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Reply With Quotethose shots have actually finally pushed me into the photorealism=meh camp. Not that I dislike the idea of a photorealistic engine, but they seem to be using it to recreate actual world locations, and that strikes me as pointless.
I'm officially scared of technology.
I have lots of beefs with Crysis, particularly the actual gameplay demonstrated so far, but I cannot help but be stunned by the developing photorealism of this engine.
I looked at the actual shots before reading "reference" and "real time" and in one or two cases, I honestly paused a while trying to figure out which was which.
In fact, that'd make an awesome little thing - the real time and reference next to each other in spoiler text. Try to guess.
those shots have actually finally pushed me into the photorealism=meh camp. Not that I dislike the idea of a photorealistic engine, but they seem to be using it to recreate actual world locations, and that strikes me as pointless.
To me that's just impressive. As long as not everyone goes for a photorealistic style, I'll like the look of it.
Still, this is a bit easier to do with screens that small.
I would say that they are using reference photos to test the results of the engine - I doubt they will necessarily be using these locations in the game, any more than they did with Far Cry.Originally Posted by Fafhrd
Still, I'd say they are still a long way off photorealistic. The impression is probably better without the reference photos.
Also, I still don't think photorealism is a very good goal for games, and a preoccupation with this seems to distract from the fact that the actual games aren't progressing. They may still be fun, but mainly due to the novelty of more interactivity in the environment, mostly with inanimate objects, not other characters.
Last edited by scumble; 18th Oct 2006 at 09:55.
Yes, I already said that...
But if you're implying it doesn't make sense, the gist was that the photos immediately show up the lack of really fine detail in the engine shots.
I'm pretty sure he's just seconding what you said, scumble.
I third it.
Well that's ok then.
On the "photorealism - yea or nay" issue: Personally, I hated the aesthetics of FarCry. I hated the overly colourful, plasticky look. I thought it was tacky as hell. In that respect, Crysis looks like an improvement to me. If I play it, it's unlikely that the art direction will stay with me even a tenth of how much Psychonauts has styed with me, but I do think that this sort of realism is one of many valid artistic styles. (I'm currently replaying Oblivion on my new, embarrassingly fast computer, and the eyecandy does give me a much stronger feeling of "being there", especially now that the framerate is a lot higher.)
However, I do think that there can be quite a bit discrepancy between how real a world looks on screenshots and how real it feels. For instance, I thought that the Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault screens looked very good, but in the game I almost never felt like any of what was going on was real. Surely that's down to the feel of the engine and the game design, and that's where Crysis first has to prove to me that it's worth paying $45 for.
Personally, although I'm no fan of "photorealism" as the next level of graphical prowess, I think you guys must be nitpicking if you don't think shots like this and this are achieving a lot compared to most modern counterparts. That is seriously quite impressive for still shots, in motion it's probably more impressive until you walk up and punch the VITAL WEAK SPOT corner of the building and it collapses with REALISTIC PHYSICS.
Impressive is one thing, "photorealistic" is more of a limiting condition. It depends what you mean by photorealistic I suppose. Perhaps that's the problem with the term, it sets up an impossible goal.
But I think Thirith is right on target talking about whether a game "feels" real, and that plasticky specular look in Far Cry wasn't appealing, though the outdoor environments were generally absorbing. The feel is down to physics and the behaviour of NPCs, and HL2 probably did a better job of it overall, though it was far from perfect.
I advise everyone to pick up a copy of Okami and stop worrying about all this photorealism nonsense.
It's not that photorealism in games is boring, it's that photorealism in yet another FPS military sim is boring.
It's definately pretty, but we'd be more excited about it if it had some style beyond your standard Jerry Bruckheimer hollywood blockbuster movie extravanza. On the other hand, if we had a photorealistic film noir detective game in the vein of Deus Ex or Vampire Bloodlines, we'd be having spaz fits over it in every other thread.
They should display the man-hours under every screenshot, just for fun.
Also isn't it interesting that the level of detail is so great they go around copying photographs? Where's the originality, the artists and their crazy worlds.
For me, we have long since passed the point where game graphics developers are just focussing on the wrong damn things. We've had acceptably awesome visuals for years now, IMHO, while character design and animation is for the most part still struggling not to regularly look dumb. The money is not being spent in the right places.
Basically I don't understand the point in trying to create an environment that looks like a photo, if you just end up watching people sliding along the ground on one foot at a time as they run, and all the people/creatures of a certain type are absolutely identical in appearance and behaviour.
In fact, the more the environment looks like reality, the bigger the jolt to your suspension of disbelief when something blatantly unrealistic occurs (which is one of the reasons why an art style not based on reality makes so much sense in gaming). Suspension of disbelief (for me at least) is so much more about how things act than how things look standing still.
Some developers are certainly making inroads into these sorts of areas, and I can think of a handful of past games that also made a genuine effort, but by and large it's taken a really really long time, and a lot of developers still don't seem to get it :/
But hey, as long as the screenshots look amazing, I guess they can sell lots of copies.
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