What is a bullshot? Let us examine the differences between a PR shot and total BS.

[Dr. Nick]

This is a "bullshot". This is where the term came from.

I don't think any madden has come close to it. There a bunch of things happening in this shot that makes it doubtful that we will see it in real time. A dev might get close but the fact that none of the maddens have done so makes it a "bullshot".

This is a PR shot of Madden 2006.

It still has more AA than what is seen in game. Some PR shots have a greater resolution than what you will see when you play the game but it still represents the final product. We can not use most PR shots to determine the resolution of the game or how much AA the final product will have but they are still an honest representation of the games graphics. Calling this a bullshot is wrong. Everything seen in the shot has been done in real time other than the AA and possible resolution.

If Madden 2006 360 actually ended up looking like this than the above PR shot would have been a "bullshot".

The term “bullshot” gets used way too much when it is not justified and is not what penny arcade originally intended when it came up with the term. If PR shots fall into the same category as bullshots than every developer this generation is guilty of using them.

 

[ShadowRunner]

I think pretty much every developer IS "guilty" of using them, though i would take issue with the word guilt unless they are trying to pass it off as exactly what you will see in-game (although maybe it is a little less straight forward when you think about more casual consumers who may not know any better). There are no genraly accepted terms. To me bullshot is anything that is not running in realtime on the designated system, its a screenshot with a certain amount of BS involved even if it is just a bump in resolution or AA. Within the scope of "Bullshot" you then have sub-categories like in-engine/photomode and plain CG. Thats how i read the term, but obviously there just isnt a generally accepted definition.

 

[E2K]

Also notable: forza3, halo3 gears of war, killzone2 motorstorm.
Is these titles different 3d models were used, i think that is also a "bullshot"

 

[Neb]

Most games have recieved this threathment and many more will. Also dont forget to add GT5 (menu car vs ingame models is a huge difference) etc. Heck even add in some PC games to although dunno how CGI traielrs should count unless it is said to be realtime/hyped as in-engine.

 

[Richard]

I believe you're trying to make a distinction when in practice there's no real difference. Neither bullshots or "PR shots" represent the final product. If you make a separate category for resolution/AA, do you also include shots for shadow resolution, transparent buffer resolution, fragment precision? After all, they all involve larger than retail game buffers.

Do we also need a new category ("Dev shots") when screenshots don't use LoDs? How about not using lower-poly shadow hulls? Non-adaptive, constant, tesselated surfaces? They all have more geometry than the retail game.

I might be a little harsh but if, at the time the shot was taken, the dev/pr-guy/whoever-took-the-shot either knew or suspected that the overall quality was higher than what the final game could produce, it's always a bullshot.

Models come and go, effects change, levels are scraped but there's always a geometry/texture/computational budget.

 

[obonicus]

I'm with Richard. If they're trying to BS you with screenshots that won't be representative of what you'll see when you play the game, then it's a bullshot. These days I think the 'no-LOD' shots, or the 'hyper-AA' shots are much more damaging than the clearly-fake CGI, since gamers at least have some idea to detect the former.

 

[PARANOiA]

I'm with Richard. If they're trying to BS you with screenshots that won't be representative of what you'll see when you play the game, then it's a bullshot. These days I think the 'no-LOD' shots, or the 'hyper-AA' shots are much more damaging than the clearly-fake CGI, since gamers at least have some idea to detect the former.

Agree with your latter point. It's becoming harder to differentiate what I should expect when I pop a disc into my machine based on the media that floats around prior.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm with Richard. If they're trying to BS you with screenshots that won't be representative of what you'll see when you play the game, then it's a bullshot.

I think the point is a conceptual difference in purpose of the media. One is to produce an image of the game that won't look like horse poo when printed on magazines, and the other is to falsely represent the game as better looking than it is in reality. The PR image was just rendered at huge resolution, but otherwise looked exactly like the game. These images were then downsampled to produce the ultra IQ iamges we see on the web. they weren't created to mislead, despite being misleading. Whereas changing the actual game engine's settings to produce pixels that the game itself won't be creating is deliverately wanting to present a better than real image.

In the case of the former, this is more a 'Media Shot', a result of print coverage. As long as people appreciate the IQ is not representative, we can see from these images what we'll get when we play the game (excluding framerate!).

In the case of the latter, the 'bullshot' we don't know what the actual game will be producing on screen.

Perhaps in a parallel to that we have fake resolution images, that are produced at 720p or 1080p with seemingly Media Shot standards but the actual game is lower resolution. In these cases the choice of resolution could almost be intentionally to mislead.

 

[dobwal]

They are all BS shots to me, if they don't represent actual gameplay.

People make excuses that they are shots made for print but why are internet sites inundated with them? I would have a different opinion if these higher rez and AA shots were few and far inbetween but they regularly released to media outlets that don't have print based products, so its pretty obvious that the shots are used to embellish the IQ of the corresponding titles. Especially, when considering that internet media dominates the gaming market and print media pales in comparsion.

I get the impression sometimes that the majority of non-spruced up shots aren't part of the official publisher or dev PR material, which seems rather sad. I, for one, have become so cynical about screen shots that I don't even bother looking at them any more.

 

[obonicus]

People make excuses that they are shots made for print but why are internet sites inundated with them? I would have a different opinion if these higher rez and AA shots were few and far inbetween but they regularly released to media outlets that don't have print based products, so its pretty obvious that the shots are used to embellish the IQ of the corresponding titles. Especially, when considering that internet media dominates the gaming market and print media pales in comparsion.

This is exactly what I was going to reply to Shifty, thanks.

 

[Neb]

The "for magazine use" line is rather dull. Most magazines have the bullshots as small images on a single page. Unless the magazine has a big poster then 5kx4k or whatever is way overkill even if the image will span over 2 A4 pages.

 

[thop]

Nintendo is always honest.

I remember the screenshot by EA. Another screenshot with a yellow Porsche was also released the same day.

 

[thop]

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3136966

 

[Novum]

Crysis PR shots also used to have massive amounts of supersampling though nothing else was manipulated.

 

[brain_stew]

Anything that does not accurately represent the native output of a console is a "bullshot" as far as I'm concerned. They all artificially increase the quality in varying different ways and do not represent the image that I will get on screen when I play the game on the actual hardware it was designed for. People seriously overestimate just how much of an impact supersampling alone can have on an image, it completely transforms it into something wholly unrecognisable from where I'm looking. Shots that "just" Increase AA, AF, resolution and tweak LODs should not be given a free pass, it totally undermines the effort of developers that actually strive for decent image quality and is incredibly misleading.

The fact that you'd need more than an order of magnitude increase in graphics processing to produce similar results in real time should speak volumes.

 

[obonicus]

Here's a different question, though. What about when they show PC footage but don't mention that outright, leaving the implication that the console version could look this good? EA's been doing this with Mass Effect 2 and I believe the MoH trailer was also all-PC. Are they trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes?

 

[Blazkowicz]

the Unreal Tournament cover shots (PC versions) were seriously great-looking PR shots.
found as a low quality, over-saturated scan :
http://www.mobygames.com/game/unreal-tournament/cover-art/gameCoverId,14340/

Good examples of staged bullshots from a nice angle, showing off effects you see in-game for a fraction of second. Then it's an impossibly high resolution scaled to a very small surface, printed at maybe 300dpi .

 

[thop]

As it turns out both pictures where actually discussed on this very forum.

A few quotes from the thread

You can get that madden image today from an r420 or nv40.

With some small degrades to the lighting, the Madden picture is completely believable....this is the minimal graphical horsepower increase that the average gamer will expect to justify spending $300 on a new console.

The NFS picture is just plain bad....that level of visuals just won't move new hardware.

 

[obonicus]

To be fair, the first quote is from someone who has been banned since, and the other 2 are from the same person, some guy with 21 posts who posted last nearly 5 years ago.

 

[grandmaster]

Screenshots are almost never used at 100% size in magazines. At 100%, a single 720p shot would just about fill an entire double-page spread. Posed artwork to be used for intro sections would warrant it though, clearly. But the bottom line is that 720p and definitely 1080p shots will be downscaled any way, leading to jaggie-elimination etc.

The OP seems quite definitive in his terms, but I have to disagree. Polyphony's GT5 screenshots would qualify as "PR shots" and yet they are in no way representative of the final product. More than that, mega high resolution and super-sample AA are such an important part of the overall IQ of any given shot, that artificially manipulating them for no reason other than to make the game look better than it actually is must surely warrant the bullshot tag?

I suppose my question is, where would you draw the line? Posed cameras adding a dynamic viewpoint not possible in-game? Additional motion blur processing? Extra resolution/super-sample AA? Photo mode shots?

I think just about the only acceptable way of using bullshots is to use the PC build with very high settings, but even then I'd prefer the provenance of the shots to be made clear.