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.

![]

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.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    3 months ago

    Honestly no, no I don’t. I find it distracting and it often gives me a headache. I much prefer the flat lighting of older games (by which i mean pre-2012…Skyrim was one of the last games where the lighting engine didn’t give me a headache). I think there’s a difference between games and movies, and trying to make games look like movies is not a great idea. What works in one doesn’t necessarily work in the other. With games it’s not just about having something visually appealing to look at. In games you need to be able to parse the spatial geometry of the environment and identify the important things in that environment, and reflections and high contrast shadows make that much more difficult. For most games i play, i turn off the fancy shaders if i can. Shaders in Minecraft for instance can make for a nice cinematic but actually playing with them, for me, is not possible. But, you know…to each their own.

    And this is a bit of a tangent but speaking of “photorealistic”: often what makes for an “artistic” photo or movie isn’t actually all that realistic. For instance when you use a low depth of field you can make something look more “artistic” and “aesthetic”, but it’s not really how we see things in real life. Yes, we don’t see everything in focus at the same time, but we can adjust our focus to see things at various distances clearly. So if you wanted a more “realistic” feel you would actually want a very high depth of field, ideally where everything is in focus so that you can pick and choose freely what to look at, not being forced by the composer of the image where to look. Even though this is not technically “photorealistic”.

    It works similarly with shadows and high contrast. Yes there are shadows and lots of differences in light levels in real life. But IRL your eyes can adjust going from one environment to another. Yet when this is done in games it often just doesn’t translate well, at least for me. I find it very uncomfortable to have to strain to see what is in the darker areas when there is blindingly bright light in some parts of a scene and very little light in others. And when they try to simulate “adjusting to the darkness” when entering, say, a cave, it feels very off-putting and disorienting. I prefer a flatter, albeit “unrealistic” lighting model, the way you used to have in the very early 3D titles of the late 90s, early 2000s. (The one exception i guess would be certain horror games where the darkness is the point, but not in like, normal RPGs or action games.)

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

      In games you need to be able to parse the spatial geometry of the environment and identify the important things in that environment, and reflections and high contrast shadows make that much more difficult.

      This is a really good point and makes me think of games where they have minimized the HUD to being almost nonexistent for “realism” but in the process, it becomes harder to play the game like a game because there aren’t proper markers for where things are. An example is FPS games where “enemies” are not designed to stand out in distinctive ways, so they can, with relative ease, blend in and catch you off guard. This may be somewhat true to RL, but most people are not playing FPS as a war simulator and not giving proper visual cues on where to put your attention just makes things tiring rather than fun IMO.

      But IRL your eyes can adjust going from one environment to another. Yet when this is done in games it often just doesn’t translate well, at least for me. I find it very uncomfortable to have to strain to see what is in the darker areas when there is blindingly bright light in some parts of a scene and very little light in others. And when they try to simulate “adjusting to the darkness” when entering, say, a cave, it feels very off-putting and disorienting.

      Same here. I suspect part of the reason it doesn’t feel right to me is because in RL, if you are adjusting to lighting differences, you might do stuff like squint, blink, shade your eyes if you’re going into brightness, avoid looking at the sun, wear sunglasses. In a game, so much stuff that we’re doing without even thinking about it in RL just doesn’t exist as POV character behavior, automated or manual. So in such games, instead of perceiving light in a realistic way, you’re having it shoved at you in a way you can’t do anything about that is not how you’d tend to handle it in RL. On top of that, things like “don’t look at the sun” simply don’t apply in a game. You can look at a fake sun in a game because it’s not the same fundamentally as looking at the real sun (which can damage your eyesight if not make you go blind). Things like this are incompatible with “realism” design and it would be stupid if they somehow made it so you could actually go blind from looking at a fake sun in a game.

      The immersion/realism obsession gets really up its own ass sometimes and loses sight of what art style is, which is always going to be approximation and choice of perspective, not real life.