I remember when I finally played God of War III after years of replaying the first two and was immediately put off by all the light reflections going on in the game. The first boss fight with Poseidon seemed to be almost exclusively made to show off these graphical capabilities of the PS3, with wet surfaces and all, but I found it just noisy and hard to look at and tell what was going on. It didn’t feel more “realistic”, just more “photorealistic” like I was looking through badly focused and framed HD footage.
Same thing kinda annoyed me in Dark Souls III, specially when compared to Bloodborne which didn’t look so greasy. I find the first Dark Souls incredibly beautiful, and never “upgraded” to the Remaster but all the pictures I’ve seen seem like they thought “this needs more light”.
In the first one the grass and less important textures blend into the background, so you can focus more on important stuff like the character through the game’s faded aesthetic. Old games also have this neat effect of having textures that are more detailed than the original resolution can handle, so I usually find that just upping the resolution on GameCube and Wii games already makes them prettier despite their “low graphics”.
So when games like Cyberpunk 2077 came out, the internet was immediately flooded with astroturfed campaigns to exalt how “pretty” the game looks. But it looks like “I can’t see shit” with all the lights, reflections, lens flares, glares and such. If that car didn’t reflect, for example, I could way more easily admire the model.
This one is also a good example:
Then there’s stuff like “Ray Tracing Mods” for games that were not aesthetically developed for that, like Minecraft.
As a point of comparison, here’s a modern game with “low graphics” that I think handles lighting much better even though it’s less “realistic”, Metroid Dread.
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It’s not natural, the light doesn’t bleed into the environment as easily. Samus isn’t lit up green by her little lights even though in real life she probably would given how strong they are. But the contrast makes scenes easier to read, and also I (subjectively) find them incredibly pretty. I also hate Breath of the Wild as a game, but it’s similarly pretty in a way that I think all these “ray tracing mods” ruin.
Is this just a nostalgia thing for me? Are Ray Tracing and associated lighting techniques just marketing ploys to sell more modern GPUs in an era where old hardware is already sufficient? Do any of you prefer oiled-up GoW 3 Kratos over rubber GoW 2 Kratos? Should I get my eyes checked? Is there a whole essay somewhere about intentional lighting decisions and how IT companies are trying to replace subjective human artistic labour with objective automatic graphical processes for financial gain? idk, Journey is pretty I guess.
Reminds me, the Jimquisition aka Stephanie Sterling has a good vid on the topic of graphics. Specifically, they focus on remasters, but I think it’s in the same ballpark as what you’re talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N5pFDZTk84
It’s called “Some Games Look Worse Because They Look Better” and goes into how making “improvements” to graphics without thinking about the overall artistic style can make it look worse instead of better.
Personally, I tend to appreciate realistic anatomy 3d model over toony style of games (KOTOR or Skyrim over Fortnite or WoW), but when it starts getting into all the fancy 3d settings, they lose me fast. My personal pet peeve is motion blur in 3d games, which I pretty much always turn off; it makes my eyes feel weird trying to process the game, I don’t know how else to put it.
And yes, I don’t really understand the appeal of hyper realistic lighting or shadows either. Which is I think an appropriate term for it because hyper realism is, well, to use one definition:
(bold emphasis mine)
And this is maybe where the issue is. Realistic is an approximation of how we would experience it in real life. Hyper realistic is actually a kind of unrealistic, yet promotion of high fidelity graphics makes it sound like it’s selling you on realism.
In a way, it’s maybe for the best that games aren’t trying to be as naturally realistic as possible. I’m not sure I’d want to play a game where the main way of discerning that I’m not looking at a recording of real life is looking away from the monitor. But I do think what is more like hyper realistic gets pushed as inherently good “because of how real it is”, when it’s not actually that real and is more just another stylistic choice and preference.