- The bikes don't have locks

- 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

> - No people actually riding bikes.

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.

Except Stranger Things, but you could say bikes are essential to the plot

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had a lot of bikes and were included in several plot lines

If we are listing games with bikes in them I feel that we should also mention the 1985 arcade game Paperboy ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperboy_(video_game)

Haha yes very true. The OG bicycle game.

Maybe there are technical challenges shooting actors sharing dialog while in motion on bicycles?

For cars this is a solved problem, and walking people are moving slowly enough for cameras to easily keep pace.

There is of course the iconic bicycle scene from Turks Fruit (1973) starring a very young Rutger Hauer and directed by Paul Verhoeven.

https://youtu.be/ze_Ncdy_igw

Plenty of American tourists standing on roads ;)

That part is realistic - the only part which is not is the lack of people shouting at them to move

And there's far too few of them :)

There aren't many bikes in that area in reality.

The alley wasn't correct. It's not a dead-end street.. :-)

You missed the part where the main character regenerates faster than Wolverine after taking a bullet

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.

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.

If you watch the YouTube version which is longer linked elsewhere in the comments you can see the trees moving, as well as things like awnings

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

Just because someone does something doesn't mean everyone else gets it for free. It takes effort to implement in every single game.

Maybe if Ubisoft had licensed out the Dunia Engine

- Lack of aroma of waffles being cooked from an opened bakery window ...

Also Lack of aroma of weed being cooked from an open coffeeshop window...

Yeah, I noticed that too. I think it's tied to the frame rate of the animations. Kinda weird

I think they should rather fix those things before trying to make everything so photo-realistic. But maybe that's just my taste.

Level design, engine development and animation happen in parallel. Waiting for one to get better before you continue with another serves no point.

I'm sure it's the engine. Call of Duty water has always looked like that.

All this robotic look will disappear one neural scene creation enters the mix

The crowd/background sound in general sounds nothing like walking around in Amsterdam. Small thing but it really stood out to 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.

I don't think I want to be able to shoot at what my brain would perceive as real people.

The water is too pretty and un-dirty in general.