MudMan
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- 34 Comments
3·3 hours agoLook, don’t take it personally, but I disagree as hard as humanly possible.
Claiming that realism “makes every game look the same” is a shocking statement, and I don’t think you mean it like it sounds. That’s like saying that every movie looks the same because they all use photographing people as a core technique.
If anything, I don’t know what “realism” is supposed to mean. What is more realistic? Yakuza because it does these harsh, photo-based textures meant to highlight all the pores or, say, a Pixar movie where everything is built on this insanely accurate light transfer, path traced simulation?
At any rate, the idea that taking photorealism as a target means you give up on aesthetics or artistic intent is baffling. That’s not even a little bit how it works.
On the other point, I think you’re blending technical limitations with intent in ways that are a bit fallacious. SotC is stylized, for sure, in that… well, there are kaijus running around and you sometimes get teleported by black tendrils back to your sleeping beauty girlfirend.
But is it aiming at photorealism? Hell yeah. That approach to faking dynamic range, the deliberate crushing of exteriors from interiors, the way the sky gets treated, the outright visible air adding distance and scale when you look at the colossi from a distance, the desaturated take on natural spaces… That game is meant to look like it was shot by a camera all the way. They worked SO hard to make a PS2 look like it has aperture and grain and a piece of celluloid capturing light. Harder than the newer remake, arguably.
Some of that applies to GoW, too, except they are trying to make things look like Jason and the Argonauts more than Saving Private Ryan. But still, the references are filmic.
I guess we’re back to the problem of establishing what people mean by “realism” and how it makes no sense. In what world does Cyberpunk look similar to Indiana Jones or Wukong? It just has no real meaning as a statement.
1·5 hours agoNo, there are actual pieces of software they’ve released alongside the patents. It’s a thing. Look it up.
You can’t really bothsides this, that’s not how this works.
I guess on one thing you were right, which is that we can choose to not interact.
39·5 hours agoThe only good thing to come out of this is that the conservative European press is roasting Trump like a stuck pig at the moment. Even a significant chunk of the far-right press, actually. Here’s a quote from a medium I’d flag as outright fascist: “Facing the left and keeping a critical position against the so-called progressivism doesn’t mean defending Donald Trump unconditionally”. They go on to claim this is a wake up call for Europe.
As of right now Le Pen hitching her wagon to this guy looks like a complete idiot and I don’t think anybody to the left of Meloni thinks of the US as less than an adversary.
Still too little too late but it has to start somewhere.
I didn’t. I am not. It is what it is. It’s not even that convoluted, they’ve listed this stuff. You’ve been factually wrong about a bunch of these things. Like, not even the “look it up” things, the list of things in the link you are reacting to. You’re taking my pondering why people can’t parse even the slightest ambiguity on their projections on brands and companies as a rude slight. Which is… increasingly on brand, I suppose.
16·5 hours agoYou know it’s bad when I had to click all the way through to the body of the article to verify this isn’t a The Onion thing. Do we still have a “Not The Onion” space here?
Hah. Holy crap, who goes “you’re going to give me attitude?” in an online conversation? That’s amazing. Are you going to tell me to meet you after class?
I am not defending them. It’s not an “attack” and “defense” thing. They did a thing. The thing is cool. I noted that they often don’t get credit when they do cool things because they are a very satisfying punching bag (ditto for Ubisoft, Activision and Microsoft in general, incidentally).
That’s not a defense. It barely counts as backhanded compliment. It’s just an acknowledgement that companies aren’t people and they very rarely have a personality, so it’s a bad idea to assign them one.
For the record, releasing a patent isn’t open source, but they HAVE released code for some of these application as open source. And some C&C games, which is of course what the original post is about. Which is a distinction that is entirely irrelevant but you made me look it up anyway. Because, as I said, your willingness to sacrifice factuality for the sake of enforcing your antropomorphization of these guys as your archnemesis has the side effect of making me defensive about your claims. If that is attitude it’s one I’m fine with having, here and behind the gym.
Hell, if you’re going to pick an archnemesis at least make it a social media company. Those guys are doing actual damage. Game companies just aren’t relevant enough to get riled up about.
Hell, no. 120 fps wasn’t even a thing. That flash in the pan moment was when 1080p60 was the PC standard and 720p30 the console standard and the way the hardware worked you could hit max specs on a decent PC every time. It lasted like three or four years and it was wonderful.
By the point we started going above the NTSC spec on displays the race was lost. The 20 series came out, people started getting uppity about framerate while playing some 20 year old game and it all went to crap on the PC front.
As for AA, I don’t think you remember FXAA well, or at least in relation to what we have. ML upscaling is so much sharper than any tech we had a couple of gens ago, short of MSAA (and frankly even MSAA). The problems that have become familiar in many UE5 games are not intrinsic to the tech, they have a lot to do with what the engine does out of the box and just how out of spec some of the feature work is.
I feel like people have gotten stuck with some memes (no motion blur! DLSS bad! TAA bad!) that are mostly nostalgic of how sharp 1080p used to look compared to garbage-tier sub 720p, sub 30 fps console games. It’s getting to the point where I have so many major gripes with a lot of modern games but I feel it becomes one of those conversations you can’t have in public because it gets derailed immediately.
In any case I think we can at least agree that it’s been an awkward couple of generations of PC hardware and software for whatever reason and GPUs, engines and displays need to get realigned in a way where people can just fire up games and expect them to look and run as designed.
I’m not asking you to “trust” anything, you can see what they did. It’s out there. That’s not how reality works, it’s not based on “trust”. Things either happen or they don’t. You can look it up.
For the record, they did not patent “UI color changes”, the list includes automated tech for checking for flashing lights, that automatic ping system you were talking about, stuff for touch controls and a bunch of other stuff. There’s a list on the link. I’m not going to read through twenty-odd patents just to disprove some random piece of misinformation you blurted out. Plus, it’s a sterile converation. They released the patents they released and it’s better than not releasing them, so who cares. Good for them in any case.
Seriously, why try so hard? You’re factually wrong about a bunch of what you’re saying and all that’s doing is making me defensive about clearing the record, which as a side effect gets me defending them. And it’s cutting into your credibility whenever you have a REAL issue to complain about. It’s just all the way counterproductive. I don’t understand the compulsion to assume the people you dislike are consistently, one-dimensionally good or evil in all circumstances at the expense of demonstrable reality. How simplistic is people’s moral compass that they can’t parse the slightest ambiguity? It’s bizarre.
13·6 hours agoOh, I have a pretty good grasp of how the messed up, charred remnant of an electoral system the US has works. Turns out you don’t get to ignore the intricacies of US politics because every now and then those idiots do something like this and make it your problem. Plus thanks to cultural imperialism the media we consume includes more insider breakdowns of that stuff than of our own political system. Welcome to the cultural colonies, friend.
For the record, I’m not gloating about being right, although I was right. But since I didn’t get to vote or campaign or otherwise participate in you wrecking our entire thing as collateral damage, impotently giving you crap about it is the only piece of agency I really have on this. As far as I’m concerned, you all did this, as a group, and the survivors are going to be hearing about it from the other survivors for a very long time. You know how chauvinists keep bringing up how the French were cowardly or the Germans were nazis when there’s any good spirited ribbing across cultures even though it was almost a century ago? Well, that’s you now. Because what else can everybody else do.
I mean, I will do my best to keep my own country from following suit, for what it’s worth, including any type of tactical voting for anybody who isn’t an outright fascist and has a chance at stopping them. But I was going to do that anyway, so it doesn’t really count.
Nope, you voted the adults out of the room, I’m afraid.
I agree that it’s a meme comparison anyway. I just found it pertinent to call out that remasters have been around for a long time.
I don’t know that I agree on the rest. I don’t think I’m aware of a lazy game developer. That’s a pretty rare breed. TAA isn’t a bad thing (how quickly we forget the era when FXAA vaseline smearing was considered valid antialiasing for 720p games) and sue me, but I do like good visuals.
I do believe we are in a very weird quagmire of a transitional period, where we’re using what is effectively now a VFX suite to make games that aren’t meant to run in real time on most of the hardware being used to run them and that are simultaneously too expensive and large and aiming at waaay too many hardware configs. It’s a mess out there and it’ll continue to be a mess, because the days of a 1080Ti being a “set to Ultra and forget it” deal were officially over the moment we decided we were going to sell people 4K monitors running at 240Hz and also games made for real time raytracing.
It’s not the only time we’ve been in a weird interaction of GPUs and software (hey, remember when every GPU had its own incompatible graphics API? I do), but it’s up there.
I guess…? Were you planning to sue EA for patent infringement? Because it specifies that the exception applies to patent-based lawsuits.
I mean, “let’s plant some patents for accessibility tech that we give away with a specific caveat and then turn the tables on someone who is trying to sue us for some unrelated patent infringement but may have used our accessibility patents before” is a hell of a long con.
Look, you’re fixating on finding a caveat to this so you get to keep being angry with these guys and I’m here to free you from that burden. You get to keep being mad with them and still acknowledge that someone, somewhere in there did a mostly good thing for mostly good reasons. It’s fine.
EA isn’t a person. There’s a ton of people there. Some seem quite nice. On a more general level, the entire risk of unbridled corporate dominance of public life is that it’s perfectly possible for a company made entirely of very nice people to do some bad shit sometimes, or even most of the time. You don’t need them to be an evil cabal to call them out when they do that. And you don’t lose any face for acknowledging when they don’t.
Well, yeah, but again, that’s not new, and it’s something every game has to do, better or worse.
I’m aging myself here, but if you must know, the time that stands out most to me in the “graphics over gameplay” debate is actually… 8 bit micros, weirdly.
There was a time where people mostly just looked at how much of a screen a character filled, or whether the backgrounds scrolled and just bought that, while a subset of the userbase and press was pleading to them to pay at least some consideration to whether the game… you know, could be played at all.
I mean, the original image is a cutscene, so…
But hey, I’ll split the difference. Instead of SMB 1, which was a launch game and literally wasn’t running on the same hardware (because mappers), we can do Mario 3 instead.
Or, hear me out, let’s not do a remaster at all for current gen leaps. Here’s a PS4 vs PS5 sequel one.
It doesn’t work as well, though, since taking the absolutely ridiculous shift from 2D to 3D, which has happened once and only once in all of gaming history, is a bit of a cheat anyway.
Oh, and for the record, and I can’t believe I’m saying this only now, LttP looks a LOT better than OoT. Not even close.
Yeah. So like every other game.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that’s what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn’t that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you’d see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the “last gen still looked good” game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn’t believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays… well, like Silent Hill, and it’s still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn’t a zero sum game. You don’t trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
Really? Cause I don’t know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.
I don’t understand what you’re saying. Or, I do, but if I do, then you don’t.
I think you’re mixing up technique with style, in fact. And really confusing a rendering technique with an aesthetic. But beyond that, you’re ignoring so many games. So many. Just last year, how do you look at Balatro and Penny’s Big Breakaway and Indiana Jones and go “ah, yes, games all look the same now”. The list of GOTY nominees in the TGAs was Astro Bot, Balatro, Wukong, Metaphor, Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII R. How do you look at that list of games and go “ah, yes, same old, same old”.
Whenever I see takes like these I can’t help but think that people who like to talk about games don’t play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming. Because man, there’s so much stuff and it goes from grungy, chunky pixel art to lofi PS1-era jank to pitch-perfect anime cel shading to naturalistic light simulation. If you’re out there thinking games look samey you have more of a need to switch genres than devs to switch approach, I think.