It is the fundamental problem with anything with “realistic” “raster” lighting. Visually you want it to look like what a city street actually looks like. Lamp post there with a nice bright bulb in it. But the actual lighting needs to look like it was filmed on a sound stage with a blue filter because THAT is “realistic”. So you have a lot of lighting trickery and so forth. The texture of the light source/bulb might be super bright but it is actually three invisible light sources that project the light that was baked into that scene.
When you switch that over to RTX? Maybe you hand tweak it so you actually get light from that street light. And, as anyone who has actually walked around a city at night can tell you, that shit is bright as hell… which makes all the areas where a street light isn’t REALLY dark and kind of creepy. Or maybe it is the phantom light sources that made things look nice that now make things look wrong.
We ran into this a lot at the start of the RT generation. Some parts of Control looked AMAZING and other parts look like… an office building. Some parts of Cyberpunk 2077 looked gorgeous and straight out of a Nicolas Refn film and others looked shiny and splotchy.
And its why one of the best demonstrations of ray tracing is… still kind of Quake 2. Because that is a game that was designed around the concepts behind ray tracing (dynamic lighting from real light sources) but also looks alien enough that our brains won’t say “That cave full of aliens looks wrong”
Its why I am so excited that the new DOOM is going to require Ray Tracing. That is gonna REALLY suck since I am “Team AMD” but it also means that level designers will be targeting one lighting scheme and can design around that.
I’ve been saying for some time that the biggest reason ray tracing looks lackluster is because it’s being held back by games needing to support rasterization. We’ve mastered rasterization which means any scene you can rasterize will look almost identical to a ray traced scene. And you don’t see scenes where ray tracing would blow your mind because those scenes most likely can’t be rasterized, which means they don’t added to the game. So for the end user ray tracing looks kinda meh because you don’t really get any significant benefits and the marginal differences between ray traced and rasterized scenes are not worth the performance cost.
It’s like having a 3D engine but you can only use it for 2D games.
you perfectly nailed the reason i don’t even use rtx. the side by sides just arent good enough, in the actual games. I can’t justify the additional performance hit when i literally cannot tell the difference in reflections when swapping between the two on a real gameplay setting. sure it looks different, but better? more often than not, no. obviously this all varies in degree game to game depending how it was designed. Hogwarts Legacy rtx DID look better, but it wasnt enough to justify it. the baked scenes were great looking too.
I’d say mid too about Outer Worlds, but the first half is above average IMHO. It’s the second half which felt half baked and lowered my appreciation.
I’d prefer some developers set their mind on a good/great 20h experience if they don’t have the budget for more, instead of trying to align themselves with the big players.
I didn’t get that far to be honest, the first world felt so by the numbers that I just kinda never picked it back up and looked up the rest of the story online.
I can’t say I missed much and my expectations for the next one are about as low as they can get at this point.
Loved the trailer, even though the first game was “only” a 7/10 for me. Regardless looking forward to this, Obsidian is making great games consistently.
If the main menu music will be only half as good as the original Im sold :D
Obsidian has always cranked out a banger when they’re making the second game, so I expect this one to be better than the last due to Obsidian’s excellent track record of making the second game in a series. The first one was only mid because it would have made making a sequel that’s better much harder. ^/s^
(I love how even they recognize this in the trailer for the game lol)
I know nothing about game development, so feel free to reference back to that. If the player is controlling an actual toddler in this game, rather than a 2ft tall Ethan Winters, have you considered trying to alter the camera and movement controls so they are more wobbly/unsteady? The most jarring observation I had from the trailer was "No toddler on the planet moves that purposefully.
Otherwise I think you have a fantastic spooky atmosphere and I think the idea of playing a helpless child really lends itself to the horror genre in a powerful way.
Do you think you could expand on what the gameplay is actually like?
Typically you don’t want to move the camera around too much without the player’s input because it can easily induce motion sickness or simulator sickness. If you ever played the 1.0 release of Layers of Fear then you might understand, the main character’s drunken hobble moved the camera very significantly which I believe was later patched to be less or tunable in the options menu. But doing this to player movement should be fine.
I trust Valve to be lazy and swim in their sea of profits rather than go searching for more.
They have thus far avoided serious levels of enshittification because they don’t seem motivated in maximising immediate profits and killing their golden goose.
The day they get replaced by a competitive non-monopoly is the day it becomes a race for the bottom, who can invent the most predatory way to drain profits from users? Nobody else will be able to compete, so they’ll all be copying each other on their way down.
They could give backers free DLC codes - pretty sure that’s what the Hollow Knight devs did for their backers. Heck, I’m pretty sure everyone who backed the HK Kickstarter is getting the sequel for free too because Silksong was originally pitched as stretch goal DLC for the first game.
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