How many of our all-time favorite games even have photo-realistic graphics? Is this just the logical outgrowth, an endpoint, of a generation-long strategy to accomplish a goal that nobody really wants?
Plenty of games pursue photorealism - they just don’t brag about it like Kojima. I’d count every game that got as close as technology allowed, then changed just enough to dodge the uncanny valley. Halo Infinite is stylized; the original game is just old. LA Noire advertised its verisimilitude and now looks like any other seventh-gen title. People have been going “holy shit, it’s so real!” since, like, Night Driver.
The good ending from here is the end of that arms race.
Half the push for ballooning budgets and decade-long dev cycles has been escalating standards for what feels real-ish. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars and shipped with fifty gigabytes of visual assets. It already feels only as pretty as modded GTA V. But a filter like this presumably works fine on RDR… 1. A game that cost a lot less, took a fraction as long to come out, and desperately lacks several graphical features we now take for granted. If your graphical style is “like realism, but” then you can now jump straight into the uncanny valley from models someone banged out on a Friday afternoon.
In other words, 2027 kinda graphics, with 2007 kinda budgets.
What’s more likely to happen is that behemoth publishers will hire even more people to do everything the hard way, and then also fight this instant realism filter, so it only looks the way it already looked when they did things the hard way. Because nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.
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How many of our all-time favorite games even have photo-realistic graphics? Is this just the logical outgrowth, an endpoint, of a generation-long strategy to accomplish a goal that nobody really wants?
Plenty of games pursue photorealism - they just don’t brag about it like Kojima. I’d count every game that got as close as technology allowed, then changed just enough to dodge the uncanny valley. Halo Infinite is stylized; the original game is just old. LA Noire advertised its verisimilitude and now looks like any other seventh-gen title. People have been going “holy shit, it’s so real!” since, like, Night Driver.
The good ending from here is the end of that arms race.
Half the push for ballooning budgets and decade-long dev cycles has been escalating standards for what feels real-ish. RDR2 cost half a billion dollars and shipped with fifty gigabytes of visual assets. It already feels only as pretty as modded GTA V. But a filter like this presumably works fine on RDR… 1. A game that cost a lot less, took a fraction as long to come out, and desperately lacks several graphical features we now take for granted. If your graphical style is “like realism, but” then you can now jump straight into the uncanny valley from models someone banged out on a Friday afternoon.
In other words, 2027 kinda graphics, with 2007 kinda budgets.
What’s more likely to happen is that behemoth publishers will hire even more people to do everything the hard way, and then also fight this instant realism filter, so it only looks the way it already looked when they did things the hard way. Because nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.