I wish more games, any even, simply provided a "walk around as a tourist" mode. At this fidelity, it's enjoyable. I spent 6 months living in Amsterdam, it brought back memories. A short walk down from here is the back of the Hotel Grand Kraznopolsky. I can smell the weed from "the British bulldog" Cafe as I type.
My friends and I spent a good chunk of time playing that game right after we all finished college and moved away for jobs. One of us actually moved to DC and playing The Division 2 actually helped him learn the area! Really fun game, your work is much appreciated!
Really enjoyed Division 2! Having visited DC during the Last Administration, your apocalypse was much nicer :)
On the GIS side of things, didn't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to make other real world locale into games for educational purposes? Can't remember the details, but I used to work for a museum and my boss wanted us to do something like that. And I was like that'd be nice, but we're not Ubi.
It would be awesome to read about your production pipeline, like did you go from drone footage to photogrammetry to dozens of artists manually fixing things, or? Was there much ML involved?
No ML. We templated some common architecture patterns and placed things in the world.
I wish I could show you our internal demonstrations of it. Basically we would plot the map in snowdrop using GIS, then raise cuboids from the shapes on the map. Then we would manually try to match google street view with something in our template library, and modify the object to match reality.
It was a very manual process, but we based the map on the real thing so distances should be 1:1.
I've recently taken up photogrammetry mapping with my drone. I'm quite amazed at the textured 3d output you can get from that by capturing buildings just by flying around them. I imagine it won't be too long that we just fly a drone over a city and entirely map it in 3d with very high resolution and detail. It's accurate to within a few feet unless you use RTK and ground stations which can bring you within centimeter accuracy. Lidar is also making things easier/cheaper.
"[F]reely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."
Why are small alleyways not interesting in a shooter? Many area to hide. Though perhaps it would stimulate camping, but I wouldn't call them 'not interesting' :)
I didn't find The Division too interesting, just couldn't get into it. I also don't really understand why they keep going on with that Tom Clancy label. The guy's been dead for almost a decade. If they feel the need to badge his name all over it, it feels like it's just B-content and they need to stick such labels on it to sell it.
I think his early books were pretty good but the later series were just drivel IMO. I don't think he even wrote them himself.
I live downtown in Manhattan: the "Gangs of New York" update on that title was interesting to play... First thing I did was go find my condo building with a mountain of trash piled up against the door.
Some of the geography has been futzed with for gameplay purposes, which was incredibly confusing as someone who could navigate the area without a map!
i loved midtown madness because i was able to drive around san francisco. ten years later when i first visited, i was able to recognize many of the landmarks because of the game.
That mode was especially enjoyable in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, walking around a simulation of antique Athene is (for lack of a better word) something.
The natural history museum in Montreal (where ACO was developed) had a mummy/Egypt exhibit and they actually had computers setup with that sim running (pretty sure Ubisoft sponsored the exhibit).
There's the "walking simulator" genre for that. I didn't care for the story, but I recently played Dear Esther, it's absolutely stunning on a 4K screen.
It did an excellent job, and considering the amount that was cut out it was still extremely easy to navigate from the east to west end along entirely recognisable roads.
The pub over the road from Parliament was a bit jarring but understandable.
Wouldn't simulated environment cause similar anxiety effects? Like I'm very scared of snakes IRL, I'm confident i won't enjoy looking at them in VR either
The idea is to do this in session with a therapist, or at least under guidance. By exposing yourself safely to a trigger reducing the effects (like a fight or flight response for example)
If anyone is interested I put a list together last year for someone who was looking at VR for public speaking coaching due to social anxiety and not sure what the current state of the art is or where these folks are now other than the web sites are all still up. In no particular order:
Ironically one of the earlier CoDs had a great semi-stealth mission in Pripyat (Chernobyl). City was modeled so well with all the iconic eyesights, really gave you a feeling of being in an abandoned post-nuclear town.
You're likely referring to COD4:MW, aka the one that made the franchise what it is. That game was outstanding for the time. Real cool locations, renderings like from the spectre gunship camera system, etc, made it special. The gameplay hasn't aged that well tho, it's easy to see the cracks now.
GTA IV was my favorite for this. I'd expect this to be hard to achieve since verisimilitude is expensive, but manageable if your character is only going to go down a fixed path.
Though it does look great, i wish more games focused on actually being fun to play instead of having long cut scenes and micro transactions.
Ironically other than the fact that you have to pay per game and that you’re often forced to die, I prefer arcade games. They generally minimize friction to play
edit: to clarify, I mean games with good graphics specifically. There are many great games (especially indie) out there.
Nowadays there are games for all tastes being released weekly, the biggest game of the year, Elden Ring, seems exactly what you're looking for. Also try indies like Slay the Spire, Into the Breach and Rollerdrome
That is an excellent way of characterizing COD. I play the campaigns pretty much because it's like participating in an action movie and you just kinda get to go along with the ride of it. It's not too tough or defeating (looking at you elden ring.)
I don't really have time for really long games anymore and these are as entertaining as movies IMO.
Absolutely, and theres nothing bad or wrong about playing it or watching a Micheal Bay movie. If you like it then great.
Many games seem to transition into more movie-like experience. Assassins Creed games for example, I found at some point I prefer to watch someone play it who cuts out the filler (while providing limited & entertaining commentary) and its just like a movie.
Gameplay innovation is risky. But if you spend a lot of money on looking good you don't want to risk that investment, so you just copy the gameplay of your last popular game, maybe with a new gameplay element from a competitors game
Fun has less to do with individual gameplay elements than execution. The balance between weapon types makes a huge difference in FPS games. Chip damage vs recovery mechanics, cover systems vs stealth vs run and gun etc.
Similarly there have been so many health systems in FPS games you don’t need to invent something particularly new, but you do need to pick something appropriate to the gameplay. For example in PvE players need to be able to fight waves of enemies but in PvP games nobody wants to stand for 30 seconds firing at a bullet sponge.
Puzzle games need interesting puzzles, racing games need appropriate tracks, and so forth.
We live in the golden age of gameplay innovation. It’s never been easier to develop and distribute a game. There is an vast ocean of indie game developers with new games coming out every week! There were 10394 new steam games listed in 2021. That’s over 28 new games per day! In 2010 only 349 games came out on the platform.
Play some soulsborne games. They look great (even if they aren't the very best graphics possible) and play great. Very rewarding. I just finished my first Elden Ring run @ 200 hours play time and I'm back playing Dark Souls 3 (yet again).
Have you played Detroit: Become Human? Graphics there is mind blowing on ultra settings in 4k and story is great, one of the best games I've played in the last few years and I'm super picky and don't play games without good story.
It honestly would pass for a recorded video at twitter's resolution... if it wasn't for the character animations looking decidedly average and robotic.
It does look great. The water, particularly with the boat going through it, is what I noticed first. I spend a lot of time in boats and around water, so it's always one of the first things I see in graphical simulations.
It's more claustrophobic than Amsterdam generally appears to be IRL, and my guess is that this level of detail requires such environments, as it always has traditionally, since in large open spaces you have to compromise.
I guess the next frontier for realism is character animation. To me their robotic movements and moonwalking feet break the illusion. There were very neat demos of ML-generated postures/movement, so it may be possible to nail it.
There are games with very realistic character animation like e.g. The Last of Us Part 2. But that is a lot of effort, requires a lot of expertise and is likely very expensive. Correct animations can also conflict with fast and responsive movement, and most games will prefer responsiveness to realistic animations. Having both requires advanced approaches that can blend different animations well, which seems to be rather difficult.
It's funny, I remember reading somewhere that research on Computer Graphics, rendering specifically, is 'solved' because photorealism had been accomplished.
What had been omitted though was that efficient photorealistic rendering, as well as the visual elements that human perception instantly picks up on such as material(s) translucency, lighting/shadows, and as you've already mentioned animations (and the bigger challenge of facial expressions!) is what everyone's after.
And what we have at the OP is indeed impressive work, which still looks artificial. Contrary to the critique of the comments so far, and outside the graphics research interpretation, this isn't something necessarily negative imo. I like video games that preserve a few elements of non-photorealism.
This is an interesting video about how hard it is to effectively animate just one small aspect of human motion: walking through a door: https://youtu.be/AYEWsLdLmcc
Just played Yakuza: Like a Dragon and the NPC animation there as well as the animation and art style in general looked better in that game than in this clip.
That's what I was thinking. Some people are complaining about very subtle details not being quite right. But to me, what really stands out as video-game-y is the way the character and camera and other people move. It's hard to describe, but they just don't move like actual people do. Gotta watch some bodycam videos for comparison.
Don't get me wrong, the visual clarity is a great achievement. But if they're gonna spend more effort on making it more convincingly real, that's a better target IMO than reflections and wave patterns.
I'd be interested in hearing the perspective of a video game programmer, because from my own intuition as a layman, it sounds as though making realistic model movement is an order of magnitude harder than working on the environment alone.
At least, the fact that this game has familiar human movement tropes that resembles decade old games sounds like a testament to that.
For characters animations don't blend too well with each others as some things reset between postures, and the walking animation doesn't translate too well to crowded spaces as people would turn their bodies to maximize the distance between body and objects (up to a point), sometimes even opting to take a different path depending on people.
And the camera is very smooth, which filters out the little balance shifts we all do (even typing something here I notice the subtle changes to vision oscillating in complex patterns which head-bobbing would be a simplified first-order approach to).
I assume it's still very difficult to do all these things with current computing power, and in the case of the camera I'm not sure it will ever be possible for something interactive to feel quite perfect unless you switch to a VR headset and carry your own balance into it.
Regarding camera movement, not completely sure what would be required for a VR-like experience. But I can watch bodycam videos like https://youtu.be/0RGLSTXu7Ws?t=75 (police action, end of a high-speed chase) and never think that it seems artificial. The camera body movement is fairly subtle, but feels aligned with the way I expect the carriers' body to move.
It feels like character movements haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. Which is a shame because the visuals are great, but let down by 2006 style animation.
Yeah its to the point where you can instantly recognize someone doing a parody of a GTA character walk. I have no idea how it is implemented but it looks as if character limbs move at a smooth constant speed. As a runner I have seen graphs that show human locomotion is in fact made up of brief bursts of speed followed by a sharp decceleration. I’m sure they could model this but its probably not a major priority.
- The wave breaks/spray from the boat doesn’t look right
- NPC motion is still janky and robotic.
- Lack of wind. All vegetation is motionless as is the hanging sign. Even on windless days vegetation still tends to sway minutely.
- Lack of squelch. The ground is wet and has leaves and puddles all over it but everyone sounds like they’re walking on dry ground. Some NPCs don’t seem to have audible footsteps at all.
Animation is the hardest and will be the long pole of visual realism in games. I've seen better water than that, but it's still hard to make Pixar-quality water in video games. Paradoxically, the more realistic the graphics, the easier it is to notice flaws. Regardless, still impressive video.
This is a common trope in media where nobody in the production uses a bike for transport. There are bikes there for setting, but people never use them as intended. They either just stand around them, or do this weird thing where they take their bikes out for a walk.
And it's odd because by Far Cry 2, released in 2008, realistic wind effects and contextual sound effects were solved problems so it's like the gaming industry has spent 14 years moving backwards in these areas.
I would argue that major studios largely have, or at least stagnated. Cards and skins are now the priorities and everything else is designed to support that.
A lot of games have wind effects, with moving vegetation, particles and fabrics for example.
Whether or not it appears in a game will usually be dictated by budget: both hardware budget (usually dictated by the current console generation) and budget for content creation.
A scene like this probably leaves it out because they felt like they could use that budget better elsewhere. There are a ton of characters walking around this scene, and also a ton of geometric detail and texture detail. I am guessing the directors for this scene felt that was more important to allocate budget to, for wow factor in those areas, rather than subtle wind effects which would probably go unnoticed in a game where you spend very little time stopping to appreciate the trees and flowers.
edit: I have to take that back: actually if you look at the full resolution video it's clear they included subtle wind effects, as well as details like falling leaves
I did notice the falling leaves which I thought was a nice touch. I didn’t notice any wind but I did watch the video on a iPhone screen so it’s possible that the wind effects are so subtle as to not be noticeable at small screen sizes.
Far Cry 2 did a lot of specific things to accomplish its vision and those have been abandoned as out of line with other games'vision. The fire mechanics, minimap, and healing mechanic are the ones that jump out at me
I watched a documentary over a decade ago which followed Gareth Edwards as he was making the film Monsters. It was pretty revolutionary at the time as he was one of the first people to take advantage of DSLRs being able to shoot HD video and MacBook Pros getting to the level of computing power where you could do your own VFX. He managed to make a film that looked like it came out of Hollywood on equipment that in total cost less than $15,000. The on-set crew consisted of only seven people: Edwards himself, the two lead actors, a sound operator, a line producer, a fixer and a driver.
One of the documentary makers asked him why he had a dedicated sound guy; the rest of the production was so stripped back, there was no lighting guy, why a sound guy? Edwards responded that, as long as you’ve got a good story that keeps them hooked, the audience will forgive bad visuals but they won’t forgive bad sound. It’s a sentiment that I believe was also echoed by Robert Rodriguez in his low budget filmmaking days. Good sound is essential to keeping people tuned in and immersed in your video. It’s why the number one thing recommended to any YouTuber starting out is “get a good microphone”.
The graphics are 80% of the way there now. Weather and character animation still needs work but the most bang for the buck might now have swung round to sound design.
NPC motion is where I think graphics technology should be focused. Environmental detail is more than sufficient. It's actually now an uncanny valley because the environment looks so realistic, and it is jarring to see unrealistic human movement. It pops out a lot more and looks way out of place.
The video is full or reflection artefacts because it uses screen space reflections, in 2022. It would be so much better to use raytraced reflections like RTX games.
It also has transparency bugs. You see the boat through the reflection on the windshield of the car right at the beginning.
Walking animations are a bit clumsy with the path finding that is a bit unrealistic.
The water effects around the boat look bad.
This isn’t very much better in terms of technology than a AAA from about ten years ago. The artists did a great work.
Yeah I'm not sure how anyone's meant to find something impressive to look at when there's a layer of vaseline over all of it. Maybe there's a higher quality version being served to some Twitter users.
Lol, so as usual, game devs perform technical miracles, rendering an incredibly rich virtual world at smooth 60 FPS, while a bloated and barely-competent Silicon Valley company cannot even display a freaking video clip of it without tearing.
As a usual twitter user, I've been dreading watching any videos there and I'm used to find them on youtube because of this. I thought it was because I was using linux, but now that I've moved to a macbook m1 with the power of a supercomputer 10 years ago, the quality of the videos is too ridiculous to take twitter videos seriously.
You could not have seen this 10 years ago. Tons of geometric detail (unless those bikes are really clever billboards) and lots and lots of texture detail. 10-year-old GPUs would have had neither the VRAM nor processing power to put this out.
Also this seems like a result of photogrammetry - so I think you can credit artists and the tools which make this possible.
Photogrammetry (together with a physical based rendering pipeline to get the lighting just right) probably deserves all the credit in this. I remember first reading about it in 2014, in an article about an indie game for that matter. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Here's an article: https://www.pcgamer.com/find-out-why-the-vanishing-of-ethan-...
Since then, every game that embraced it for photo realism looks basically perfect in terms of world geometry. Doesn't even have to be crazy high-res or high poly, as long as you don't stick your virtual nose directly in front of stuff, you can easily fill every pixel on screen with one that's ~95% there from where it should be in a real-world photograph.
Aren't artists still involved in getting assets ready for production? My understanding was that a fair amount of polishing and refinement would still be required after capture (e.g. trimming down a very high poly model to something which can be rendered at 60FPS) - but I don't know to what extent that may have been automated by now.
I guess technologies like Nannite will also reduce the need for this type of grunt work.
But in either case, artists will still be involved in framing and staging the scene, doing the actual capture etc.
Creating a beautiful scene through photogrammetry is still a form of art, the same way photography and painting are each forms of art.
Art direction trumps tech in games for a while, now. This is just well lit, well researched and compression artifacts smooth out the details. Character's eyes are still kinda dead, animations fidgety, screen space reflection artifacts if the "reflected" area isn't in frame, etc, etc. Definitely no different from the average "realistic looking game" 5 years ago and probably, yes, even "high end graphics" 10 years ago. Things are slowing down.
Meh. I don’t care much about how realistic it looks like. I care about how realistic the interactions are, this is: can I break a car in two? Can enter any building? Can I make a hole in the ground? Can I cut trees? Can I kiss NPCs? Can I demolish any building? Sadly, games are not optimizing for these kind of interactions.
It's not really practical or sensible to task your developers with making sure that Spiderman can start digging a hole if he wants to. In the long run probably frameworks will start to handle these things - soil mechanics, building infrastructure, metal deformation, and so on, and then all games will start to include them by default by gradual degrees. But hoping the game developers themselves make working hedge trimmers instead of focusing on actual gameplay is silly.
If you can't rip a car in half or see the insides of a building then battle damage will look like it's painted on.
If Spiderman can't move a bit of rubble (he doesn't really do dirt) then he can't pull something into or out of place to free a friend or trap an enemy.
It's (all) the little things that are in the way of a game feeling immersive and appealing to people who aren't just into the main mechanic (ie shooter on rails).
> Can enter any building? Can I make a hole in the ground? Can I cut trees? Can I kiss NPCs? Can I demolish any building?
I'd really prefer for the developer to focus on the gameplay and plot rather than make a perfect simulation of earth. What you describe sounds like a cool sandbox, like Flight Simulator, but isn't appropriate for most games.
Try doing something like that in the real world and you will not be doing anything for many years :)
In the real world you can't enter or demolish any building you want. So it makes sense for games not to offer this either until it's an actual plot point to do so.
It looks like they invested a ton of money on texture optimization and lighting algorithms. However the animations look like the basic skeletal animation / skinning you can learn from an OpenGL/DirectX tutorial. That imbalance is kind of weird.
"Brand new AAA game looks incrediby realistic" has been a very banal observation for the last 20 years.
If this were a link to a discussion of some special technique that the creators of the last CoD used maybe that would be interesting. But this is lacking in any kind of substance.
No. Not even close to the raytraced images from 2003 with PovRay. This is nothing close. Even an RTX GPU in not enough to what we've seen as photorealistic.
Maybe I'm jaded being around graphics for too long, but every few years we have a bit of an advancement and proclamations of "wow, this looks real!". Probably since early 90's. Only theb, a couple of years down the road, same material suddenly looks funky compared to new material.
I’d guess most of the player base is there for MP. Some of the more well known content creators on YT said they never played the CoD campaign as they jumped straight to MP. With the week of time between the SP release and MP release, along with MP rewards, there’s a reason to actually complete SP this time.
I've always been surprised by this metric. True, if the game is only a couple of hours it can be a bad investment. However, I can think of at least half a dozen ten hour games that have left me with a more memorable impression than some games I've played for ten times as long.
To my teenage self it would make sense, though. Enough time but not enough money, which makes long (sometimes artificially long) games a necessity.
Personally, I see it as an equation of Story/atmosphere quality x mechanical pleasure x length where story is the trump card.
A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever remember the experience.
Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical pleasure so it's a great game.
CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie clichés. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre compared to Cyberpunk.
Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1 for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do have. Usually for length to be the most important factor, you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday for months and still have things to do. The story is nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You know the game is there for you when you come back from work.
Amount of time is a really bad measure of what you are getting. Quality > quantity. Not saying CoD is an example of quality (no idea) but we already have enough padding and needlessly repetetive tasks in many games.
It's interesting we can create amazing graphics like this, but at the same time we can't model humans walking naturally. It looks quite realistic if you take out the humans.
I’ve been in computer graphics 30 years. This satisfies me. If the young generation wants to take it further, more power to you as well. Maybe the uncanny valley is even bridge-able in my lifetime.
This amazement is not one I share. Yes, it appears more polished than GTA type graphics. In particular, the NPC movements. To describe it as "incredibly realistic" is a stretch.
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The Division 1 was handcrafted, so we cut a lot of the world away that wasn’t interesting, small alley ways and such.
I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear that you enjoyed the work that went in.
On the GIS side of things, didn't Ubi team up with some European nonprofit to make other real world locale into games for educational purposes? Can't remember the details, but I used to work for a museum and my boss wanted us to do something like that. And I was like that'd be nice, but we're not Ubi.
It would be awesome to read about your production pipeline, like did you go from drone footage to photogrammetry to dozens of artists manually fixing things, or? Was there much ML involved?
I wish I could show you our internal demonstrations of it. Basically we would plot the map in snowdrop using GIS, then raise cuboids from the shapes on the map. Then we would manually try to match google street view with something in our template library, and modify the object to match reality.
It was a very manual process, but we based the map on the real thing so distances should be 1:1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vrpKFV0odg
You're likely thinking of the Discovery Tour line derived from Assassin's Creed. https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed/discovery...
"[F]reely roam Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age to learn more about their history and daily life. Students, teachers, non-gamers, and players can discover these eras at their own pace, or embark on guided tours and stories curated by historians and experts."
I didn't find The Division too interesting, just couldn't get into it. I also don't really understand why they keep going on with that Tom Clancy label. The guy's been dead for almost a decade. If they feel the need to badge his name all over it, it feels like it's just B-content and they need to stick such labels on it to sell it.
I think his early books were pretty good but the later series were just drivel IMO. I don't think he even wrote them himself.
Some of the geography has been futzed with for gameplay purposes, which was incredibly confusing as someone who could navigate the area without a map!
Not walking simulators but low-key “just sorta look around” games I like: Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch.
Edit: Corrected the Finch title, thank you!
The pub over the road from Parliament was a bit jarring but understandable.
https://www.ovationvr.com/ https://virtualspeech.com/ https://virtualorator.com/ http://presentationsimulator.com/
Sadly it was ignored. The graphics are really impressive!
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
Ironically other than the fact that you have to pay per game and that you’re often forced to die, I prefer arcade games. They generally minimize friction to play
edit: to clarify, I mean games with good graphics specifically. There are many great games (especially indie) out there.
IME games do. But then I also don’t play any shooters.
Paying for lives was the first micro transaction!
I don't really have time for really long games anymore and these are as entertaining as movies IMO.
Many games seem to transition into more movie-like experience. Assassins Creed games for example, I found at some point I prefer to watch someone play it who cuts out the filler (while providing limited & entertaining commentary) and its just like a movie.
Similarly there have been so many health systems in FPS games you don’t need to invent something particularly new, but you do need to pick something appropriate to the gameplay. For example in PvE players need to be able to fight waves of enemies but in PvP games nobody wants to stand for 30 seconds firing at a bullet sponge.
Puzzle games need interesting puzzles, racing games need appropriate tracks, and so forth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KV-RNmFuLw
asking for good graphics seems ironical since you complain about devs focusing on graphics instead of gameplay
GTA 3/4/5 are in the megalotesticle category (characters moving like wavering boats).
What had been omitted though was that efficient photorealistic rendering, as well as the visual elements that human perception instantly picks up on such as material(s) translucency, lighting/shadows, and as you've already mentioned animations (and the bigger challenge of facial expressions!) is what everyone's after.
And what we have at the OP is indeed impressive work, which still looks artificial. Contrary to the critique of the comments so far, and outside the graphics research interpretation, this isn't something necessarily negative imo. I like video games that preserve a few elements of non-photorealism.
Sure, you can compare two and tell which one is better but unless it is really bad humans won’t be bothered by it or even explain what’s wrong.
Don't get me wrong, the visual clarity is a great achievement. But if they're gonna spend more effort on making it more convincingly real, that's a better target IMO than reflections and wave patterns.
At least, the fact that this game has familiar human movement tropes that resembles decade old games sounds like a testament to that.
And the camera is very smooth, which filters out the little balance shifts we all do (even typing something here I notice the subtle changes to vision oscillating in complex patterns which head-bobbing would be a simplified first-order approach to).
I assume it's still very difficult to do all these things with current computing power, and in the case of the camera I'm not sure it will ever be possible for something interactive to feel quite perfect unless you switch to a VR headset and carry your own balance into it.
It feels like character movements haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. Which is a shame because the visuals are great, but let down by 2006 style animation.
- The wave breaks/spray from the boat doesn’t look right
- NPC motion is still janky and robotic.
- Lack of wind. All vegetation is motionless as is the hanging sign. Even on windless days vegetation still tends to sway minutely.
- Lack of squelch. The ground is wet and has leaves and puddles all over it but everyone sounds like they’re walking on dry ground. Some NPCs don’t seem to have audible footsteps at all.
- No people actually riding bikes
- The guards are casually standing in the middle of the road
- The curb doesn't drop properly where the pedestrian area starts
This is a common trope in media where nobody in the production uses a bike for transport. There are bikes there for setting, but people never use them as intended. They either just stand around them, or do this weird thing where they take their bikes out for a walk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy_(video_game)
For cars this is a solved problem, and walking people are moving slowly enough for cameras to easily keep pace.
https://youtu.be/ze_Ncdy_igw
The alley wasn't correct. It's not a dead-end street.. :-)
Whether or not it appears in a game will usually be dictated by budget: both hardware budget (usually dictated by the current console generation) and budget for content creation.
A scene like this probably leaves it out because they felt like they could use that budget better elsewhere. There are a ton of characters walking around this scene, and also a ton of geometric detail and texture detail. I am guessing the directors for this scene felt that was more important to allocate budget to, for wow factor in those areas, rather than subtle wind effects which would probably go unnoticed in a game where you spend very little time stopping to appreciate the trees and flowers.
edit: I have to take that back: actually if you look at the full resolution video it's clear they included subtle wind effects, as well as details like falling leaves
One of the documentary makers asked him why he had a dedicated sound guy; the rest of the production was so stripped back, there was no lighting guy, why a sound guy? Edwards responded that, as long as you’ve got a good story that keeps them hooked, the audience will forgive bad visuals but they won’t forgive bad sound. It’s a sentiment that I believe was also echoed by Robert Rodriguez in his low budget filmmaking days. Good sound is essential to keeping people tuned in and immersed in your video. It’s why the number one thing recommended to any YouTuber starting out is “get a good microphone”.
The graphics are 80% of the way there now. Weather and character animation still needs work but the most bang for the buck might now have swung round to sound design.
It also has transparency bugs. You see the boat through the reflection on the windshield of the car right at the beginning.
Walking animations are a bit clumsy with the path finding that is a bit unrealistic.
The water effects around the boat look bad.
This isn’t very much better in terms of technology than a AAA from about ten years ago. The artists did a great work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_LlSR6-ibA
Here's a 4k60 YouTube video: https://youtu.be/VGnuGnOWeTE?t=605
Also this seems like a result of photogrammetry - so I think you can credit artists and the tools which make this possible.
Since then, every game that embraced it for photo realism looks basically perfect in terms of world geometry. Doesn't even have to be crazy high-res or high poly, as long as you don't stick your virtual nose directly in front of stuff, you can easily fill every pixel on screen with one that's ~95% there from where it should be in a real-world photograph.
I guess technologies like Nannite will also reduce the need for this type of grunt work.
But in either case, artists will still be involved in framing and staging the scene, doing the actual capture etc.
Creating a beautiful scene through photogrammetry is still a form of art, the same way photography and painting are each forms of art.
If Spiderman can't move a bit of rubble (he doesn't really do dirt) then he can't pull something into or out of place to free a friend or trap an enemy.
It's (all) the little things that are in the way of a game feeling immersive and appealing to people who aren't just into the main mechanic (ie shooter on rails).
In real life, you can punch holes in and through buildings and trees, given enough bullets and a high enough caliber
I'd really prefer for the developer to focus on the gameplay and plot rather than make a perfect simulation of earth. What you describe sounds like a cool sandbox, like Flight Simulator, but isn't appropriate for most games.
In the real world you can't enter or demolish any building you want. So it makes sense for games not to offer this either until it's an actual plot point to do so.
If this were a link to a discussion of some special technique that the creators of the last CoD used maybe that would be interesting. But this is lacking in any kind of substance.
It's not perfect yet, definitely not but it's a major step IMO. Perhaps it helps that I know the city.
RDR2 in particular looks much more realistic. More detailed terrain, better lighting, leagues better character animations.
The lack of cyclists passing through is weirder IMO.
Just playing it randomly, without some tryharding you can complete it in something like less than 10 hours, it sucks.
To my teenage self it would make sense, though. Enough time but not enough money, which makes long (sometimes artificially long) games a necessity.
Compare those CoDs to e.g Cyberpunk which I needed like 40 hours to complete
it was way better
A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever remember the experience.
Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical pleasure so it's a great game.
CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie clichés. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre compared to Cyberpunk.
Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1 for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do have. Usually for length to be the most important factor, you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday for months and still have things to do. The story is nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You know the game is there for you when you come back from work.
PCVR support when?