All I know is the game doesn't look very good. Some people can theorize all they want about the gaming looking not-that-bad because it uses the technique X and technology Y, but the statistical sample taken from the overwhelming majority of reactions around the Internet can't lie: this isn't looking great.
Absolutely correct. But this isn't "news", it was clear from the reveal trailer in June. Why people are suddenly surprised is a bit of a mystery - particularly given
Pete Hine's interview back in August:
Metro: In terms of the reception to the game so far, I was looking again online and I was surprised at how negative a lot of it is. There seems to be a significant proportion of the fans upset at the quality of the graphics and there also seems to be a Diablo III style reaction to the use of colour – which was personally my favourite part of the reveal. Do those sort of complaints surprise or upset you?
Pete: Definitely doesn’t upset us. Very little surprises me after 16 years in this industry. [laughs] Generally speaking… I think we’re an industry, we’re a form of entertainment. As with most forms of entertainment you never get 100 per cent agreement on anything. And so, at the end of the day, whether it’s what the graphics look like or whether the gameplay is what you want or whether you like the setting, or whatever it is, everybody is entitled to their opinion.
Yeah CD Projekt with Witcher 3 made everyone else's lives terrible because of the standards raised, but the truth is that Fallout 4 looks worse than a decently modded Skyrim on a modest PC from 2012.
The Witcher 3 also had an awful lurching framerate on consoles, particularly the swamp in Velen. It looks great, but it's taken what... ten patches to get semi-decet and close to a solid 30fps on consoles? They made different compromises.
One would think that after the rampant success of Skyrim and the crapload of money it brought would make Zenimax/Bethesda double-down on the art resources for Fallout 4, especially for the detail being given to the various assets. Instead, the textures look flat and the models seem to have a low polygon count for a game being launched in late 2015.
I agree on how the game looks but I'm yet to be convinced that the game could look significantly better without taking a hit in other areas. I'm interested to see some of the large scale battles that the press got to see in Cologne, but we've seen glimpses of huge airships crashing into the ground, vertibird battles and more.
I'm not, nor was I expecting, huge advances in graphics. I always believed that Bethesda would take the increased power of the new consoles and direct it at the things they have always seemed to focus on because I presume they think they're more important. And I'll definitely reserve judgement on the game until I've put a good 20 hours into it.