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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.
The Elder Scrolls would be interesting if it was touching up Morrowind graphics. Like instead of a remaster, they did a minimum-effort re-release based on OpenMW, but included official text-to-speech and style-transfer models. Bind a toggle key so you can activate CHIM mode and see the generic imperial male face beneath the actor telling you a little story.
Admittedly the dice-roll combat would be even sillier as fake live action. A playable version of those Oblivion skits.
I should say: a game hallucinating detail like this would be sick. Spend a hot nanosecond rendering some PS3-quality animation with PS2-quality graphics, shunt that into a very weird shader, get high photorealism that maybe doesn’t look the same if you turn around and look back. Probably with diegetic framing, like being in a dream. A shooter where you’re fighting your way out of a coma. Use all that GPU grunt to make a tinny saxophone soundtrack as you play.
But when you’re just bumping the resolution? Fuck off.
Dinguses went from reconstructing a noisy render to Half-Life Reimagined With AI.
The way y’all overuse the word “slop” is like calling all e-mail “spam.” Both are supposed to refer to a deluge of nonsense nobody asked for. This author has an LLM in-the-loop, plainly on purpose and with purpose, and it seems to be working out.
If any interaction with spicy autocomplete is treated as equally bad, to the point of aggressive mockery - no kidding people will tune that out. It’s not constructive or sincere. It borders on abusive. How much coverage did this guy just get, where the comments are all ‘well if he’d just done [blank]–,’ and how many people actually believe that [blank] would result in fewer snide comments?
Fuck software patents. You don’t have to make anything - it’s not a specific mechanism - it’s just claiming an idea.
With real patents, tiny workarounds are treated as completely different. Nintendo’s sturdy and reliable d-pads from the Game & Watch through the N64 used a hollow cross pivoting atop a dome. Some years later, Sega put the dome on the cross and had it pivot on a divot.
That sort of silly bullshit distinction is endemic to mechanical design patents. But I only know one case where it happened in software patents, and it’s why image and video codecs are such a clusterfuck. IBM patented arithmetic coding - assigning short codes to frequent values. JPEG and ZIP software had to dance around this for decades, by using Huffman coding, which does the same god damn thing, but slightly worse. When the patent finally expired and ultranerds were free to improve on arithmetic coding, Google tried doing the same bullshit with their improvements, which is part of why JPEG XL went nowhere.
And that’s for hard math! I had to sit and think about describing what arithmetic coding even does, instead of instinctively explaining how to balance binary trees. Namco infamously patented the idea of minigames during load screens. Any minigame! And then they used it, like, once. Warner patented the idea of hyping any NPC that beats you, so you won’t be allowed to do that until 2033. Nintendo’s trying to patent the parts of Pokemon they copied off Megami Tensei.
Imagine if Nintendo had patented sidescrollers. How many games would not exist, if they decided to own that concept? No iteration, no competition, just a handful of Marios and the worst Zelda. The very first third-party example would be Braid. A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says going left to right is theft.
Epic offering a game for free, only to be treated as advertisement for its sale on Steam, is the headline of this submission. What do you mean, what? Do you speak English?
I’ve demonstrated I keep notes on these arguments. Not that it seems to matter, when even the people who agree that Steam is a monopoly pile on, like I’m the asshole for pointing it out. I have asked you, specifically, what I should say differently, and your response was ‘well I dunno.’ Great! Thanks! How distinctly useful!
If I have demonstrated anything in all my years online, it is that I am ready and willing to argue. But it’s not an argument if the other side is just saying words recreationally. That seems to be the case here, when no amount of pleading for specifics or alternatives results in anything besides ‘shut up.’
Meanwhile:
The actual topic remains that Valve is a monopoly. In what universe is that not relevant to this article about their largest competitor being so unimportant they can’t give things away? If everyone here takes that for granted, great… so why am I getting the same response as the many times people deny it? Even the meta discussion about phrasing is fraught and confrontational, regardless of what I’ve actually said. Have I offended you in some way?
If you want to warn, then warn directly
What would that look like, besides what I’ve done?
I don’t think any of you know what you want. You act like I’ve done something wrong, and when pressed on what exactly that is, you cannot provide a reason, but will not re-examine the assertion. Any amount of context is the wrong amount, any approach is the wrong approach, any tone is the wrong tone. The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
And this is over agreement. I’m used to people getting weird when they insist Steam isn’t an obvious monopoly. The exact same weirdness becomes novel when it’s from people insisting it’s too obvious. I’m getting shit on both for explaining why being a monopoly is not intrinsically evil, and for explaining why we should be concerned about them anyway… and I’m getting shit on as though I did neither of those things… in the same comment. Baffling.
People fall over themselves to demonstrate what I’m saying.
I mention that it’s a monopoly - ‘shut up, no it isn’t.’ I mention the people who say it isn’t - ‘shut up, of course it is.’ I start from scratch - ‘shut up, what are you talking about.’ I provide two years of context - ‘shut up, that’s not in this thread.’
What sequence of words would avoid this abuse? What possible sentence would address the actual issue, without people acting like I’ve insulted their mother’s cooking?
Even when I ask what should I say instead?, people go ‘ooh, no, I wouldn’t say it like that’ instead of answering the fucking question.
I’ve had this argument in a wide variety of contexts and tones-of-voice. All of them get the same asinine responses. This goes beyond resting bitch font, where people interpret whatever I write in the shittiest way possible. I’m starting to think the topic is just cursed. Like it’s impossible to have a sensible conversation about Valve’s market share. All efforts descend into snipping about the commenter, or spiral out into nonsense and denial.
I beg of you, prove me wrong. What should I say instead?
I refuse to be shamed on tone when every approach sees the same response.
A coy eye-roll which you cannot imagine anyone disagrees with gets brusquely scoffed at. Pointing out that people absolutely disagree with it gets treated like heavy messing.
Direct responses get downvoted.
Detailed overviews get downvoted.
Oblique implications get downvoted.
Direct application with context gets downvoted.
If I can’t win I don’t play. Steam is a monopoly and people are fucking weird about it. You supposedly agree with me and you’re still treating me the same way these “dumbasses” do. If I pretend they don’t exist I get more predictable bullshit. If I acknowledge they exist it’s my fault somehow. How about no?
I’ve had dozens of people pile on to insist Steam is not a monopoly. They’re the ones I’m quoting about it being the only store they use. They’re the ones downvoting me, and only me, for pointing out it is a monopoly, while they upvote you for also saying it’s a monopoly, but in a yeah-but phrasing.
But Steam’s totally not a monopoly, you guys.
No, the word does not mean competitors don’t exist. It means they don’t matter.
No, the label does not mean we have to shatter Valve. Having market dominance and abusing it are different things, but we still need to recognize when a company fffuuucking obviously has it.
If Gaben suddenly announces he’s sold it all to Larry Ellison, that has ruinous implications for the entire PC gaming market, despite the fact Valve does not strictly own PC gaming. They don’t have to, to be an outsized influence, to the point most people will readily admit they only buy from one store. We have a word for that.
Congratulations on the worst take in a competitive field.
Just… what the fuck? What is it about this distinction that makes people lose all sense? ‘Hey bearing in mind we’re still talking about criminal creeping on children, it’s important to remember that actual touching is worse than doodling over images, so let’s not dilute a term specifically f–’ ‘There is no difference between fiction and reality because what if a crazy person couldn’t tell fiction from reality?!’
Get help.
I’m making an explicit argument about the purpose of the term, as a necessary component of dealing with some of the worst crimes imaginable. I didn’t figure I’d ever have to explain to someone why abusing a human child is fundamentally different from and worse than drawing on top of a fuckin’ JPEG.
If y’all manage to stomp the meaning out of “CSAM,” the same way y’did for “CP,” we’re gonna be right back here, where there’s some bespoke term for the visual evidence of actual assault that physically occurred, yet people insist that a fictional rendering is-too VEOAATPO.
Diluting the impact of these terms is antithetical to protecting children. That stupid Horses game had people lobbing the term “CSAM” at it… for a game you can buy on GOG. If you can casually say “I bought some CSAM at Walmart the other day,” then the term’s not doing its fucking job, describing the kind of imagery you go straight to jail for.
Are you honestly asking me why child molestation is worse than rendering an image?
This term was already developed to distinguish evidence of criminal events. I should fucking hope everyone here understands why preventing or punishing such events is a leading goal, but apparently that’s asking too much, if y’all really do not believe there’s a difference between pasting someone’s head onto a magazine centerfold… versus sexually assaulting them. I am fucking bewildered by this lack of consensus on the topic of child rape. Really thought it was a gimme, for everyone to go, yeah, this thing over here is bad, but obviously it’s not as bad as child rape.
Didn’t expect to fire up the computer and have Lemmings sincerely ask me, why are crimes that happened worse than crimes that didn’t?
If a fan released this as a shader injector, I think it would be celebrated.
Nvidia pushing it under their brand for upscaling is fuck-right-off territory.
If they’d talked to… anyone, beforehand, they’d know RE9’s graphics don’t need help. Show us how this affects unmodded Skyrim. Show us LA Noire actually looking like all the actors it stars. Real-time style transfer surely works the other way too; show us Doom Eternal as a cartoon. Make it a silly thing users can do, rather than yet another bullshit feature to bribe into new games and lord over AMD. Were the anti-competitive margins from CUDA not comfortable enough?