It's hard to read this and take it other than gaslighting. I've bolded items in orange that I think are difficult to reconcile here.
Firstly, there's been like 4-5 titles released that most people are complaining about it's performance versus it's graphical output - while that argument still rages on, it's a very different argument to be upset that your hardware isn't performing as well, and the game looks like something from the middle of the pack last generation title, or as you put it, looks as bad as killzone 2. The games themselves do actually look quite good, and because of their dynamic nature do have situations where somethings may not look so crazy good, and in others can look incredible. That's just the nature of not hand tuning every single scene possible. But if I'm being honest; most of the people making commentary about the lack of graphics are likely to have not played the titles. I've read a lot of stuff and seen a lot of stuff about Starfield, but my experience is greatly different from peoples comments. I would say, it looks quite good in my opinion, it's not winning any awards, but it's definitely not something possible on last generation console hardware.
See for instance: this picture here of Starfield
There's no way any last gen title would ever look like this. The engine would break because no engine is designed to be able to handle item hoarding, nor does any game model this much random stuff to pick up and dump elsewhere.
But these of systems, apply to any dynamic lighting and shadow and reflection system.
Let's talk about BG3 and A3 vs Days Gone. Days Gone entire technology stack is built around that particular premise and they had to do a lot to get that working. It's doesn't working like a typical NPC character would, they've modelled those Zombies as a group, so I would disagree heavily in comparing many disparate different NPCs all doing their own thing, versus a hoard of zombies where only a handful of those zombies actually have any AI running them.
Also, comparing these next gen titles, with the exception of Starfield, you've compared them largely against Sony exclusives which are some of the most well funded, most supported games on the market, and most importantly all of them are single player. And the games that people are largely complaining about, are not. And that's also a huge difference. Very few studios would ever be given the amount time and funding that Sony titles are given. BG3 is basically crowd sourced. Larian still has a far way to go to get anywhere close to the sales numbers that the first party studios of Sony.
If you want to compare games across generations, you need to compare the game type and the budget. And then you can see the difference in technology.
Compare linear single player adventure titles vs other single player linear adventure titles. Compare multiplayer GaaS titles against other GaaS titles.
Compare mass zombie hoard games against other mass zombie hoard games.
Last edited:
