Next-Gen Graphics, where are they?

My gaming platform is the PC, but when new consoles were announced I was excited because that meant better overall looking games for everyone. I known that graphics aren't what make a game great, but I'd say everyone loves those few titles that just blow your pants off with visual goodness.

My question though is, where is the visual goodness? None of the trailers show anything mind boggling. I'd say most games are still struggling to just be on par with BF4. The only real other visually awesome game down the line is the Witcher 3, but that was to be expected from cdprojekt. (Also I guarantee that's running on a beast of a rig, cdprojekt isn't known for forgiving engines.)

I guess this means EA games using the Frostbite engine, have a solid platform, and a visually amazing Mass Effect game is enticing. CDprojekts cyberpunk will probably be a visual feast as well, but everything else looks anti-climatic when these next-gen games can barely compete with a last-gen game.

My platform is the PS4. The only game that truly looked next gen IMO was Killzone: Shadowfall. Not too sure about inFamous Second Son. Sure it looked good, but next gen good?

You raise a valid point though. Where is the visual goodness?

Sleeping Dog high res texture pack was it 2 years ago. But actually I'm more concerned with last gen with Ubisoft posting up higher res screenshots of Assassin's Creed games and then claiming it's in game. Just we were sold false games for about 7 years, and now it seems easier to see that with PC and most graphic cards going 2k.

They got lost somewhere in between diminishing returns from better hardware and bloated and out of control budgets that are crippling studios left and right.

All next gen graphics have been delayed to 2015

They haven't found that magic switch called "NEXT GEN GRAPHICS" yet. Apparently, these things take time to happen.

Actually, I think Dragon Age looks as good as anything.

I think we've reached the point where video games aren't going to keep looking better and better. We're getting close to a sort of graphics plateau. We're not there yet, but we're evening out. Visual "wow" factors are going to come from good aesthetics and good use of technology, not just brute force "more particles and details".

Hmm, "trailers" haven't been "mind boggling". Ever.

Unless one counts the generational/tech leaps where people where amazed at how a game like Quake and that wasn't so much due to how the game looked but that it blew up minds because people didn't think a game like that could exist and run smoothly. If you want one of those you need to wait for tech jumps which are rare.

Witcher 3 looks pretty "next gen" to me.

It's an iterative process. Evolution takes time.

I don't own any of the new systems yet, but there was a lot next gen looking stuff at Microsoft press conference and there will be at Sonys' later tonight. The games they showed looked much better than on the 360/ps3. Also compared to last gen, this gen seems to be moving a much more accelerated pace...the truly good games seems to be coming much earlier in this console cycle.

I thought a lot of the new stuff looks real purty. Assassin's Creed looks amazing I thought. You can see all the lighting and particle effect advantages that they are getting from the new consoles. It's never going to match the leap from SD to HD but I can see and apprectiate the upgrade.

We'll really have to wait, since a fair amount of those games were either really early or just represented by a trailer.

Cool looking stuff doesn't show up for about a year after a console's launch.

@veektarius said:

I agree. It's this weird mix of traditional animation styles (simple shapes with eye-popping colour) and hyper-detailed character models. It's strange, but it looks absolutely gorgeous without relying too heavily on realism.

Still, that latest Wild Hunt trailer made my jaw drop.

This. So much this. Making a game that looks drastically better than what we have now and what's coming in the near future is going to take an amount of money that very few companies have and even fewer are willing to spend.

That said, I think a lot of the stuff out there/coming out looks great. It's not mind-blowing, but disappointed is the last word I would use to describe how I feel about graphics at the moment.

The way i think about "next-gen" graphics is to only consider them in terms of consoles, and in those terms we've already had a bunch of next gen stuff. I mean fuck even the new Infamous PS4 game looks technically way better then any of the PS3 stuff did. So yea consoles made that leap for sure. Except that leap was to at best a PC parity level. So we don't feel it as much. That's what next-gen graphics mean to me anyway, console games don't looks like total shit anymore.

I guess a better way to word what I'm trying to say is this: Technology, not money, has always been the limiting factor in how good games look. We're getting closer to the point where the technology is there, but there's not enough money to make games that can make full use of it. We're not quite there yet, games are still going to look better in the future. The kinds of leaps that we saw in the '90's and 2000's are never going to happen again.

Which I am A-OK with. I was talking to some people who were wowed by what MS showed of The Division, and it just doesn't do anything for me. It and The Witcher 3 both look really, really good, but I can't honestly say that either one's looks are what excites me. Actually, The Division didn't look all that interesting to me anyway, but that's beside the point.

What the fuck does this mean? Witcher looks jaw dropping, but is it 'next gen'? Is anything ever going to be next gen? Do you want in to jump out of the screen and eye fuck you?

seriously, i feel that term "next gen" is hurting things more than helping.

@oldirtybearon: Saturated colors make a huge difference in how good a game looks, it seems like. You look at a demo like Hardline and how desaturated things look, and something about that makes me associate that with last gen. I don't know anything about the technical aspect of color - is this because it requires intensive lighting effects? It doesn't seem like using colors that are more vivid over those that are more drab would make any difference computationally.

It's a funny shift this generation, when the 360 was introduced the notion of cross platform games was a little different. You expected 32 & 64 bit consoles to be strongest at what they did, out of the box oomph.

Since 2006 most console games have equalised their asset development with their PC releases. Nobody expected those set top boxes to still be used 8 years later. This cycle was the most protracted in history. Now their hardware is more than ever before like a PC, it's not just the "wow" factor of an ATI logo on the Wii anymore.

I can't imagine why as a PC gamer you would buy into the hype of thinking "next gen" graphics means anything. A PS4 is for people who are done with their PS3. It's not 1996 anymore and the N64 is the new polygon paradigm. Next gen graphics will mean something again when developers like Kojima can stop using two perpendicular 2D textures to generate shrubbery. When you no longer have to cheat the constraints of video memory or processing architecture.

@veektarius said:

I think the biggest thing is that it's (Dragon Age) different. Hardline looks like real life, minus the people, the dirt, and the grime. Los Angeles is a dirty fucking place, and that map didn't look dirty at all. It's hitting the uncanny valley where it looks realistic enough, but the little details aren't right. Sure, nobody cares about the little touches in an MP-focused FPS, but to me that's a bit of a rough spot in terms of grading its visual quality. It's entirely subjective, but overall I'm worn out from realism and I recognize fully that realism is what Battlefield and DICE excel at. It's just not my bag, and probably won't be, for awhile.

That and from a gameplay perspective it looked like Battlefield gameplay in a halloween costume. I mean, I'm sure that's exactly what some people want, but I want something more intense and more personal in my Payday heist games. Less focus on spectacle, more on tactical cooperation and, well, robbing banks.

Visuals will looks much better once devs stop putting resources into 360 and PS3 versions. Having to spend time and money on those versions holds back the current gen versions in my opinion.

It takes time. Just gotta be patient is all

Let me ask you a question, how long did we have to wait until something truly blew our minds with the coming of previous consoles? Because I can guarantee you that nothing visually stunning came out in the first year.

Except for the fact that it runs at only 30 FPS and isn't even 1080p...a pattern that is going to be repeated with The Order.

I'm under-fucking-whelmed with both the Xbox One and PS4 right now. I hope next year is better because right now they're about equal to the video card I was running two years ago.

@hustlerlt said:

Ding-ding-ding.

While this absolutely correct, there were games like Oblivion that came out in that first year of the 360's life. However there were also games like Hitman: Blood Money and Condemned: Criminal Origins that, while looking great, weren't graphical powerhouses like we saw later in 2006 and 2007.

Also the fact that games are starting to look so good in all the detail and resolution, that no video stream or even most captured footage will show how good a game looks.

Things like YouTube and Giant Bomb's current video quality just don't match what the machine is directly putting out. Even previous gen stuff wasn't being represented in its full glory on the internet.

To see what these games really look like, you have to have it playing on your own TV or have some maximum quality video capture that is a very high bitrate and thus a huge file size. People need to develop better video compression. This was the idea behind the most recent Silicon Valley episode.

check out bullet girls, it looks all sorts of next gen.

That Witcher 3 looked pretty nuts.

Division too.

The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition look pretty stunning. Those games are definitely next gen to me.

I kind of feel like this generation compared to the end of last generation isn't so much a leap as it's comparable to how really nice DVDs compares to blu rays. I watched the entire Life of Pi on dvd by accident. It was beautiful, but when I realized my mistake and put in the blu ray, the difference was clear but it was the same image. Only slightly more detailed. And I kind of feel like the devil is in the details when it comes to new hardware graphics these days. There are moments in everything from Wolfenstein to Infamous and games like The Division and The Witcher 3 where I can see the details. It doesn't have to be a huge difference, but there's just more stuff. And more of it with more clarity and softer animation. And I am sure a few years from now, we'll become accustomed to the new graphics and look back and realize the difference was bigger than we initially thought.

I personally think the only thing to blame as to why I sometimes personally can get into that mindset of things not blowing me away is because I consume so much media of new games that by the time I actually see them, I am already used to it. It's not like when I was younger and I only had a vauge understanding of how things looked based on a small picture in a magazine.

It's a few years away.

Even then Oblivion looked like shit compared to Skyrim

@sethphotopoulos said:

That's true. Funny how five years of iteration and innovation in tools can do that, huh?

Here they are.

I'd say there is some pretty cool stuff, but really just look at the previous generations game, look at the very 1st games released on the 360 and PS3 and look and the very last games. You'll see major difference in graphical quality, just as you will with this gen by it's end. Sometimes it'll be so gradual you might not even notice, but it's always getting slightly better.

batman, ac unity, far cry 4, no mans sky, metal gear, and of course the witcher 3 are all pretty dam good looking. Everything else they showed in the conferences was either okay looking or part of CG trailer making it to hard to tell if it represents the final product.

Witcher, Assassin's Creed, Batman and Uncharted... All mind blowing.

@ll_exile_ll: Ha. Whatever. Captured froma PS4 means nothing. They said that the announcement of The Last of Us was captured directly from a PS3 and the gameplay looks nowhere near as good as the cutscenes. This stuff is always super misleading. I have no doubt in my mind that Uncharted 4 will look phenomenal and that the cutscenes will look as good if not better than this trailer, but this is not what that game will look like.

Yo man, I could sit here and rattle off a bunch of games. I don't need to though, you see Batman?

Diminishing returns on hardware from the previous generation forward. We had some very nice looking games on 360 and ps3 and from then on as far as generations go we won't see massive jumps in graphical fidelity like have before. That's just the way it is, get used to it.

@ll_exile_ll prepare to be disappointed when your game isn't a CGI trailer. Let me guess, you were shocked when watch_dogs didn't looks like it did on a $4000 computer?

Man are people being that impatient? As others have said, it takes awhile for the truly amazing games to start coming out. Just because the development of games have been made "easier" due to the tools being more akin to developing on PC, doesn't mean that it is instantly going to translate. It's going to take time for devs to fully utilize a consoles potential, I mean again like others have said, look at what devs have been able to eek out of the last gen consoles.

It isn't as pretty as a lot of their PC counterparts, but it's still fairly impressive seeing as how that hardware they are using is like 7-8 years old and were probably planned and being developed a year or two ahead of time. Wait until next year when the first batch of AAA developers start putting out their games like the Naughty Dog, Rocksteady, Kojima Productions, etc..

@beaudacious: There is no next-gen on PC. PCs just gradually get better and you'll continue to see graphics gradually get better.

You can already see massive leaps in the visual quality between ps4/Xbox one and ps3/360 and it'll keep getting better for awhile. Watch anything from today and you'll see the next-gen graphics.

They're insidethe computer.

I'm rather tipsy and will freely admit to not reading the responses in this thread (and therefore my status as a terrible person) but DId you see The Order? That's like the exact perfect example of graphics emphasized over gameplay.

I honestly fear the production costs of games as a result of these newly established standards. I just wanted this new console generation to ease the burden of game development as games no longer need to improve further form the previous generation. Photorealism is so freaking expensive and unnecessary that I'd rather developers just continue with the same graphical fidelity and just run their products at 1080p, 60fps, increase their draw distances, upres the textures, and voila -- no need for new shaders, crap tons of tesselation, complex facial animations, and other expensive technologies that don't help games any. Last gen games just looked good enough.