Videogame Aesthetics

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They'd just be borken anyway - Pictures, that is, as we upload all our pics to the BU server.

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All this talk about photo realism is nice but maybe game designers are taking this all from the wrong angle.

Look at screenshots from the next wave of games : they require hardware AA to iron out all those jaggies. Also, recent titles like UT2004 have nice looking shapes but the bright display and muddy colours just ruin the sense of depth. One thing that has been done right is perfecting world physics such that you can have realistic looking water.

Now, HL2 is going the right way by actually simulating some effects like the temporary flash you get when turning round towards a bright light source. It's not about how things should look, it's about how the human eye interprets a scene. That's a subtle difference but you'll understand when I say that the human eye adapts to light changes.

The site's back up.

Nice article :tup:

I dont see the big deal with photo realism, its good for some games, but I nearly always prefer graphics that are stylised (sometimes very subtley) in some way, so that it just looks cooler. Anyone can make super high poly characters and take photos of textures to make them look photo realistic from certain angles, but I prefer some artistic edge.

Well I don't think photo realism has to necessarily denotre a realistic setting.

Right now I think the main problem is / are characters. There's something about their look and movement that still too animated, even in games with mocap and ragdolls.

I can remember showing my mother a picture of a church from Hexen 2 when they were promoting that. She asked "where's that?" Of course it was a small photo helped by the blurring of printing, but I think as far as backgrounds go we're a little closer than some think we are. Even it it's cheating the photo cap textures of games like CS have been really good. In the credits for Max Payne 2 there was a nod to some kind of radiosity technology. It must have been used when creating the levels light maps and not real time, but none the less I think that's the direction of tech a lot of games will need to go in..

I'd like to see a version 2.0 of this article after ut2007 is released so that the maps of mod authos can be taken into account (as much as I like epics levels, they've never been known for looking too realistic).

I don't like photorealism anyways, so I don't care.[/skimmingthefat]

The writer of the article has a valid point though. Whenever a game uses a more stylistic approach (such as cell-shading) reviewers complain that it has been done before, etc. There's rarely any such comment about games with 'realistic' content.

He's also right that there's rarely a game that even appears to try something other than cartoon or (near)photorealistic settings.

btw : it's fun to see that an UT2kx-mod (Hollow Moon) gets mentioned along professional games.

the problem with photo realism is that it makes the development time a lot longer and becomes more expensive to make, the whole development time is taken up making art assets and not actually making gameplay or dare i say that filthy word story and character development, well one can dream. This is why the creative side has taken a nose dive as rising expenses mean that publishers will not fund anything they consider too different from the established titles, in fact so high are the development costs and what they see as risk that some publishers do no publish first time developers, new IPs or products without a film or TV tie in, also the games that try and look real well quite fankly they dont and the problem is they date very very fast, with stylized visuals they dont date the same leading to a longer shelf life plus they should be quicker and cheaper to develop.

Personally when i look at something that tries to be real but isn't my eye picks out every small mistake or distraction, but with a stylized look to the graphics my mind and imagination seems to fill in the spaces and makes it real turning into a more emersive experience