Watching the Deus Ex quicklook, I was reminded of just how much I HATE cube mapped reflections and similar methods used in games these days, particularly on PCs. So I thought it'd be interesting to see what people really want out of games on consoles next generation, or in general from PC games.
Here's my list:
PC-
1) Real time reflections! Sure, cube mapping was impressive in HL2, but it's gotten to the point where I want things that are reflective to reflect real time. It doesn't have to be everything, but anything significant definitely. GTA IV is a great example of how that can enhance the look of a game. Driving around Liberty City, particularly later in the day, or on a rainy night, was always super impressive. Even consoles are capable of such reflections, and it's a little disappointing devs aren't willing to take some time to put it as on option on PC games, because it really does look so much better than the reflections of today's games just moving with you.
2) More dynamics! I love anything dynamic in video games. Even if it isn't really dynamic, and just appears to be, like the effect wind had on characters in Metal Gear Solid 4. Anything from cloth/hair physics to interactive water to the wet-Drake effect from Uncharted just makes the world feel so much realer. I can't believe there continue to be games without so much as canned ripples, just a texture without even a normal or anything, when games like Gears of War 2 can have such great water.
3) DYNAMIC LIGHTING, SELF SHADOWING. Seriously guys, it's 2011. We have games like Crysis out there that use nothing but Dynamic shadows. Hell, even Borderlands was mostly dynamic shadows. I want to see wayyyy more of that. It adds hugely to the fidelity and immersion of the game. There isn't much that takes me out of a game more than looking at a closed door and seeing light filtering through as if it were open. It gets even worse with games like HL2, which does that AS WELL as having an actual shadow on the door. This particular issue came off very strongly in that Gears 3 footage we got from GB recently, in the helicopter, it looked awful because none of the shadows came through, with the chopper being in the way, so it was all just ambient lighting and shading. But as soon as they stepped out into the light, it looked WAY better.
4) Fewer shitty textures. One thing that always ticked me off about PC gaming was that so often, particularly with console ports, you would see a lot of really low resolution textures in "unimportant" places. Particularly bad are pretty much any games with middle eastern locales, it seems like no one wants to add decent textures to Middle Eastern environments. It's really frustrating having all this VRAM and seeing all of these grainy, noisy textures everywhere. It was one of my favorite things in Crysis, where you could look at the ground, it actually looked clean and highly detailed, not a mess of patterns made to resemble what it represented, but often photographic in quality/nature.
5) Better post processing! I love post processing. Ambient Occlusion, bloom, blur, all that stuff. I love it. When it's done right. However, a lot of games do it really poorly. I'm not liking the way some of the AO looks in Deus Ex: HR, the bloom in games like Halo 2 and Oblivion look AWFUL, and the motion blur in a lot of games is pretty poor, or when it's not even motion based, like anything running on that RE5/LP2 engine that exploded doing that awful radial blur. But you look at games like Crysis 2, which I felt nailed things like bloom better than just about any other game (Uncharted 2 is about the same level, with a more reigned in look, that isn't quite as stylish as Crysis 2). So I'd love to see some higher quality stuff from PP. Things like object based motion blur (that hopefully looks a little better than, for example, some of the Uncharted 2 stuff, which when you look at it, looks a bit janky a lot of the time), and bloom that either enhances the style of the game, or doesn't overpower everything, and hey, add in some AO! It looks pretty good! Only, maybe, don't call it "SSAO" in the menu, just because I'm tired of telling my non-graphics whore friends what it means! And I'd love to see more post processing that enhances the look of the game.
Consoles-
1)Anti-aliasing! This one is a big one, as it's one of the few things you can definitively say the PC is significantly better at than consoles even in console ports. Jagged edges can be really frustrating, particularly when it comes up with certain effects causing extreme jaggies, which seems to be a popular process these days more and more. It seems like some games are certainly getting better about it, especially the bigger titles, as developers start to reach the current consoles' peaks, but there are plenty of jagged games out there today, and it's a bit of a bummer, because AA helps a LOT. It may not be SS or FSAA, but a little 4x or 8x MSAA can go a long way.
2) RESOLUTION. Specifically, 1080p. Thing with resolution is that is directly effects how every part of the game looks. Some things, like textures, can be less effected, as they are often lower resolution anyway, but things like AA become incredibly important and when they don't exist, painfully obvious, even at 720p. Because jagged edges are proportional to the pixel density, the lack of AA can be awful in games like Infamous or Halo 3 or CoD 4 which run at lower resolutions. On top of that, on a native 1080p display, games can look grimy and noisy and grainy, much like DVDs. And there is just a loss of clarity and detail, as well as a requirement for things like larger UI elements, etc.
3) Framerate. 45 frames per second or higher. I recently went back to play some Metal Gear Solid 4 with a friend, and man, the frame rate in that game can tank REAL bad, and is generally pretty low, although there were certainly points where it went super smooth. Part of this is certainly me being spoiled by constantly playing PC games, with my 360 becoming increasingly unplayed, but man, even rock solid 30 fps is rough looking. It gets worse when you look at games like InFamous or Dark Sector which both had a tendency to sometimes randomly, sometimes not so randomly go to running like fucking butter which made it all the more obvious how, even for console games, those games kinda ran like garbage.
BOTH: Add some flair, some style! Make your game look unique, look at games like TF2 or DOTA 2 or WoW and try and emulate the livetime of the visuals in the game with clever use of lower poly/fidelity visuals that manage to still look really sharp and clean for a long time.
So what do you folks want to see? Anything I didn't add? Which of these are most important to you? I'm particularly curious which of the console things I mentioned people want most, as those seem to be fairly divisive with people.
Log in to comment