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Flogger23m
[H]F Junkie
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- Jun 19, 2009
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Without ray tracing it ran about on par with other games so I'm not sure what your complaint is there.
Cyberpunk is probably the best ray tracing show case out there. Control is still a good example. Seeing the difference in ray tracing is harder in stills because a large part of ray tracing is how the lighting reacts and behaves in real time. Things like lighting and reflections from explosions, gun fire, etc.
Still looks better than control's characters. And RLY? You pivot to animations and reactions? Now we are really pushing those goalposts around.
Animations are part of graphics. Like lighting, reflection, 3D model quality, texture quality, and art design. If you have stiff animations the game will look unnatural or bad. In Odyssey the character essentially talked through their teeth half the time which looked odd.
I didn't say Control had great animations, but Odyssey had not so good ones.
Small details make up the big picture. You can't have a game with one aspect that looks good, and the other important aspects look bad to qualify if as a "good looking" game. Metro 2033 looked great, but one down side that stood out were the poor animations. Movement was jerky and looked unnatural.
What creates the overall look of a game? The sum of all its parts.
Screen shots 1 and 2 are good examples of the dated lighting I am referring to. Assassin Creed games have this bad adjustment from light to dark areas that calls back to the HL2 expansion era (what Valve referred to as "HDR" back then as show cased in HL2 Lost Coast). In specific scenarios like static grassy fields it can look good. Elsewhere it ranges from okay to dated to outright bad. They aren't awful looking games, but graphically they are inconsistent.
Well the props and textures looked top notch when it came out. It is hard to say it lacks detail when it had lots of it. It looks good without ray tracing.
High texture resolution is one of the more important things. A mass of grey can be completely realistic depending on the setting.
In the screen shot I posted above, no. Not in those lighting circumstances or distance. It should be clear as day. The lighting in the Assassin's Creed engine has been dated for a while. It only looks good in certain scenarios outside in grassy fields, and looks outright bad indoors.
I was just addressing that. That was your complaint with Control. I also pointed out you used an extremely low resolution screen shot. If you can't see how blurred the lines are on the character outline in the screen you posted I have to assume your eye sight is going bad. I'm not saying that to be rude, but to me it is clear as day.
Refer to the above screen shots I posted.
And that is my point. Despite having older graphics, it lighting ends up behaving more realistically than Odyssey or Valhalla in many scenes.
Did you even look at the screen shot or read what I said? If your eyes are "pixelating", I think you need to get your eyes examined.
Though in the Assassin's Creed engine, the pixelation problem has been an issue going back many games.
What? A lot of games use an artificial fog or haze to limit draw distance to save performance. Go back and look at games from the early 2000s and you'll see how frequently it was used. In some games you could stand still, but pan the camera around and that would change the fog's orientation. But I'm not sure why you're talking about haze/draw distance as I never mentioned that. It isn't really a problem for most games now days.
If you want to see an example of washed out, over bloomed graphics with a grey/brown filter look at the Ghost Recon screen shot I posted above as an example. It was a very common art design back then and makes those games look quite dated despite having some graphically superior features to older games like HL2.
No. Look at the screen shots I posted and read what I wrote. The lighting in Valhalla and Odyssey doesn't behave realistically. And you're kind of flip flopping, you went from saying realism and realistic details don't matter but rather art design, and now you're saying realism matters?
You bounce back between preferring art direction/design and realism. Control had excellent art design. The game had lots of concrete, cubicles, sharp edges, light rays, and captured the oppressive look of a government building. It also had industrial sections, laboratories and large lounge areas for workers that looked that part.
It is okay to not like the setting. And clearly you didn't like the setting. But to say the game has bad graphics because you don't like the setting personally is dumb. If someone doesn't like bright colors or neon lights, they might think Cyberpunk looks ugly. But that doesn't mean Cybeprunk has bad graphics; they just don't like the setting.
I think the other aspect you seem to ignore is how the graphics look in motion. Like I said previously, Control looks good during action. The micro level destruction looks amazing. The explosions, debris, fairly realistic looking destruction/behavior on desks and other small objects looks great. As do the reflections from this. How a game looks when you actually play it is often more important to the visual experience than finding those few particular scenarios where the game is still (idling in an empty field) and may look somewhat photo realistic.
