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.
You lost me at calling dark souls beautiful haha. Ngl, even dark souls 3 looks kinda trash for the time it released. You know how you remember shitty graphics better than they were because you played it as a kid? DS1 looks like how i remember PS2 graphics lmao.
I also never had a visibility issue with good lighting in games. No more than i do in real life i suppose.
I honestly do like more high fidelity graphics, but don’t care much about realism. The newest nintendo games as well as the latest God of War games are all beautiful even though they take on widely different art styles.
Realistic graphic mods can suck my dick tho’. That shit just looks like shit from ass 100% of the time and i can’t imagine someone actually playing with these mods besides putting them on to show your friends how cool it looks like before uninstallling it again.
Not going to argue because it’s subjective and all, but I replay Dark Souls 1 at least once a year, so it’s definitely not just memory. I don’t find it pretty because of the graphical fidelity, which granted is on the low end for a PS3 game but mostly for the framing and good use of vistas. For example, Anor Londo’s models are fairly low poly and the textures are simple, but I appreciate how the game forces you to look at it through flattering angles.
DS3 doesn’t really do much like that due to the level structure (except for Anor Londo again lol), and DS2 is just kinda fugly, but I don’t really like either of those games.