Old Man eyes and Game Generations

This week we were able to see footage of what this generation of video games will bring us on the new consoles with the release of an Unreal Engine 5 demo running on live PlayStation 5 hardware. Before I dig into this topic I want to throw up a disclaimer that nothing I am about to say is meant to discount the hard work or how revolutionary this may be for game developers. It does in fact sound like it is going to reduce the work load significantly allowing them to directly use assets rather than trying to bake them down to usable assets in a game engine. However from a pure visual standpoint, this seems less like a generational leap and more like cranking the settings from High up to Ultra in a video game.

I am wondering if we have gotten to the point where graphics are good enough that any improvements just end up feeling marginal? We reached this point with pixel graphics during the jump from the 16 bit era to the 32 bit era with games like Castlevania Symphony of the Night, not really looking that much better than games you could have seen on the Super Nintendo. Sure you had a much wider palette and could therefore display a wider variety of colors on screen at once. However if you jump between playing SoTN and a game like Dracula X that released for the SNES there isn’t much of a noticeable difference.

We’ve been on this journey with 3D graphics that started out with something as primitive as this, and evolved rapidly over the course of a few generations. We’ve gotten used to each generation being instantly and noticeably better than the previous generation. I am starting off with the Nintendo 64, because while it technically released after the PlayStation it seems like the floor of 3D graphics that were available during this generation. It may be a matter of preference but for me at least games like Vagrant Story showed the PlayStation 1 era to be cable of a superior experience. The Nintendo 64 games felt childish and block, whereas the PlayStation games were capable of conveying rich emotions. Now these could come entirely down to art direction and decisions made by the studios, but for me at least it felt like I was leaping forward a full generation when I moved from the 64 over to my Dual Shock Playstation. When I moved up to the PlayStation 2 the leap was even more noticeable. The textures were smooth and gone was the blocky nature of the characters. Other than the 4:3 aspect ration of most PlayStation 2 era games, I still consider many of these to be completely playable. God of War was one of the better looking games on the system, and since I have some direct comparisons to games on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, I figured I would use this as a reference title.

To be honest, looking at these two screenshots, I would argue that this generational leap at least with this title wasn’t as big. Last of Us after all originally released on the PlayStation 3. However just between these two shots you can see higher fidelity of assets and better lighting. It is hard to tell it in a single image, but the main thing that came with the PlayStation 3 was bigger and more open worlds, whereas the PlayStation 2 mostly focused around more static scenes, you had a sense that you were roaming a living environment.

Now I realize this is a completely different type of game to the previous God of War titles, but it no less highlights something important. For me the leap forward that happened between the Xbox 360/PS3 era to the Xbox One/PS4 era was significant. This was the first time we were capable of playing in what felt to be photo realistic worlds, and the games were completely capable of carrying off that illusion. For years PC games had effectively stagnated due being tied to the 360 and PS3, but this is also the generation that 4K became a major player in gaming and with it a higher level of fidelity than we had experienced before. This generation felt like it was the biggest leap to date, for me personally.

There is no denying that the Unreal Engine Demo footage looks good, but when you compare it directly to an image coming from a game of this generation, I see higher fidelity but not enough to make it clear that we are making a generational jump.

If you compare the above image to a screenshot from Jedi Fallen Order, I am not sure if I could tell they were effectively running on different generations of hardware. I think the challenge there is that we had a half generational jump in the middle of this generation. Notice that this image is from an Xbox One X which is capable of 4K gaming, whereas the base model is still stuck in the 1080p era. I think this generation is going to feel like another incremental bump forward, and not necessarily the radical shift that I was hoping for.

Granted I am cherry picking examples of some of the best looking games from the current generation to use as contrasting evidence, and they are being placed up against a demo reel. However I do feel like it is an important question to ask ourselves as we go into this next generation. If you are already running an Xbox One X or a PlayStation 4 Pro… is this leap worth the $500 to $600 price tag that is going to come with it? For me it likely is because at least on the console front I never took the half leap and am running an original Xbox One and PlayStation 4. So yeah it probably will be a sizeable upgrade, but for those rocking a 4K capable console or PC right now, I am questioning if this is a big enough bump to make it feel worth it?

All of this said… it could just be that I am getting older and that my eyes are not capable of picking out the same level of visual fidelity that they once were. However if I went into this scenario and you threw screenshots of all of these 4k games in with the Unreal Engine footage, I am not sure if I could immediately tell the difference. Granted all of this is ultimately moot because I am mostly a PC gamer, and maybe it is just that I am used to the fidelity of games that can be produced on that platform already with significantly higher performing hardware than the consoles will likely ever have. Ultimately this has left me with a feeling that the games look great, but that ultimately I expected more in some way that I can’t quite quantify. I feel like we have maybe reached the limits to what is visually possible, and everything moving forward is going to be a battle of margins and not the big leaps forward I experienced throughout my gaming career. The post Old Man eyes and Game Generations appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.