experience and while the Switch is nowhere near offering photorealistic graphics the PS4 and PS5 definitely were.

We were getting to that point near the end of the PS4 generation with games like FF7 Remake and Death Stranding sporting near photorealistic models, and Ghost of Tsushima for landscapes, but I agree with OP, graphics are starting to tail off, and I can’t see the scale and scope of graphical improvements happening like this maybe ever again.

@Grumblevolcano Just wait till you play a PlayStation or Xbox game, because the Switch was never meant to be a graphics machine, nor was any Nintendo. None of the switch games would make any of my lists in terms of graphics impressing me the most, I’d recommend looking at the aforementioned examples.