So much ado about nothing
Since the early 2000's, The supply of quality AAA games has come to a slow halt. The reason?
I blame the fixation on realism, personally. The devil is in the details.
AAA releases have been few and far between. When Red Dead Redemption 2 released, critics (me included) had their spotlight on a few things:
The drag of having to check every cabinet and corpse to get supplies.
The clunkiness of having to micromanage your inventory, lest you lose your rifles at a time you need them most.
The drag of having to feed your character sustenance so that they may survive and thrive in the midst of battle.
The clunkiness of something as basic as movement, as your character goes through many seconds of unnecessary animation just to change directions.
All those neat, realistic mechanics are neat and all. For example, you can watch an NPC eat an entire meal from start to finish, or watch railroad workers extract/hammer spikes into each and every piece of the track.
It's nice not seeing the same NPC clones regurgitate the same lines over and over again. It’s neat that characters have all those subtle animations and blending for “humanizing” their movement. It’s neat having unique individual animations for picking up items…
...but these things take hours upon hours to make, and at some point, all this stuff gets old.
In anticipation of Grand Theft Auto 6, and the millions of tiny microscopic details we'll be finding years down the line if that game ever releases, we've had to have multiple releases of GTA V on multiple consoles to compensate for the total lack of anything. The one big issue I have with this, is the lack of... you know... more Grand Theft Auto.
Something is amiss.
I get it, Rockstar's trying to go bigger and better. They want more graphics. They want more stuff to do, more characters, and more... "everything" - and a lot of time is required to do "everything", and that much of "everything" is going to equal a lot of replay value.
But if the cost is one new Grand Theft Auto every decade, is it worth it⸮
It is a double-edged sword. Is the "fix" to go back in time and reintroduce the old system limitations? To get rid of the fixation of every crack in the rocks, every blade of grass, and all the calculations for realistic weather and lighting? Do we make developers go back to the philosophy of what actually makes a game good and replayable?
It is food for thought, even though nobody’s going to buy a game if the graphics look like they belong from the PS3 era.
The realism unrealism
A recent upload by a YouTuber named “The Critical Drinker” had me thinking.
For those who don’t know, he’s quite prolific in voicing his distaste for the modern movie malignance phenomenon. Despite myself not being much of a movie connoisseur, his content is still up my alley, unsurprisingly. The lost art of creating art seems to be evident in many present-day mediums nowadays; gaming is no different.
One moment in this video really stuck out to me:
(Go to 4:11)
Critical Drinker points out that having to stick to realistic lighting botches the spirit of the movie - and he couldn’t hit the nail on the head any harder.
Both the animated movie, and the remake, take place in the deep depths of the ocean. One carries a bubbly, colorful, and sometimes downright beautiful aesthetic thanks to the carefully crafted, expertly planned hand-drawn animations.
Then you get to the remake, and all of this is replaced with a dark, grungy, almost horror-esque vibe because… that’s just the bottom of the ocean. It has to look real, as anything else would simply look goofy to our eyes.
And as of writing this, another youtuber uploaded a video that pointed out this ill illumination phenomenon. This time for the recent “Portal RTX” launch. Watch this:
In the video, Ossy makes the exact same argument.
Moral of the story, people are (hopefully) realizing that injecting your game with “SUPER COOL 4K ALGORITHMIC RTX” isn’t a magic spell. It is a textbook example of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”
Remember this scene from Spongebob?
I always just passed it off as some odd bit (and maybe it still is and I'm just making this connection out of coincidence) but doesn't RTX feel a lot like chrome right now? It's new and eye-catching, so it's gotta go EVERYWHERE, right⸮
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