I’m about to start a series of blog posts called Games Look Bad. Before I start throwing stones from my glass house over here, I wanted to offer an explanation of what I’m doing and a defense of why I’m doing it.
There’s no doubt that we’ve seen a sustained and significant period of improvement in real-time computer graphics over the past three decades. We’ve made significant advances in nearly every aspect of visual look and feel, drawing quite a bit from the film industry in the process. So why the heck do most games look so bad?
Games are technically much more sophisticated than ever before, but I’m going to stake out a claim: aesthetically something has gone quite wrong, and the products don’t live up to the hype. Show me a next-gen, cutting edge game and I will show you an image that no competent film industry professional would ever deem acceptable. Why not? The answer lives at the crossroads of art and technology, a strange neglected intermediary which we in the industry tend to avoid talking about. Particularly in the last ten years, several new techniques have appeared that are foundational to practically every high end game on the market. These are well documented from a technical standpoint, and it’s generally assumed that graphics programmers who have stayed current are fluent in at least the basic goals and implementations of these techniques, if not the finer points of them. I won’t labor to build a complete list, but you likely know them: normal maps, HDR/tonemaps, physically based shading, volumetrics, DoF/bokeh, etc.
