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[Hide] (299.1KB, 1920x1080) Reverse For me it's the PS3/360/Wii era, even the PS2/GameCube/XBoner was good enough, but it peaked on the next generation.
You could imerse on good visuals, the developers had to use their brains to make something good and the thing I liked the most, no need to login on the game service, just the console login you always had. No need to be fucking online on everything, no live service every day.
Even on a bigger TV, if I boot up my Wii for some to play some stupid shit like Brain Academy or Boom Blox or try better looking games like Okami, Zelda, Smash, it will look fine. If I get my 360 to play some Ace Combat, Need for Speed, Batman, it will not look bad.
Everything had cohesion, the game, characters, the world, the UI... The menus somehow got way worse because people need to over justify UI/UX, every game is looking the same, like they have a mobile mandate to follow.
Graphics were just good enough, more than that we get the creepy uncanny valley like today.
People are mad and talking shit about the lady on the God of War trailer. She doesn't look ugly directly, it's the whole game that make everyone look ugly an weird.
The modern 3D and CG standard looks weird, the whole world is ultra realistic but when it comes to facial expression they are years behind stuff like Half-Life 2.
The lighting and shaders are perfect, but when we get the close on characters faces we get shocked by the sudden lack of detail on their faces or some weird stretched surface that was left to render on some object in a cutscene. It's no use to have raytracing for realism when you bump on a chair and it get knocked 5 feet away.
The motion capture is good but the animation is weird and poorly rigged together. A lot of modern AAA games have hundreds millions of dollars invested and years to make it yet the characters move and act like worse than some weird PS2 game. The AI making enemies walk in circles, basic pathing not working....
The industry is making games look like a bad CGI movie.
And I'm not even pointing that these days objects popping up and stutters are normalized, be console or PC. People act like it's just was always like that but it's not.
Graphics today are working against the game, we are getting less immersion because of the disparity between realities created in the game itself.
Companies choose to focus on big realism slopped together without care than having any art direction and a careful created environment.