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Video games have gotten so realistic that g@mers everywhere are publicly admitting they've never been outside before
(hexbear.net)
still look like crappy game graphics on a big uncanny valley spectrum.
the thing about graphical fidelity is you can't go fucking full hog anymore. Crysis is still remembered for it and people still mod that game to eek out some more shit. The rest of this? It could look like fucking Gothic 2 and be fine
the closer they get to 'photo-real' fidelity it somehow continually looks flatter and more soulless. it's either a statement about how real life looks or the conditions game-devs are under stifle creativity
but it really does distress my brainlobes how all the technology and energy going into something like these new spiderguys produces something less stand-out than third party people using lighting injectors and cheap tricks. a similar thing happens in film where unprocessed ultra hd digital cameras create an uncomfortable hyperreal effect, so that most Real Movies actually pare it down or use traditional film to, ironically, not look as cheap.
There's only so much you can do with photorealism because the expectations for animation and physics will continue to increase with level of detail. An NPC's nose hairs blowing in the wind means nothing if they occasionally clip through walls or their feet do not land on steps when they go up and down stairs.
Games that try to solve this are grating to play. Being locked in place to watch a canned animation while a character slowly shuffles across a chasm or climbs stairs or jumps a chest high obstacle over and over and over destroys immersion even though it looks "realistic" because you're losing control over your character multiple times in the span of 10 minutes
Those aren't really for realism, those are modern loading screens.
Max Payne 3 kinda felt like this
If you can imagine comunism. Instead of every game requiring thousands of hours to make functionally identical high resolution cups. People could just use the high quality cups thst exist and not have to waste hundreds of hours in making new ones
Another great example is the original version of Sleeping Dogs. The remastered graphics make the game look worse because the art style was so well done.