And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics?
> That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority
You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game.
All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me wrong, it looks decent!" could be predicted the second I read the submission title.
Remember when HL2 was announced you had this super fancy physics engine? How objects would bounce and realistic react with each other, how you could stack things and come up with puzzles that would just use the physics engine without hardcoded scripts? HL2 was gorgeous looking but it was more than bump-mapping and complicated light models. You couldn't port HL2 to goldsrc and have it play the same.
Meanwhile almost 2 decades later we're back to fully scripted puzzles, mostly non-interactive environments and AI that's generally limited to a glorified A* algorithm.
This tech demo doesn't look decent, it looks really good, there's no arguing about it.
On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience.
So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).
Interestingly, I won an Occulus Go at a meetup about 9 months ago. I almost gave it away, I didn't really know what I had won, I thought it was going to be an upgraded google cardboard.
But man I was surprised at how cool it was. And yeah- everything feels really raw and unpolished and experimental, kind of like the early days of the internet. My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore, but still its all quite interesting and has me interested in buying a "proper" VR setup.
Some titles on the Quest are a bit better in that respect, but you still have to research the game to know. I think that's also a factor of how new the space is. It's much harder to allow users to roam where they want and still have the polish allowing them to interact how they want with the environment, it took quite a few years for that to happen in the traditional game space, both because of the effort required to craft that world, and because the engines were still working on abstractions that made it easy to fill those worlds with things that could be interacted with without too much programmer/artist work.
A good example of this is all the ways people have found for break Half-Life Alyx by working around the game expectations. People have found a way to hoard items, which would normally be hard to do because you have to actually hold them, but throwing them in buckets and bringing the bucket with you (for example, hauling around a bucket with 20 grenades in it, when normally you don't have a way to carry them all). If you put too many items in a bucket and pick it up, the physics system slows to a crawl and can crash the came. They designed the game so there weren't too many interactable objects in any one scene (because that makes sense), but the wholly new paradigm means that people were able to easily do crazy stuff to break it.
I've been meaning to pick up Arizona Sunshine for Quest, and that might be along the lines of what you're looking for (but not for Go). The Walking dead game is supposed to come to Quest eventually to (but again, the Go is unlikely), and the reviews of that looks pretty open for movement and exploration.
For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.
Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully.
Sometimes the simpler, the better.
But on the flipside, there's literally thousands of indie games with innovative, interesting gameplay, if not sparkling graphics.
Plus they don't actually explain how it works, how the demo was made and what's the limits of their technology. They only show the good side, so people naturally wants to know the not-so-good side as well.
And it resonates with me. I like eye candy like almost everyone and can appreciate technological marvels in CGI (and currently working with UE4 after hours, creating my own assets, I can appreciate how much work goes into modern game graphics). At the same time, I do feel many games these days try to use high-resolution textures and pretty shaders to paper over incoherent storylines and lack of gameplay depth. I think it's an entirely valid point to make.
But I agree with you that I expected games to be much "better" by 2020, back when I was a kid playing 7th Guest. I guess I couldn't understand back then how much manual, hard-to-scale labor and budget would have to go into story, dialogue, art, acting (plus salaries of A-list movie stars), mo-cap, etc. I expected in-depth scripted NPC behavior, like in 1992's Ultima VII [1], to be extremely commonplace and basic by now, but I obviously didn't understand back then what actual AI and emergent simulation requires (versus manual scripting, and testing of that scripting)
But I do agree with you in general that more advanced simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.
If you double the number of triangles, it doesn't take long to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double it, it doesn't look that much better unless you're zooming way in on it.
So there's two things here, I think:
* There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic lighting. This turns into more of an immersion/ realism thing, and less of a "detail" thing. It's weird when your characters shadow doesn't move the way you expect with the light sources, it's weird when one part of the room is totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a light source, and the light isn't bouncing around it.
* With VR, this will all matter way more. You're going to have people taking objects in the game and putting them right up to their face - suddenly the difference between X triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again, relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that's at least a foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR, so optimizing there makes a lot of sense.
So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they open up possibilities for new mediums.
But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years ago.
Many games on the Switch look way better than generic AAA games on PS4 and Xbox. Granted the Switch games are still somewhat held back by limited hardware.
Personally I'd take Breath of the Wild over some generic UE4 game any day.
- Realtime dynamic GI makes baking lights unnecessary, increasing iteration time for environment artists.
- Also using this dynamic GI it is possible to create new gameplay mechanics based on dynamic lighting (for example in the demo the roof of the cave falls down and the area becomes lit, making more things visible)
- The new animation system makes developers able to create natural motions that automatically adjust to the environment, which would also save a lot of developer time.
- The demo explanation video mentions that the statue model assets are imported directly from ZBrush without any postprocessing (with the original triangle count, without baking any normal maps/LODs), which also saves time for artists importing their work to Unreal (although the file size costs might probably be a bit high to practically use this in every scenario)
What I'm noticing is there's too much focus on fancy lights, over-the-top postprocessing effects with annoying crap like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections that hog a lot of performance for just reflecting your character in water puddles placed everywhere just to show the effect off, and so on.
And not enough focus on good old textures and polygons. Approaching spherical objects closely still makes the polygons very very obvious. Staring directly at walls still shows how low res textures are.
> You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things
You might be looking for Minecraft! :D
Even CGI water looks typically very fake (except from afar), because we don't really have very good models for water/liquids. That's certainly not the priority for games either.
Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO. At around 4 minute in the video they briefly mention the water effects. They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good.
When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games to look a lot better, but I also expect gameplay and world interaction to progress massively. Fully interactive environments you can interact with like in the real world. You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc...
It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost entirely focused on eye candy first and foremost. That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority, after all the Uncharted games are generally considered to be good games when I find them incredibly boring.
I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games they'll have to come up with something new to keep pushing the envelope.