Which games from the 7th-gen console era has the best graphics in your opinion?

Hello, time for more and more nostalgia gaming discussion!

The best looking games from the 7th-gen console era in my personal opinion are (In alphabetical order):

• Battlefield 3
• Battlefield Bad Company 2
• Blur
• Burnout Paradise
• Colin McRae: DiRT
• Colin McRae: DiRT 2
• DiRT 3
• Excite Truck
• Formula 1 Championship Edition
• Forza Horizon
• Forza Motorsport 2
• Forza Motorsport 3
• Forza Motorsport 4
• Gran Turismo 5
• Gran Turismo 6
• GRID
• GRID 2
• Halo 3
• Halo 3 ODST
• Halo 4
• Halo Reach
• MotorStorm
• MotorStorm: Pacific Rift
• MotorStorm: Apocalypse
• Project Gotham Racing 3
• Project Gotham Racing 4
• Split/Second: Velocity
• Wii Play
• Wii Sports
• Wii Sports Resort
• WipEout HD
• Xenoblade Chronicles

It is predictable that these are almost all racing games, it is perhaps defensible that there are no 2D games on the list (do you even Bastion, bro?) but it is indefensible to put Xenoblade Chronicles on this list.

Personally I think that best graphics is a very broad category as to what it means. Uncharted 3 and The Last Of Us looked great and had fantastic animation, some of the late intergeneration games like MGS V and Titanfall were technical marvels, and art design is in the eye of the beholder but games like Journey have aged very well, as have 2D games like Rayman Origins and Hard Corps: Uprising.

It was the longest generation and had a huge number of games so I can't even list all the ones I think looked spectacular. Heck on the Wii Mario Galaxy in HD is still kind of a stunner.

What has not aged well is the original Xenoblade Chronicles.

@bigsocrates: Everything you said about Xenoblade is true, but in it's defense, the world is impressively huge. Amazed they managed to get locations that big working on Wii.

I'd say God of War Ascension is the best looking game on PS3. Gets overlooked because it wasn't as good as 3. Same Could be said about DMC.

Split/Second

Halo 4

Tomb Raider Reboot

Forza Motorsport 4

Killzone 3

Journey

Need for Speed: The Run

Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time

Motorstorm Apocalypse

Skate 2

@judaspete: I played the cleaned up remaster/remake of Xenoblade Chronicles on Switch last year and I've played a bunch of PS3/Xbox 360 games over the past year, including like 20 minutes of Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus literally this morning because I wanted to grab a couple trophies I missed on my playthrough earlier in the week. So I am not going on nostalgia here.

Xenoblade has a lot going for it. It's a technical marvel. It has some really great environments and cut scenes. As a game there's a lot to recommend it, and if you want to argue that it has some of the best art design of the 7th gen then that's a fair argument.

But it's low poly, had a low frame rate on the Wii, blurry textures etc...

The actual best looking Wii games were highly stylized like Okami or Kirby's Epic Yarn.

Meanwhile the actual best looking 7th gen game was probably Grand Theft Auto V. That thing was frickin' magic on that old hardware.

I know it's hard to believe, because the main game looks like it was pressed through an N64 emulator, but the cutscenes in the PS3 version of Shadow of Mordor are pretty much just the PS4 ones. They look unbelievable for that platform.

Other candidates:

Ni No Kuni

Sonic All-stars Racing Transformed

that fucking Wizard of Oz DS game

FVII Crisis Core

3rd Birthday.

So I know GB had just a “best graphics” category in GOTY for much of the last generation so this question isn’t exactly impossible to answer, but I feel like not separating graphics into art and tech kind of makes this a lost cause. Like from a technical standpoint I will second GTA5 as being maybe the most ambitious and successful technical achievement of that generation. The scope and complexity of that open world working on a system like the PS3 which had 256 MB of VRAM is kind of mind blowing. As far as raw rendering chops are concerned, Crysis 3 is the clear winner, with many features that would not be included in most games until the following generation. Then I would probably cite Naughty Dog’s incredible animation blending systems as the highlight of animation that generation (In Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us).

The art side is far more subjective but Journey is definitely a highlight.

Yeah i'll have to give it to Ni no Kuni. While playing, i felt like the art was pretty much spot on, unlike those naruto & DBZ games of the time, where it still felt like they had to compromise the look of the show in their transition to the gaming world. I bet if i boot it up in 20 years i will still think that game looks great.

I'll say:

1. Dragon's Dogma (those nights!!!! to this day few games have managed to make nights look so good)
2. Mirror's Edge (on the opposite end of the spectrum, ME really nails daytime cityscapes with its kinda stylized look)
3. Ace Combat Assault Horizon (I didn't play AC6, as I had a PS3 and that game was 360 exclusive. Say what you will about the mission designs and story of ACAH, but the graphics were often stunning)
4. Journey (the look and movement of the sand in particular, but that game looked stunning all around)
5. Red Faction: Guerrilla (parts of that game definitely aged, and aspects of the environments maybe looked a little dated even at the time, but that physics engine made up for it by just how naturally things crumpled and collapsed)

Honorable mentions: Battlefield 4, The Darkness

Metal Gear Solid 4 looks dope as hell while also being the most 7th gen-ass game in the looks department, so I'm going with that.

Isn't that kind of like saying the CGI cutscenes in FF VII are the best graphics on PS1. Sure, they look good for the system, but they aren't running on that system. It's a video.

@bigsocrates said:

It is predictable that these are almost all racing games, it is perhaps defensible that there are no 2D games on the list (do you even Bastion, bro?) but it is indefensible to put Xenoblade Chronicles on this list.

Personally I think that best graphics is a very broad category as to what it means. Uncharted 3 and The Last Of Us looked great and had fantastic animation, some of the late intergeneration games like MGS V and Titanfall were technical marvels, and art design is in the eye of the beholder but games like Journey have aged very well, as have 2D games like Rayman Origins and Hard Corps: Uprising.

It was the longest generation and had a huge number of games so I can't even list all the ones I think looked spectacular. Heck on the Wii Mario Galaxy in HD is still kind of a stunner.

What has not aged well is the original Xenoblade Chronicles.

To me, original Xenoblade Chronicles' graphics look really good for Wii standards and I've known that it looks even better when being remastered for Nintendo Switch.

Edit: For Uncharted, it's not a bad game in my opinion.

To me, MGS4 should get remastered for next-gen and better be multiplat, because not every Metal Gear fans like PlayStation plus not everyone had a PS3.

@gtxforza: Personally I don't love that idea. MGS4 is such a PS3 game. Those loading screens? That mix of high-poly models with relative low-res textures and minimal shading? Mwah, that's videogames in 2008. The technical limitations of that system are part of the pomp and grandeur of MGS4. I want to watch Snake smoke a cigarette for 10 minutes. Any kind of remaster on more powerful hardware would make that less dumb, and therefore less awesome.

MGS is among my fav game series and more people should easily be able to play the whole thing. People would rather play a game in an non-perfect way than not play it at all. If PS3 owners enjoy it more on the PS3, we still have that version to play.

I do wonder if the inclusion of Snake using the sixaxis controller to control the lil robot in MGS4 is something that holds it back. Sunny also has a PSP in that game and i think there's a blu-ray mention in there as well. Stuff that could easily get taken out for a multiplatform release, but i imagine that's harder to do now Konami has stopped focusing on games outside of PES.

On the other hand, now playstation straight up sells games on Steam, perhaps it doesn't matter if a game shows up with a bunch of playstation hardware in it nowadays.

@gtxforza: For Wii standards it looks...okay in places. The faces are awful and the performance is bad. There are many other Wii games that look better, like Sonic Colors.

Compared to much on the HD systems, though, it just looks horrible.

@onemanarmyy: If Konami wanted to take that stuff out it wouldn't be hard, but even if they didn't they could make a PS4/PS5 version. Konami just doesn't seem to care to do anything with its games anymore, except make absolutely terrible games and those weird mini collections they put out that were actually decent but had kind of an odd game selection.

I don't know why Symphony Of the Night keeps getting re-released but MGS1 hasn't been touched in a long time. I think it's still available for sale on the PS3 store so it's not a rights issue, but it wasn't even in the MGS 2/3 re-release on Xbox.

It's also possible that there was some kind of permanent exclusivity deal with Sony on that game.

@bigsocrates: I see because the Wii's specs aren't as powerful as the PS3 and Xbox 360.

@onemanarmyy: Well it is a good idea for PlayStation's 1st party developers to release their games to PC because not everyone likes console gaming.

You could see it that way, but just like FFVII making puppets of their in-game models to compensate, it still makes their prioritized rendered visuals a cut above any comparable cutscene on that platform at the time. Having played TLOU at the same time, for instance, I'd place Mordor much higher on that scale, since those cutscenes look pretty rough, in comparison.

I dunno, it depends on how you want to be wowed by a game. I didn't mention something like Short Peace, because it wouldn't really convince anyone that, in motion, it's one of the most trippy experiences at the time.

I have a strange relationship with graphics these days because i reaaally don't care anymore, i care more about impressive animation than the quality of a texture or effect, i'll use NieR Automata as an example i remember a lot about the vistas and areas you visit in that game and it's certainly not because of their graphical prowess, it's how i felt when visiting them, another example i've always thought Killzone 2 looked extremely ugly, technically better looking than COD4? I guess so, it won awards, but looking at that game and how it barely chugs along to present its dark and dreary image disturbs me, pushing graphics at the cost of... pretty much everything, ugly game.

I have a big soft spot for Capcom games running on MT Framework, i find looking at those games really appealing be it early games like Dead Rising all the way up to RE6 but i'll pick Devil May Cry 4 as the highlight for me, i love looking at that game.

It might have been here when video games reached their peak for me :P.

@cikame: DMC 4 had some stunning architecture and just fantastic art direction all around. Looks nicer than 5 to me. 5 is more realistic, but I think 4 just looks better.

I'm most likely making this more complicated than needed, but are we asking about how the games looked on those older consoles and PC's at the time and running at the expected frame rates and resolutions, or playing those older games with newer hardware?

I ask because I did buy the PC versions of almost all of the 7th gen games that I used to have on PS3 and 360. I don't remember what they looked like back then on those consoles, other than muddy textures and the general lack of anti-aliasing, but I'm pretty sure that my current PC and monitor significantly enhances their visual quality, in addition to me using ReShade for adding sharpness, film grain, and my preferred color balance. And then there's games with big modding communities like Skyrim. Do I talk about the vanilla visuals of the original game on a 720p TV that I still have, or do I talk about my preferred texture mods and ENB presets for Special Editing on my current 3440 x 1440 IPS monitor?

PCMR has ruined me.

I have a softer spot for games like Transistor, Rayman Legends or Journey... games that have a style in mind and excel at it, instead of games that just look expensive.

If someone wanted to convince me Shovel Knight has better graphics than GTA 4, my answer would be "yeah, that checks out"

I remember the original Gears of War, then near the end Halo 4 as two big standouts in my memory. I also originally played Skyrim on the Xbox 360 and that looked great at the time, although the whole stepping out of the grate into the world in Oblivion was a "wow" moment.