3roxor said:
But that's your opinion.. Fans of realistic racing in realistic environments(what you call boring) don't agree with you.
Good technology does not guarantee a pretty picture (a game like PDZ proves that, along with a lot of other games), and good art direction matched well to the technology used can result in a beautiful game.
As for the boring comment, go back and read what I wrote. The contrast is not
Unrealistic vs. Realistic
The diachotomy was that some real world environments are prettier than others, thus those who choose an ugly setting are at a disadvantage. I am all for realistic environments. But it is much harder to pretty up a track in the middle of DustBowl, OK than it is a track in down town Tokyo or on Oahu simply because of the setting and source art are so much nicer and have more color and variety.
Ask 100 people (exclude inbreed Nascar freaks) if they would rather live inside a 2.4mi concrete oval track or on a cliff side peak overlooking the ocean and surrounded by a valley filled with multi-colored trees in fall, all 100 are going to choose the prettier scenery. All things even (same technical and artistic skill) the game in the prettier location will look better because the scenery is better.
Scoob said:
With that said I don't entirely aggree with acert here, while it's true that being set in a city, or other environments off the track allows for much nicer scenery detail, that doesn't mean these types of games will always look better. For example, Forza looked better than PGR2 on xbox
I never said that a game like Forza cannot surpass PGR3 (I expect it to as I said in the other thread I referenced). Nor did I say they always look worse. I said they were at a
disadvantage. All things being equal a game "like PGR3" (key word being "like" i.e. in various locations with larger/variety of high detail backdrops where scale can be exaggerated/manipulated) will look better than a sim where everything is done by the books. There is a challenge to overcome in regards to locale. A typical race track is repetitive, single/bi-color bucket seats in some concrete stadium with tires and gravel around the course, etc.
They have less scenery to draw, but they can also spend more on the poly budgets of the cars, improve on the lighting parhaps, improve on the sense of speed, the flickering/jaggies from fences, have true foliage, more realistic reflections, there's a bunch of things that could elevate a sim racer above an arcade racer in the graphics department, even if the backgrounds are not the most interesting.
Having 10k seats and tens of thousands of fans in the stands will eat into a poly budget as well, especially if they are higher resolution with accurate lighting and shadowing. But so far we have not seen that--instead we get 10k PS2 level models.
I would choose the photorealistic building textures in PGR3 over the fans in NBA Live/NBA 2K. Of course a sim could cheat, remove the fans, remove all the individual seats, etc. but then you are removing the most colorful, dynamic part of the tracks. As Dr Evil said:
Dr Evil said:
Well about GT4 I must say that to me the most impressive looking tracks were city circuits like Tokyo, Seattle or that narrow old city, maybe italian?, whereas racetracks like Laguna Sega or Nurburing looked... well... like crap, so GT4 basically had those big sceneries to draw and maybe because of that the race tracks looked pretty bad to my eye.
Having seen a number of race tracks in real life, they are just ugly to begin with. Now they should strive for realism and accuracy, but the tracks in real life are just not very pretty. And IMO a realistic building looks a whole lot better than a realistic tire. Both wizz by at over 120mph, but most people would agree that a tire (as in the tire stacks they use around courses for accidents) is pretty boring compared to a diverse and colorful street front.
Its not impossible to make Forza 2 or MotoGP look better than PGR3, but they are at a disadvantage as I said.
