Comment by aaroninsf
1 day ago
I would suggest that both are true!
It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic which uses cultural and social and graphical "languages" to create specific emotional impacts and effects. The lower the budget the more this is leaned into for expedient reasons but that in turn creates genre expectations! Low-poly and 8-bit are fine examples of what were once a product of technical limitations becoming their own target.
Subject matters also, and the overall aesthetic of the game; triple-A games often push towards what you're describing, that the most impactful and compelling may also be the most real...
...or at least, contain elements of it. Lots of games mess with color shading and saturation etc for the impact-reasons...
I do look forward to the era of more "photorealistic" rendering as you prefer, especially for natural landscapes like those I enjoy IRL. Some of which can have very "unnatural" feeling swings in tone and all sorts of things! I was just up in the mountains this week and saw a lot more variation in lighting and its impact on a consistent landscape (mountains across a lake) than I've ever seen in a game engine so far :)
> It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic ... to create specific emotional impacts and effects.
And before games this was true of movies and before that photos and paintings. A master cinematographer can spend hours lighting a shot that will later be praised for its 'gritty realism' :-).
One theme that is common to almost all visual art that strives for some form of realistic appearance is that they start out with real material appearances and physical lighting behavior. Both are inescapable parts of the reality in our physical world, anyway.
By extension, this means that it is highly desirable to have a renderer capable of reproducing the real world as a baseline for highly controllable aesthetic tweaks. When you look especially at VFX specific tools, they have - almost without exception - two layers of tools: the first creates a realistic simulation (e.g. water/fire/shattering...) and the second layer allows for tweaks to control the final look.
If you want something realism-adjacent that makes sense. If you want to create Antichamber, which is a game about non-Euclidean geometry, maybe not. You can carefully try to match up the lighting on both sides of an invisible teleporter, but it's going to be much easier if your engine doesn't try to do lighting at all. (Antichamber is mostly flat colors, basic flat shading, and hand-drawn accents)
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Yup. I once came across a (picture of a) test print made by one of the old black-and-white street photography greats, and it was all marked up with development adjustments for better lighting, contrast, and subject separation. Those were always a photographer’s main concern.
I think a Horizon Zero Dawn developer characterized their approach as “more realistic than reality” or something along those lines, i.e. they were aiming for the kind of perfect saturated look that you would only get in that golden hour with ideal surroundings but that we all recognize as real and at the same time don’t find too dull to stare at for hours. And I think for daytime HZD did do that quite well.
> I once came across a (picture of a) test print made by one of the old black-and-white street photography greats, and it was all marked up with development adjustments for better lighting, contrast, and subject separation.
Likewise, Ansel Adams is particularly famous for popularizing manipulation of exposure, both in-camera snd during development.