OP didn’t live through the Brown period started, I’d wager, by Quake II. Brown is realistic, don’t you know?
What a coincidence as I just watched this from one of my favourite youtubers:
TheYamiks - The Failure of Game Graphics (35:29)
Where he reflects on how the graphics of current games came to be technically and why they are so terrible as they are.
Damn, it’s still weird seeing Yamiks outside of Elite content. It’s like seeing your old teacher in a bowling alley.
I installed a Reshade on Oblivion Remastered after like an hour of playing.
the un-fun-ed health bar is so real
The ghosting on the sword too
you can thank TAA for that
No, that’s bad motion blur - TAA would leave a spacetime distortion behind the sword
there’s no blur there. that type of ghosting is incredibly indicative of TAA.
I’ve seen some bad implementation of (camera-based) MB way back, I don’t quite remember which game it was but the engine would just blend the current frame with previous ones and leave one or more afterimages.
I think it was Garry’s Mod?
that effect is usually only used as like a “drunk” shader in games, it’s not really motion blur so modern games aren’t going to be using it for that. however that first person weapon model ghosting is one of the most prominent and complained about drawbacks of TAA specifically so I’m confident in saying that’s what the artist had in mind there.
People have been trying to gaslight me that base game oblivion looks fantastic and with mods it can look amazing. I’ve modded the fuck out of it and it still looks like shit. The remaster looks decent though.
Nostalgia is one of the strongest biases humans have.
But it is a beautiful shit
The most polished of turds.
Tbh the reason to play Elder Scrolls games were it’s flaws.
i wish those flaws didn’t give me a headache, though. idk what it was about old oblivion but i remember getting frequent headaches from playing too much, when i could easily play any other game for 8h straight
Honestly, the bottom 2 images reminds me of having Minecraft shaders off vs on. Especially the 15fps later on lol
Nah man Minecraft with raytracing shaders is unironically some of the best visuals you can get. Definitely at the very least the best raytracing visuals out there (IMO)
Check out the SEUS PTGI shader + Stylista resource pack. It’s not even that hard to run; I get 60fps @ 1440p with a 6700xt (stock clockspeed)
Time of day. Common.
This. Every time I see a complaint about how reddish/orange the Remaster looks - the screenshot was taken at extreme sunset or sunrise. Literally some of the most reddish times of the day even in real life.
The sun is on the freaking horizon too. Great point.
Ironic, this comic (rightfully) disses bloom, which the original Oblivion used liberally.
That was my first thought. Is it 2008 again?
Bloom is used a lot subtly than it was in the 2000s. I think motion blur (and maybe depth of field) are the new bloom.
More like chromatic abberation, as both that and bloom was/is often used to hide graphical shortcomings.
Always loved that term. Sounds like an illusionist’s D&D spell.
bloom was major between like 2005-2009ish maybe, coexisted right before the piss filter of the console generation.
currently tech wise, the current joke trend is blurry TAA caused by the switch to deferred rendering in order to get better lighting. TAA was a stop gap AA to replace older AA methods that are less compatible with deferred rendering. It’s why things look like shit(blurry) ontop of performing like shit (lighting/shadows/raytracing) unless you have high end hardware to deblur as much of the blurriness as possible.
I can’t stand motion blur/depth of field. Does it take extra processing to blur stuff? Either way it looks awful. Horizon forbidden west is completely different with it on or off.
There’s two kinds of motion blur, really - camera based, and model based. Camera-based requires calculating one motion vector for the whole screen, which is basically free. Model-based requires projecting the motion of each vertex of the model in the projected view; one matrix multiply per vector is not ‘expensive’ on a modern graphics card. Depth of field requires comparing the depth buffer, which you’ll have already created as part of rendering, and then taking several ‘taps’ around each point on the screen to calculate the blur for the ‘focus distance’ compared to the actual distance. The final image post-processing will generally process the whole screen anyway, so you’re just throwing a couple of extra steps in for the two effects.
Now, what does it save you? If your engine is using TAA (temporal anti-aliasing) then that’s performed by ‘twitching’ the camera a tiny amount (less than a pixel) every frame. If nothing’s moving, then you can merge the last several frames to get a really high-quality anti-alias; all the detail that wouldn’t be caught with a ‘completely static’ camera will be captured, and the result looks great. But things do move; if you recalculate ‘where things were’ then you can get a reasonable idea of what colour ought to be at each pixel. Since we need to calculate all the movement vectors to do that, then using the same info gives us the motion blur data ‘for free’ - we can add a little blur in post-processing to hide the TAA mistakes in post processing, and when implemented well(*) then it looks pretty effective. It’s certainly much, much cheaper to calculate that ‘proper’ antialiasing like MSAA.
(*) It is also quite easy to not implement TAA well, and earn the ire of gamers for turning everything into a blurry mess. Doom (2016) does a fantastic job of it - it’s in the engine at a low level - and I’ve never seen anyone complain about that game being blurry or smeared.
It takes time to load high-quality textures and models from disk, and it uses up the RAM budget for each frame. Using lower-quality textures and models for distant objects greatly helps rendering speed and prevents stutter, and a bit of depth-of-field hides the low-quality rendering with a bit of a smear.
Now, if your graphics card greatly exceeds the design requirement (which was probably some kind of console) then you can switch these effects off and the game will look even better, which might make you question why they’re there in the first place. To help consoles look better with some ‘cinematic’ effects, is why.
Yeah, it’s more like reversed:
Left: Zelda BotW
Right: Zelda TP
I like the ghosting on the blade edge, presumably from the fake frame generation, that they added in the right comic panel.
That’s from chromatic aberration, the second most stupid idea since motion blurring everything to the maxx
I think it’s supposed to be motion blur, chromatic aberrations show up as fringing of certain colours, it’s because different wavelengths of light refract at different angles so it splits the colours
That’s just from TAA, iirc that meme predates frame-gen being abundant in games
The top right image is at sunrise or sunset, and if the game is going for natural illumination (rather than the so-called “Ambient lighting” which isn’t at all realistic) low-light times will look pretty faded and somber because most light will be coming from indirect lighting so amongst other things the colors you will see are affected by the illumination being just light reflected by nearby objects which themselves have color and thus don’t reflect the full light spectrum.
The top left image is with the sun high in the sky so most things are being illuminated by direct light. Further it looks like it’s relying on the Ambient Lighting trick, which means shadows too will be better illuminated (and hence not realistic) because even though they’re not hit by direct light, that ambient light makes everything look like it’s getting light by a weaker light that is unaffected by shadows (and also projects no shadows) coming from all around. Oh, and it has the insane amount of bloom that the game originally had (IMHO, it looks better with it switched off) so everything looks extra bright and over-saturated.
I walk my dog every day around sundown. That’s way too dark. Maybe if the air is so clean and dry that it doesn’t scatter light as much, but that is impossible because lake and forrest.
And it’s a game. Lighting should depend on mood more then reality (even in movies they add impossible lights everywhere).
Still nice you understand what they call “PBR”.
Edit: maybe higher elevation where the air is thiner? Idk.
A major complaint about modern movies is the prevalence of realistic lighting. Night scenes are getting so dark, you can’t see anything. This came up in a recent RLM review where they shared a story about some actor in an unrelated movie asking the director where the lighting was coming from in some night scene. The director said the lighting was coming from the same place as the music. It’s more important to convey an idea or feeling then it is to convey realism. For the media illiterate(like CinemaSins), it’s easier to complain about unrealism then it is to complain about meaning.
I’m actually making a computer game that takes place in space, within solar systems and is in 3D with a (somewhat) realistic style - a mistaken choice of art style given the time I’m having to spend in 3D modelling even though it’s mostly empty space :/
It would be near unusable with realistic lighting, especially further away from the system’s sun, because in most places there’s just this one decent light source which is the sun and this extremelly weak “lighting” from the background which is mainly black with stars (since it doesn’t take place near the center of a galaxy, that background has about the same star density as the night sky on Earth). If I was doing realistic lighting, only near the sun or near planets would it look good, and the latter only on the sunny side of the planet (because of the indirect light from the planet), not the dark side.
So I’m having to fake it using ambient light, otherwise most objects would just be entirelly dark most of the time (it would be that or putting lots of little lights on them, which carries other implications).
Anyways, the point being that most space scenes in Sci-Fi films are also total complete bollocks for similar reasons: almost everything would be pretty much black almost all of the time or at best have very sharp shadows everywhere but near the illuminated side of large stellar objects. (There’s actually a scene in Star Wars - Rogue One where they purposefully use realistic illumination for effect and the scene starts with a stary dark background and suddenly a star destroyer starts to emerge from such a total darkness that it was not at all visible, and we see more and more of it come out from the shadow of the Death Star).
In all fairness, in my journey learning game making, lighting turned out to be an unexpectedly interesting subject and actually fun, though it’s unusual to have the chance to really use it for effect (well, the rings around the planets in my game do look pretty stunning merely from the interplay of light and shadow as long as I their axis is tilted relative to the direction of the sun).
The director said the lighting was coming from the same place as the music.
hahah that’s great
This is a bit dishonest. You can clearly see in the screenshot that the sun is low in the sky, thus the darker/somewhat washed out tones. When it’s high in the sky, the color really isn’t that much different than the original, albeit obviously not as vivid. Whether the vivid/bright color of the original Oblivion is better than the remaster or not is purely subjective; I happen to prefer the newer aesthetic a lot more.
I agree with you, the remaster looks really nice. I dont feel it’s washed-out at all. The only thing that freaks me out a little is how every NPC’s mouth is a little too wide for their face now. Just a little.
For some reason the games difficulty being lowered dramatically has made me more judge mental of the graphics upgrade. Like they should only upgrade the graphics if they are going to get the gameplay right.
I did fix the difficulty thing with a mod though so its not like its unplayable.
It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve played the original, so I may be misremembering its difficulty. I remember it being super easy to cheese everything, just like in the remaster. Really, I don’t have a high opinion of vanilla combat in any of the Elder Scrolls games. I think Avowed did an excellent job of showing how FPS RPG combat can be accomplished well.
Loved Avowed, definitely great. Not perfect, but made me forget my worries while I played it. I went dual pistols, you?
how do you dual pistols? i tried and it wouldnt let me so i just did dagger and pistol before finding a super cool legendary rifle
You just equip em, if I recall correctly. I didn’t try it myself, but it definitely is possible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/avowed/comments/1iso0q2/psa_dual_wielding_pistols/
You still have to attack using LT (on controller) to get the offhand pistol to shoot.
Yeah, Avowed definitely has its flaws in other areas of the game, but its combat was a lot of fun, in my opinion. I really think it got way more hate than it deserved. I’m the same way when reviewing games: If it’s fun enough to make me look forward to playing it the next day and I forget about the real world a little bit while I’m playing, then I feel like it accomplished its purpose.
I started out as 2h hammer, but ultimately did shield and 1h axe. I’d probably do a magic centric run next if I ever do a replay, as the magic system did feel pretty good whenever I’d use it as my off-hand.
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The below comic existed before the game even was announced. Some people just looked at the leaked pics and decided to start hating the remaster.
Everyone has a right to like/dislike things but this is just pure dishonest depiction of the game to fuel the hate circle jerk.
it’s clearly not the same time of day.
reminds me of the study that says that cars are more colorful in times where the economic prospects are better
Makes sense if you’re paying extra for the colour
Tbf that top right image looks modded to hell
No, it’s not, looks stock to me
Bloom. Bloom never changes.