/games/ - Games

>>27624
Yeah, its lazy and it sucks. Thats why some of the older games like Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and FEAR look so favorable compared to even some of the newer titles, because they used ambient lighting sparingly if ever and instead used static and dynamic light sources to light levels up and made use of various lighting tricks like chiaroscuro to create mood in their scenes.

>>27626
It’s not even just that it’s the colour choice
Take a look at this frame from fear and compare it to an ordinary screenshot of dying light 2s map, far cry 6, and watch dogs legion. If the UI for fear was disabled this image would look convincing but with the new games they have so many over saturated colours that it looks fake. Maybe this was for stylistic reasons so these games could consistently look good in the future but for me I hold the sentiment that it just makes these games look cartoonish similar to Fortnite

It's a fixed capital vs variable capital thing. It's simply more labor intensive to set up the kind of lighting you want, which imitates the lighting techniques of film crews and tries to carefully select the proper light for each important element. Ambient lighting lets you drop your light sources into the level and let the computer do all the work. It might be more "realistic" but that's not the same as looking good. A lot of people focused on graphics tend to think of video games more as visual simulations than as visual art.

There's a bit from the Lord of the Rings commentary tracks where Elijah Wood talks about a conversation he had with the lighting guy about a particular scene. The scene involves a close-up on Frodo's face as he's facing a wall, with the camera being positioned "inside" the wall. Wood observed that in that position his face should be too dark for the camera to see anything and jokingly asked the lighting guy where the light's coming from. He replied "the same place as the music."