Do you agree or disagree with hot takes from gaming communities?

despair

Hello fellow artists!
If you frequent social media or reddit, you know there will always be some graphical comparison between latest releases, console wars, IP wars, old fans calling new games of a series trash etc. Some opinions I can totally get behind, but some of them make me question myself. That's why I've been feeling a bit hesitant about sharing my opinions on the technical and graphical aspects of games in public settings. I'm curious to know if any of you have experienced similar feelings. How do you handle sharing your insights and expertise openly? Some devs/artist got into hot water simply stating some facts, some got roasted over their opinions.

Let's discuss some of them here. Feel free to add your opinion/hot take on any game, expand on it freely. I need to hear more from this side. 

1 - use of color filters in games. People campaigned against some games like Starfield having filters in specific outposts or planets, wanted all to have the same color grading. I believe it's beneficial to give sense of atmosphere. Bethesda's never been after hyper realism in any of their RPGs, they call it fantasy realism or something like that. Like Skyrim didn't have the most realistic water even for 2011. It was a mix between stylized and realism that aged better than the games that aimed for hyper realism at the time, also runs on more lower end devices. 

It could have been tweaked maybe, but completely removing all color filters would just make every location look the same, if you set any architectural/structural differences aside. 

2 - huge landscapes make games boring/bland. The most complained games about this are latest Assasins Creed games and RDR2. Maybe I think more like an environment artist, but I enjoy just chilling in a rural setting without worrying if there are some enemies to kill or objectives to complete. Also both these games make use of that large landscapes and corporate different seasons in some parts of the map along with color filters. (yes, filters again)


3 - x game has bad graphics. y game has superb graphics. The recent release of Forza Motorsport showed something I've been suspecting some long time. The media has some bias against some brands/IPs. In the graphical comparison videos of Forza MS and Grand Tourismo 7 some people went as far as claiming Forza has PS3 era graphics and GT7 is miles better in terms of looks. The material definition of the cockpit shots in the Forza alone makes these claims look silly. I really don't know what else to say.

4 - Another popular hot take is Gotham Knights looks worse than Arkham Knight. Again I love the detail on materials and shaders in Gotham. I only played an hour or so of the game myself with HDR on a console after all the patches. Maybe that played a huge part but what I have seen so far has been phenomenal, especially lighting and details of the interiors. There are some parts that geniunely felt a backwards some like water effects. But the overall design is smooth. Saying this game could've run at 60 FPS with these graphical fidelity is something but calling it looking objectively worse than its 7-year old counterpart is another thing.

* They had some bad publicity before launch, like their lead TA calling next gen Xbox a potato and the reason why the game can't be 60 FPS, excusing untethered co-op as the reason why the game underperformed or dropping last gen support last minute. Imo these might have contributed to overall receivement.

I still want to appreciate the effort these artists and engineers put into these games. Some of the finest craftsmanship went buried under failed management, time/budget constraints and marketing. Some games had  their redemptions like Cyberpunk and No man's sky, but some will never have another chance at it (looking at you Bioware)

Alex_J

i wouldnt care about some random gamers opinion about graphics per se. usually its like, if big things are fucked up, then people start looking at all the small things and get focused on picking everything apart. but if the big things are right then nobody cares about the small things.

I think the big things that have been done poorly is that focus has been on making games addictive and money draining, rather than cool and fun and high value. The core gamer audience who has been playing long enough to know a thing or two picks up on this. maybe this is because games used to be made by geeks but now its big money which skews motives too far.

its been said to death but from a technical standpoint fromsoft games are always pretty far behind other AAA games but the audience doesnt care because they are fun and give high value for the money. In terms of game design they are pretty basic too - nothing really groundbreaking just the basics done well.

It wont matter though what people complain about if profits are still made. "let them march, so long as they pay their taxes"

thomasp

I'm always amazed how some games are rated as better looking for simply having higher res/very sharp looking textures, even if the models and lighting are not much to write home about or the whole scene is looking very static and/or with jerky animation. Apparently as long as you can cut yourself on the individual pixels of a still image it's all good. That goes back a long time too with extra high res texture packs for ego shooters about 20 years ago.

Btw. Forza cockpits are looking quite low res to me (geometry detail) compared to GTS/GT7. Can't speak to Forza's overall image quality but GT manages to look like actual TV race footage at times. Probably the overall best looking racing title out there? If only my racer of choice - Assetto Corsa Comp - would come close to that. Superior in the driving/physics/AI/customization at least - which is of course the main thing with these games.

zetheros

not really a hot take, but personally I almost always turn off motion blur, depth of field, and sometimes chromatic aberration and film grain depending on the game, and default 90 degree FoV is just too claustrophobic, 103 is just about right. These settings just don't look good to me, and sometimes make me motion sick. They might be neat features to have in a photo mode, but barring that I want to see everything at all distances with visual clarity

DoF is particularly troublesome in PvP games, because the depth is usually based on a ray traced from the camera direction to the environment, and not all the stuff going on around to the left and right of you, which is really important to focus on. Anything that hinders situational awareness is bad, unless it's part of a gameplay feature; like getting hit by a flash grenade.

As for hot takes by gaming communities, a lot of them are pretty rubbish or misinformed, but some are true. For instance there has been basically a decade-old hate train against Activision Blizzard King, which is mostly deserved, but it's also kind of like beating a dead horse until it's been thoroughly charred via kinetic energy alone. People have prospered by growing their careers riding this train, kind of like when a whale dies and a microcosm of sea life springs up around it on the ocean floor. I expect to see this hate train continue on it's route for at least the next two decades, and expect that it'll continue to entertain me while I do mundane tasks like retopology.

When you're a game developer it becomes easier to discern the difference between truth and sensationalist opinions, like that popular bit where "Game Developers Hate Larian For Being Good". No one hates Larian for making a good game, lol

poopipe

In the lead TA's defence both the Xbone and Series S are potatoes and are a fucking nightmare to develop for

iam717

quick: driver lock outs, bad for new systems, no driver lockouts in old systems/updates,

tldr;

I haven't updated in 12 years or so, my recently experience with these new "systems", seem to have been limited, and locked out of options that where perfectly fine and perfectly available previously, example the search ability in windows as an example, the ms documents, ms paint, now driver lock outs? . . .

Whats really interesting bout this stuff is the agreements when installing o.s.'s, since they now incorporated a.i. into the o.s.'s they can say well you used to disagree with a.i. (stealing) and the plagiarizing it does to say the least but you agreed to the agreement for the .o.s. so you are showing us you agree with it now so you can't sue us if we copy 1:1 with a little editing your projects when you connect to the internet.

^

This is on topic since we need drivers to even do things with the gfx cards, integrated or not, things i could do are no longer possible? strange really, i really feel at odds with these "updates" regardless of what they push, it seems micro upgrades, while slowly somehow limiting the machines, like a forced pull back type of situation (watch benchmark reviews on gpu/cpu) just cause a few digits go up doesn't mean its the best new thing. 

I could do more quicker on old pc's than i can on these now, very strange, oh well i am retracting my progress of this digital stuff, screw these shady practices, they never have enough $, but i think its more about not letting you have any.

Edit: when i played with the diamond, i did it deliberately to see if we are really limited and it showed me, they have been crumb dropping updates and its disgusting now the "upgrades" are even less.