When will we reach the point that graphics and performance will no longer be a important aspect of a game?

[Dedayog]

VR like Ready Player One, or the controlling of other humans (that Gerard Butler movie) would be interesting.

[xXPCMotherDunker69Xx]

6 hours ago, 8tg said:

Our current technology is capable of making a playable game that looks and feels like a conventional “real life”.

Think Squad with top of the line animations and the most up to date graphical engine and a massive development team making it look pretty. It’s by all means possible.

But very few people actually want that and making something like that is insanely expensive and time consuming. There’s more to “graphics” than realistic effects and lighting.

I highly advise looking at Noodle’s video on why the Halo remaster sucks visually. You can add all the fancy textures and lighting and different geometry if you want, it isn’t the same result as what’s given by true artistic intent. 
You can make CSGO look like real life, the engine is capable of it, grass blowing in the wind, set your RTX 4090 on fire Ray tracing and all. Except there’s a reason why some objects on Dust 2 have seemingly out of place positioning and coloring. There’s a reason why there’s big red arrows pointing you towards bomb sites. There’s a reason the character models are designed with aggressively chunky and contrasty geometry and texturing. 
Advance graphics don’t always make a good game visually, it’s a game, not the real world.

 

As well “realism” doesn’t have to be high fidelity, check out Unrecord:

This game manages realism not by super high resolution detail and effects, nothing super special is happening behind the scenes graphically. What makes this look like actual real life is:

1) perspective

2) animation and movement

3) filtering

4) sound design

5) world design

Basically making the game look like it’s bodycam footage, the rusting of clothes when running, microphone peaking causing distortion with gunshots, blur, slowly reacting contrast like a cheap cameras auto exposure adjustment, washed out coloring and inconsistent lighting. The world of sorts it’s in is designed to look messy, not exactly detailed, but messy. And messy covers up a lot of the visual indicators of “video game”. You can’t see perfectly smooth transitions between planes off wall-floor when there’s a pile of blurry garbage in the way and flaking paint on the walls. Take the filtering, perspective, and animation away and what you have is a fairly regular shooter that would have a similar level of graphical fidelity as any other semi modern shooter.

 

So to answer your question, I don’t think it will ever happen, because graphics aren’t something that needs to improve for all of video gaming to get better in any way. Some games lend themselves to visual design that’s based around the technical level of detail. But most games don’t. 

If rockstar never released GTA IV, and just sat on that finished product until today, and released it as is for current platforms. People would of course rip on the fact that it looks like a game from 2008. It’s 15 years graphically out of date, the animations are sloppy at times, vehicles are floaty, material deformation is oldschool design…

but it’s still a masterpiece of story, character design, gameplay and world building. It would still be praised for its strong points rather than its theoretically 15 year out of date graphics. The graphics aren’t nearly as important as a fun to play game.

nice timing! I am just watching a about that game, but yes I meant that, I should've worded it better (or never said it in the first place, cuz its a stupid question) I meant games having better immersion than ever, to the state that a off shadow ruins your immersiveness, I don't know why but that sometimes happens to me, like in CSGO when a shadow bug happens something feels off, like when I play a game I don't focus that much on the graphics (like they're good but I focus on the gameplay) etc. instead (is that normal), like I don't know how graphics 10 years from now on will look like and how VR will improve immersiveness, thats why I asked the question, like I am fine with graphics as long as they don't bother me or nausate me or they look terrible, I think people won't have that much of high standards and we will go towards further elements of the game (such as feel, and immersiveness like I said before), still a stupid question by me.
we will see in 10 years.  

[askja]

I would argue we are already there.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, 8tg said:

Advance graphics don’t always make a good game visually, it’s a game, not the real world.

 

As well “realism” doesn’t have to be high fidelity, check out Unrecord:

This game manages realism not by super high resolution detail and effects, nothing super special is happening behind the scenes graphically. What makes this look like actual real life is:

1) perspective

2) animation and movement

3) filtering

4) sound design

5) world design

Basically making the game look like it’s bodycam footage, the rusting of clothes when running, microphone peaking causing distortion with gunshots, blur, slowly reacting contrast like a cheap cameras auto exposure adjustment, washed out coloring and inconsistent lighting. The world of sorts it’s in is designed to look messy, not exactly detailed, but messy. And messy covers up a lot of the visual indicators of “video game”. You can’t see perfectly smooth transitions between planes off wall-floor when there’s a pile of blurry garbage in the way and flaking paint on the walls. Take the filtering, perspective, and animation away and what you have is a fairly regular shooter that would have a similar level of graphical fidelity as any other semi modern shooter.

 

That game looks like a motion sickness generator, unfortunately.

 

And this is another reason why not all improvements in graphic fidelity lift all boats. Sometimes if a game is "too good" at simulating something, it's enough to make the brain confused about what is real, and result in hallucinations or vomiting as the body thinks you've actually been injured or poisoned. This is why a lot of the VR stuff is a dead end. If you were actually able to run around in VR, with your actual legs, that motion sickness would affect nearly everyone, pretty darn quick. A lot of VR experiences can be described as a 8 foot box you can't move from and have to teleport to move just to avoid the effects that would make you want to vomit.

 

Personally, I'm not interested in a game that "simulates" reality past a certain point, because that tends to make things wrap around to the uncanny valley problem. Where you encounter another human in the game and they look "creepy" because the detail is "too perfect" in one place, and too imperfect in places that matter.

 

Like it's pretty easy to go "that anime girl, definitely isn't real", but a lot harder when "that realistic video game character with a fatal gunshot wound is bleeding out in front of me". To what I'd say if the game is evoking the wrong emotion from you, then it's probably too realistic, and may end up giving you nightmares if the game has more of that in store. It's one thing to want a "more realistic" survival-horror experience because that's part of the fun. But you probably don't want a character-driven game to be so realistic that your brain starts experiencing PTSD when companions die in a horrific way.

 

I'd say we peaked around 2009 as far as "did we need to keep going", something that looks like a PS3 game or Xbox 360 game, is good enough even today for telling a story. What we want as improvements since then is higher render resolutions and frame rates, because that matches our expectations for the hardware. I have a 4K screen, why isn't the game natively 4K? a PS3 or Xbox 360 really was a sub-720p experience at the best of times, even if you had a 1080p or higher screen. The hardware was capable of more, but the need to also still be able to work on a 480i television held it back, and thus many games designed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 were designed to have huge chonky UI's of a 480i game, as that's the only way you can read text on a standard definition television.

 

Even some games today still adhere to that UI language, where no more than 3 lines of 40 characters can be on screen

 

The 40-column text mode is a hold over from 1980's computers that used televisions as monitors. That's what is most readable, even if a modern high definition game could easily fit twice as much text in that space, it would be too tiring to read if shown all of it at once.

 

What happens when you get a text dump of tiny flavor text in a game?

Do you actually read it? I'd say more people don't because they just see a bunch of tiny text (sometimes with a poorly contrasted background,) over and over again from identical looking items and NPC's. You quickly reach for the "skip" dialog, or "accept quest" without reading any of it. 

 

Overall there are things that can be improved for sure, but I think we plateaued in how realistic something needs to be around 2009. Short of some very specific "realism is required, and the selling point" scenarios, such as vehicle and job simulators. Most of the time the "fun threshold" is met by simply having the graphics and sound match the expectations of the player. 

 

If that was not the case, Pixel-art games would have stopped being a thing and discarded back in 1994 with the launch of the PS1, and minecraft/roblox would have no audience. Like imagine if games like Minecraft and Terraria had to always look like the most recent COD to be popular.

 

[XNOR]

6 hours ago, 8tg said:

 

This game manages realism not by super high resolution detail and effects, nothing super special is happening behind the scenes graphically. What makes this look like actual real life is:

 

I'm kind of amazed how completely fooled a lot of people seem. The movement, the perspective and the lack of the usual cues (gun and head move together) seem to sell it to our brain as realistic. The world was built with attention to detail, but you'll quickly see the typical bump mapping, texturing and other features which give away a video game, yet some people seem to insist it's photorealistic to an unprecedented degree.

[Quackers101]

yes its more of demo like titles of what is to come. Its fun for those who want it, but doesnt mean we are there, although with enough work it can be close-ish.

Then putting it into gameplay, not through real-life scans, but from what one can create. Then the hardware to run it perfectly, in motion or without. But I guess we can be closer than what I said, then again 4090 can't really do path tracing. But at some point those realtime path traced rays, might become a reality.

 

As with bodycam as camera, comes into the FOV and other issues, taking from a first person view would be harder and maybe towards what we have in VR.

 

UE5 Procedural Content Generation, and the use with AI is such good tools for daunting tasks. To make something both gameplay focused and realistic, when it works. procedural to make the goals, AI data to clean and improve or adjust to make it more believable with less effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoCGLW53fZg

 

materials adjusting for both engines, and UE5 view on newer materials (some also shown through the demo). just dont add so much complexity that performance sucks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joOIBteSo1w

 

 

In short one can look at the older UE5 demo and cyperpunk to understand a bit more the difference, although they aren't the newest ones and things will change quickly in some areas to make stuff look more convincing.

[cmndr]

On 4/18/2023 at 8:18 PM, emosun said:

About 10 years ago when games looked similar to todays games but then you wouldnt be purchasing new crap which for nvidia is a no no.

Mostly this... 
Yeah, things are better now but not enough for me to really care. 

 

I say this as someone that thought the PSX was trash and that well done 2D was better than poorly done 3D. We've got a lot more polygons now. And We're talking about 1920x1080 through 3840x2160 instead of 800x600 through 1280x1024.
 

 

Probably the next thing that'll get me interested is when the CP2077 EXTREME LIGHTING that just came out is the norm. 

[Thaldor]

Even without the evolution of consoles we would have the push for better graphics, a lot better graphics, thanks to PC. Like who would buy and play "Nintendo Entertainment System 16x2 TurboFX" with the old SNES limitations in '99 if the PC graphics were developed the speed they did? '99 because that time we didn't yet push as much for the 3D but everyone knew the 2D era had ended totally and the 3D was the thing for the graphical fidelity and not a gimmick anymore.

 

For the graphics there have been 2 big forces that have driven the game side a lot; movies and demoscene. Movies have shown how close to "realistic" CGI we can get, as in pushing to the point where you cannot differentiate CGI from filmed footage was a huge race and kind of still is. Demoscene on the other hand showed what we can do in real-time, as in if we push everything to the limit and bit further, what is the level of graphics computers can actually run like a game. Even today when you look at something like CNCD Fairlight demos and know a bit about things behind CGI (as in what goes to the demos and what they are actually doing and how hard they are pushing the hardware), yeah your Hogwarts Legacy looks passable, the Unreal 5 City demo is what should be the AAA class and Forspoken looks like shit.

Demoscene of course is more about shaders and what kind of graphics code can generate. And no, while publicly shown they are pre-rendered but when they are submitted, they are executables, so i you go through something like Assembly demos, those are all captured from organizer machine running the demo in real-time. But from the demoscene, 3DMark was born, while it's not often given much credit for pushing the PC game graphics but it has, like even still you cannot say Ice Storm "looks bad" as a game graphics, is it more like RTS graphics in 2023? Yes, but it is also from 2013 so not the latest and greatest. There has always been games that have challenged 3DMark in quality of graphics but still for the small part of gamers who cared about benchmarks it has always been something which has told what PCs are capable of doing.

 

Graphics also kind of isn't only about textures, models and shaders. Physics modeling and surprisingly many other things have walked a long time hand in hand with the graphical performance of hardware (mainly thanks to Nvidia CUDA). The move to 3D graphics kind of just happened because the same hardware that could manipulate sprites was found out to be bad but able to handle 3D object manipulation and when it came to that 3D graphics were already out here and saying they were something unattainable would have been just plain stupid.

 

Already mentioned Unreal5 City demo shows that we have a lot to still develop and polish. We can attain the level of graphics where you cannot differentiate real-world from a game and it seems we are getting closer and closer to that. Is it going to be extremely expensive and pretty much in vain, yeah, but we are going to make it

"Because it's there" (~George Mallory, when asked why he wants to climb the Everest)

and we ain't going to stop before we get there. Not to even add that with VR we have moved the goal a bit further because we are going to need a lot more resolution and we want to read that tiny text.

 

For the actual story and gameplay. I can agree that pretty much all popular games are shit when it comes to the meat. Some multiplayer shooter, zero story just mindless running around, sandbox survival horror/adventure/whatever and it's pretty much "do your own content, we don't have time for that" (locked door here, key there and note on the floor saying "aaarrrgghhh... We did wrong..." isn't a story), MMO's all pretty much have always had a lore, the story side is almost impossible to do, FPS games have lacked any really new features for a long time (special abilities do bring some spice but we are far away from mindblowing new features like the bullet time, although in 3rd person shooter, was at the time), RPGs seem to be in the same place without anyone doing anything actually new, blah blah, blah blah blaa. This however really only concerns AAA business which seems to have just stopped doing anything remotely new for a good while. EA, Microsoft (and now ZeniMax), Activision/Blizzard, Sony, Nintendo, Ubisoft and whoever else from the huge names I missed have decided to just rinse-and-repeat after couple somewhat new tries didn't do that well and probably all of them are more or less in the same boat with that they would need to do something new but their tools are pure garbage because they really didn't make them to be infinitely upgradeable, like Bethesdas Creation Engine is already legendary joke when it comes to new versions.

 

But the silver lining. That seek for graphical fidelity has pushed the hardware forward and everything so much that we are making games that would have been impossible even a decade ago, let alone going as far as couple decades ago. While it's a graphical development to go from the 10 meters viewrange of original Silent Hill (the "fog" was there because PS1 just couldn't render more than that and a fog was great way to hide that) to Skyrim where you can almost see the target in the next city, the gameplay possibilities that bring are huge. Not to forget stuff like out of render distance simulation (like imagine playing Satisfactory so that your machines only work while they are within the render distance), generally the "world simulation" has become a long way along the development of the pure performance, the resposiveness of games has gone up a lot (like fighting games were long time the last bastion of sprite animation because the ease of running them and even then so many got it wrong), compare EVE: Online to Elite: Dangerous or NMS and the scale difference is just huge (the "only fly in space" vs. you can actually land on every planet you come across is pretty huge jump), hell, I used to love point and click games which have now basicly died because there isn't any reason to make them anymore out of necessity rather than choice (point-and-click was made because running something like Monkey Island in constant real-time would have been way too much).

 

Have we lost the great time of mystical Myst, the endless tales of Neverwinter Nights, the storytelling of Grim Fandago, the brutal tactical strategy needed to be good in Close Combat? No, absolutely not. Is majority of the games marketed the most just stamped in from the last years release in hopes to get more money and sheeps buy that shit? Yes. But if for a second you go and just leave the mass produced garbage to it's real value and look the smaller projects and some huge projects, they are all there still. RDR2 can go toe to toe against LucasArts games in story telling, many games today are far more complicated strategically than the old Close Combats, NWN was gold mine for modders and DnD DM's to build their own stories but you can do the same in Skyrim and who stops you from doing your own campaign over some sandbox game?

 

And it's less than a month until Cyan Worlds releases the Firmament and at least I'm going to live with my headset on until I either pass out from brains being too stuck or I finish it. Like holy shit, you would think in three decades pretty successful game studio would have been bought and gutted many times over but no, it's still independent and run by Rand. They have changed that much they have apparently hired at least Richard Vander Wende back to work on Riven remake, probably again from Myst profits like they did in the 1996.

[thrasher_565]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

That game looks like a motion sickness generator, unfortunately.

 

And this is another reason why not all improvements in graphic fidelity lift all boats. Sometimes if a game is "too good" at simulating something, it's enough to make the brain confused about what is real, and result in hallucinations or vomiting as the body thinks you've actually been injured or poisoned. This is why a lot of the VR stuff is a dead end. If you were actually able to run around in VR, with your actual legs, that motion sickness would affect nearly everyone, pretty darn quick. A lot of VR experiences can be described as a 8 foot box you can't move from and have to teleport to move just to avoid the effects that would make you want to vomit.

 

Personally, I'm not interested in a game that "simulates" reality past a certain point, because that tends to make things wrap around to the uncanny valley problem. Where you encounter another human in the game and they look "creepy" because the detail is "too perfect" in one place, and too imperfect in places that matter.

 

Like it's pretty easy to go "that anime girl, definitely isn't real", but a lot harder when "that realistic video game character with a fatal gunshot wound is bleeding out in front of me". To what I'd say if the game is evoking the wrong emotion from you, then it's probably too realistic, and may end up giving you nightmares if the game has more of that in store. It's one thing to want a "more realistic" survival-horror experience because that's part of the fun. But you probably don't want a character-driven game to be so realistic that your brain starts experiencing PTSD when companions die in a horrific way.

 

I'd say we peaked around 2009 as far as "did we need to keep going", something that looks like a PS3 game or Xbox 360 game, is good enough even today for telling a story. What we want as improvements since then is higher render resolutions and frame rates, because that matches our expectations for the hardware. I have a 4K screen, why isn't the game natively 4K? a PS3 or Xbox 360 really was a sub-720p experience at the best of times, even if you had a 1080p or higher screen. The hardware was capable of more, but the need to also still be able to work on a 480i television held it back, and thus many games designed for the PS3 and Xbox 360 were designed to have huge chonky UI's of a 480i game, as that's the only way you can read text on a standard definition television.

 

Even some games today still adhere to that UI language, where no more than 3 lines of 40 characters can be on screen

 

The 40-column text mode is a hold over from 1980's computers that used televisions as monitors. That's what is most readable, even if a modern high definition game could easily fit twice as much text in that space, it would be too tiring to read if shown all of it at once.

 

What happens when you get a text dump of tiny flavor text in a game?

Do you actually read it? I'd say more people don't because they just see a bunch of tiny text (sometimes with a poorly contrasted background,) over and over again from identical looking items and NPC's. You quickly reach for the "skip" dialog, or "accept quest" without reading any of it. 

 

Overall there are things that can be improved for sure, but I think we plateaued in how realistic something needs to be around 2009. Short of some very specific "realism is required, and the selling point" scenarios, such as vehicle and job simulators. Most of the time the "fun threshold" is met by simply having the graphics and sound match the expectations of the player. 

 

If that was not the case, Pixel-art games would have stopped being a thing and discarded back in 1994 with the launch of the PS1, and minecraft/roblox would have no audience. Like imagine if games like Minecraft and Terraria had to always look like the most recent COD to be popular.

 

ya the ps proffed that platforms were still a thing with lbp. but they messed up the online play... and could never recover...

i love to see new snes games being made. but i guess big aaa compalys problyu thing no one would pay $80 for it... unless your nintendo...

games are meant to be shallow all because they dont what you playing it for decades they want it forgetable.

 

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Thaldor said:

hell, I used to love point and click games which have now basicly died because there isn't any reason to make them anymore out of necessity rather than choice (point-and-click was made because running something like Monkey Island in constant real-time would have been way too much).

 

People still make P&C games, but they've generally taken the form of mobile games, since that's the most obvious input path on an iphone/tablet. Where as PC games have pretty much gone into WASD+Mouse, or XInput gamepad, no in-between unless you're a vehicle sim.

 

P&C games have also morphed into the action-adventure-rpg and the anime-style visual novel.

 

Traditional, Sierra/lucasarts P&C games can't be made anymore because they don't match the expected experience. It also needs to be said that SCUMM (eg Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island) were real time games. Along most of the Sierra AGI and SCI games had world-timers, but they were usually not as robust as SCUMM (where NPC's would actually chase you out of a room, something only otherwise seen in QFG Sierra games.) Under the hood AGI and SCI were just saving state between rooms, the rest of the world wasn't actually "living", but SCUMM, the rest of the world actually was living. There were also other games of similar vintage (eg Ultima 1-8) that also operated on the same real time principles, but often only the overworld was affected by time in 1-8, and dungeons were clean reset every in 1-5 when you exited them owing to not sharing state (eg, separate executables.)

 

One of the games I'd love to see "remade" from the 80's is StarFlight. There have been some half-hearted attempts at it, but a lot of them just straight up fail to understand why that game was fun.

 

If you were to remake it today, you'd probably not only algorithmically generate the planets, but also use AI to generate the Alien NPC's and their ships you encounter. The closest we've seen to this concept has been No Man's Sky, even some other games (eg Spore, Stellaris) have main features of intelligently generating aliens and planets, but falling extremely far from having an end-game that isn't just "conquest."

 

Given how good 3D stuff is now, nobody would realistically want a "2D PixelArt" remake unless you ironically were trying to "pixel remaster" the original game. Even then you'd likely end up using 3D at pixelart resolutions because it would just make things faster than trying to generate the landing sequences in 2D when they have always been 3D.

 

 

[Vishera]

On 4/19/2023 at 5:18 AM, emosun said:

About 10 years ago when games looked similar to todays games but then you wouldnt be purchasing new crap which for nvidia is a no no.

It's generally true,

Just looking at Ryse: Son of Rome - i can't believe this game is 10 years old (Used my ATi Radeon HD 6970 for the screenshot):

[Poinkachu]

20 hours ago, Dedayog said:

VR like Ready Player One

When that time comes, we have learned from the villain in the movie to disconnect / not wear the crotch part

[Montana One-Six]

On 4/20/2023 at 6:32 PM, 8tg said:

This game manages realism not by super high resolution detail and effects, nothing super special is happening behind the scenes graphically. What makes this look like actual real life is:

1) perspective

2) animation and movement

3) filtering

4) sound design

5) world design

Watched the video and I think that only the lighting and world design makes it look kinda realistic.

 

Animation and movement look off and sometimes not realistic at all. Perspective is better than most FPS but still kinda strange and very narrow. Sound design sounds like you are  wearing headphones without music playing while also having a hoodie over your head.