I recognize the author of this post just from the logo on his site. He worked in the industry and has spent years sharing his knowledge on gamedev.net. This is not an attack on the industry. He is speaking to his peers.

> [...] some of the "over-contrasty garbage" is intentional to help people rapid identify the things that they need to identify. Being able to quickly spot the things that you need to play the game are more important than sensible tone maps and contrast curves.

Is this speculation or were you involved in these discussions? Or, maybe a GDC talk? For all I know, you could the lead graphics programmer for Naughty Dog, in which case I'd totally take your word for it.

And, actually, I really would like to hear more specific criticisms. As much as I respect Promit, he absolutely could be wrong and a detailed breakdown from someone who knows better would be informative.

I was hoping that the author would go into how to do tone mapping correctly.

> ask WHY games are the way they are, though.

To add to your point, the main reason for "bad HDR" in FPS games is for simulating eye adaptation. Screens don't have 1,000,000:1 constrast ratio and can't shine as bright as the sun (we wouldn't want them to). This means that games are forced to approximate this effect - inevitably resulting in shortcomings.

Furthermore, game development is a race against time. You have milliseconds to render the scene and apply tone mapping. It may very well be mathematically possible to create automated tone mapping that would make a cinematographer proud, but can you make an algorithm that completes in less than 1 millisecond? I doubt it.

To my point, there are mods on PC that replace the tone mapper (I think ReShade does this) and they absolutely destroy your framerate - however the results are absolutely gorgeous if you know what you're doing.

> To add to your point, the main reason for "bad HDR" in FPS games is for simulating eye adaptation...

How is that different from what photographs do?

> Furthermore, game development is a race against time. You have milliseconds to render the scene and apply tone mapping.

Maybe I know just enough to be ignorant of the topic, but LUTs are just lookup tables. People working in film apply LUTs to the footage they're watching in realtime on normal PC hardware. Fragment shaders have been common in games for years. Last year I was working on a VR project (targeting 11ms per frame) and I think the post-processing took between 0.25 and 1.5ms--any more an it would have been dropped). For a desktop game having 16 or 30ms to render many fewer pixels is an eternity, comparatively. The only difference between a LUT and ICC profile (which most OSes support out of the box) is that for ICC profiles are mean to be calibrated against either an input or output--they're used everywhere in realtime.

I've never actually used ReShade, so I had to look it up. It does way more than color correcting. Depth of field, ambient occlusion, antialiasing are completely separate from tone mapping and notoriously computationally expensive (not just in video games, but in film as well). I also think since third-parties are writing them, they're not always tuned to be performant.

> How is that different from what photographs do?

A typically developed HDR photo is a single sample following the time at which the eye has adapted. There are [hopefully] no over- or under-exposed areas.

The dynamic range in HDR games is often used to simulate the entire process of eye adaptation. It's a function over time that intentionally creates over- or under-exposure some of the time.

I still don't see why animating the exposure explains why there's "bad HDR" in games (high contrast and over saturation)? I haven't implemented it or read any papers on the subject, but the games I've played don't look that much different than auto-exposure on camcorders in the 90's (or your phone today). For actual cameras it's more difficult because you need to guess and adjust the aperture or shutter instead of having a HDR image in a buffer and deciding how to generate a LDR image to present. Calculating the exposure (especially if you're animating it and only willing to go so far in one direction or the other), should be fairly quick.

The game industry definitely follows inward looking trends. For a long time every game was grey or brown and lacked contrast. More recently they all seem to use the same look/LUTs.

I worked in animated feature films and had similar critiques about the lighting and look. I felt like they lit everything like a well exposed photograph and were afraid of letting things fall off into dark or light (part of that could have been poor simulation of the toe or head of the film curve).

Then, when Pixar did Wall-e (2008) they hired a well known cinematographer, Roger Deakins, as a consultant. DreamWorks also hired him for How to Train Your Dragon (2010). I think that was a big change and both of their studios approached how CG movies look.

Whatever reason modern games have for looking like shit, it's not good enough. The end effect is that they look like shit.

Maybe a little snark is good. These big studios have been pumping out bigger and louder games for a decade, and each one is more soulless than the last. There's a reason Minecraft took off the way it did. It's because it was a return to the visually appealing age when pixel colors were in some sense manually selected, resulting in a pleasant palette. I can say without a hint of irony that I prefer the look and feel of the original Doom to any modern blockbuster game.

Are you here to tell me that Minecraft and Doom are paragons of bad gameplay?

Maybe I wasn't clear. I said, basically, gameplay trumps visuals. You are in agreement that gameplay trumps visuals. If gameplay and visuals are at odds, gameplay should win. Minecraft's contrast is boosted and its colors are not accurate, and this all adds to its charm. This is in dispute of the article, which is taking the stance that tone mapping and colors should be tuned to look like a painting or film, rather than aspects that can influence gameplay.

My response here is mostly that many of the visual choices made in the games I'm criticizing were made completely independently of the game design team. This is far from ideal but it's a consequence of how the production pipeline is set up in these blockbuster titles. I do vehemently disagree that the aesthetic traits I'm looking for are at odds to gameplay and design decisions, though.

I could go on for a while about how Zelda BOTW manages to integrate the design and aesthetic choices, but I'm going to get mugged if I try to use that game as an example again. Maybe I'll use it as part of a different write-up on visual design.

Zelda BOTW has climb-anywhere gameplay, though, so it doesn't need landscape contrast to support gameplay purposes. Contrast that to something like Horizon Zero Dawn where you need the harsh ledge contrast on rock faces to distinguish between walls you can climb on and those you cannot.

Similarly combat in BOTW happens up close, you don't actually need to distinguish things at range. This is not generally true, especially for the other titles you're comparing BOTW against. BOTW also has problematic cases such as this: https://static.gamespot.com/uploads/scale_super/1552/1552458... That rock face is horrible. Totally washed out in a highly unrealistic way, to say nothing of the ridiculous saturation of the torch light.