The Order: 1886

Personally I'm finding it quite hard to get into the 50 shades of grey and brown look of the game. I know it's 'the look' and Victorian London wasn't teletubbies, it is what it is, but still.
 
There's a world of difference between feature list bullet points and getting all the tech to work well in unison. There are many games already which have all the stuff on paper but the results aren't as convincing, or the performance or image quality suffers, or the art content isn't good enough to make the most out of the engine - and content creation also depends on the custom tools which are once again an engineering effort.

The Order seems to get everything right and that makes it stand out from the rest, similar to how Quantum Break does it on the X1. While this is obviously a general team effort, it still shows that the engineering side has had to be done very well.
 
Personally I'm finding it quite hard to get into the 50 shades of grey and brown look of the game. I know it's 'the look' and Victorian London wasn't teletubbies, it is what it is, but still.

I actually think it's pretty strong on the blue and gold/copper shades as well, with some splashes of red, so not nearly as bleak as Quake or Gears was. Adding more greenery would definitely kill the mood.
 
Funny, as most of today's movies are shot with digital cameras with much sharper results compared to grainy film as far as I know :)
 
The Order seems to get everything right and that makes it stand out from the rest, similar to how Quantum Break does it on the X1. While this is obviously a general team effort, it still shows that the engineering side has had to be done very well.

Pretty much this.
 
Another thing is that games are still forced to work within a very thin performance envelope, so they have to use approximations of the 'proper' techniques. Now there are many possible options for every aspect of the general rendering pipeline, but it takes a lot of skill to chose the proper set and implement them efficiently enough. For example, Halo 3 made choices where their lighting pipeline was very good, but other aspects of the pipeline had to suffer in turn, including rendering resolution. This is not a trivial choice, very hard to get right.
 
If anybody is good at After Effects, that person could add grain, chromatic aberration and motion blur to say, Uncharted 4 videos and see if that helps the believability of the image. I know MB would, but I'm not sure about the rest.
 
Another thing is that games are still forced to work within a very thin performance envelope, so they have to use approximations of the 'proper' techniques. Now there are many possible options for every aspect of the general rendering pipeline, but it takes a lot of skill to chose the proper set and implement them efficiently enough. For example, Halo 3 made choices where their lighting pipeline was very good, but other aspects of the pipeline had to suffer in turn, including rendering resolution. This is not a trivial choice, very hard to get right.

Ahh the life of a rendering programmer. The most dangerous type is one who tries to appease everyone.
Good graphics require effort from the entire team, to accept and exploit chosen tradeoffs. Choose the right battles. You try and do everything, and you might just find you end up having not much at all to show for it.

It's a summary of all game dev really. More than anything, the decisions made early to limit ambition are what determine how good a game is, when taking the experience and abilities of the team out of consideration.
 
So I tried to re imagine UC4 with something similar to The Order's visuals in PS. Added film grain, DOF, motion blur on Drake's left leg, God Ray, color grading, lens flare, camera lens distortion (convex) for wide angle, 16:9 black bars and vignette. And god damn I think it does look better than the original at least to me :).
Before
Oi2gINp.jpg

After
Icnv0Rh.jpg
 
Oh yeah, aesthetically it looks good. But I'm wondering what makes it best technically on the PS4 for some people. As far as I can tell, it's nothing we haven't seen before.
The fact they pull it all off to a great aesthetic means it must be technically good. You can't be technically bad and get all the high-tech features in. ;)
 
So I tried to re imagine UC4 with something similar to The Order's visuals in PS. Added film grain, DOF, motion blur on Drake's left leg, God Ray, color grading, lens flare, camera lens distortion (convex) for wide angle, 16:9 black bars and vignette. And god damn I think it does look better than the original at least to me :).
Before

After

I disagree. I am very happy with Naughty Dog original vision, thank you very much.

Since basically Jak & Daxter they have prioritized image clarity and resolution of assets over cinematic blurry effects (they mostly use those effects lightly)...and they have being very successful with their semi-realistic vision.
 
So I tried to re imagine UC4 with something similar to The Order's visuals in PS. Added film grain, DOF, motion blur on Drake's left leg, God Ray, color grading, lens flare, camera lens distortion (convex) for wide angle, 16:9 black bars and vignette. And god damn I think it does look better than the original at least to me :).
Before
Oi2gINp.jpg

After
Icnv0Rh.jpg

The lens flare is too much, I agree. but I like the DOF and film grain.

The thing is, you can't really make it better unless you change the textures, shading and lighting. No comp tricks are going to get you that.
 
So I tried to re imagine UC4 with something similar to The Order's visuals in PS. Added film grain, DOF, motion blur on Drake's left leg, God Ray, color grading, lens flare, camera lens distortion (convex) for wide angle, 16:9 black bars and vignette. And god damn I think it does look better than the original at least to me :).
Before
Oi2gINp.jpg

After
Icnv0Rh.jpg

Lose the lens flare, add chromatic aberration and desaturate the colors.
 
1) Not really (though I think it's technically good).
How do you create a game with all the high-end, demanding technologies running at the same time and looking good if your engineers aren't much cop? Only on PC can you brute-force a solution. On consoles, to feature all the desired components of a pretty render, you need to squeeze them onto decidedly limited hardware which requires good technical execution.
2) What are all those high-tech features?
Really? Soft body physics. Facial animation. Material shaders and rendering pipeline including shader filtering. Lighting and shadowing. Motion blur. DOF. The usual litany of features of a good looking game of this ilk. Obviously it's stronger in some areas than others, but all round, each aspect of the graphics is probably a minimum 'good' by current standards with some 'excellent'.
 
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