/vr/ - Retro Games

The modern game industry decided to chase photorealism, and it's been an absolute cancer. Mindlessly copying reality leads to soulless art. Pic related is a good example; it's a pencil drawing that realistically copies a photograph as faithfully as possible. While we may admire the technical skill, it ultimately does nothing except imitate. We recognize that the best artists aren't the ones who can imitate reality the closest.

With early game graphics, imitating reality was impossible. Artists were forced to interpret around limitations, and the results ended up being quite memorable.

Nowdays, games have the perverse obsession with making everything look realistic, regardless of everything else. The concrete has shaders that let it perfectly model the fresnel based on the angle of incidence, the ceiling lights have their global illumination simulate bouncing light, and there's perfectly simulated volumetric scattering everywhere. Despite all that, the fundamental artistic job of having something interesting to look at in somewhere interesting to be never gets done. You just get stuck in some grey concrete island or mathematically generated vegetated area that's indistinguishable from any other game out there.