Those quotes are all asides or insubstantial to the point being made. I have nothing to add beyond pointing you back to my previous post. Except perhaps that the points about Detroit and architecture are both directly responding to statements on the video you linked (he mentions Detroit defenders and gets super stuck on using the Bilbao Guggenheim as a proxy for samey architecture as a proxy for game visuals).
Oh, and that I'm not confusing setting and style, I'm saying that you can take the idea of leaning towards a photoreal treatment of light transfer to go along with leaning into performance capture and still have style around that choice. The statement that the retrofuturistic aesthetic of Horizon is somehow "almost identical" to the 80s movie homage of Indiana Jones is baffling. I will keep repeating this until it lands: nobody would argue that Raiders of the Lost Ark looks "almost identical" to... I don't even know anything that looks like Horizon... let's go Conan the Barbarian just because they both point cameras at people. Technique does not dictate style (or what in movies you'd call production design). That is a purely videogame-y hangup from the historical misunderstanding that technology is the main driver for aesthetics. If that ever made sense, it certainly stopped fifteen years ago.
I suppose that's at the core of the meme in the OP. Growing up in an era where going from beautiful pixel art to ugly lo-fi 3D was seen as the natural evolution of game aesthetics and never having figured out to distinguish the tech from the art as separate concepts.
Well, then don't be hyperbolic, let's see where that takes us.
That video is still nonsensical, just eloquently nonsensical. Makes me think he hasn't been to Bilbao, for one thing, but talking about games, not architecture, he caveats the crap out of a tautology just to end up in a tautology: AAA games look like this because a AAA game is a game that looks like this, whatever "like this" means.
For one thing, man, do I wish Detroit had never existed. It's amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage's games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I've never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It's a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don't) while showing clips from, if you're keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology. None of those games look alike in any way that makes sense. Not more than Spider-Man 2, Transformers, A Quiet Place and The Northman look alike. Photographing people as a technique is not an aesthetic, and it certainly isn't an aesthetic limitation. That's like saying that only animation is creative while photography isn't. It's such a disservice to creativity.
But even from a 2020 video, things have moved in the direction he wants, if only because the games industry is unraveling, I suppose. If you peek at game awards in the interim, the games that got most attention in those five years include The Last of Us II, but also Hades, Elden Ring, Balatro, Astro Bot, Animal Crossing, It Takes Two, Baldur's Gate III, Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent batch of first party events there was a genuine splash of discourse about which rendition of fake stop motion looked better between the Louisiana fantasy Wizard of Oz reimagining and the creepy claymation... horror FPS thing? What are we talking about again?
Let me drop the pretense for a moment and make a case for what I think we're talking about: this narrative is part of the problem, if there is a problem. These contrarian takes are being tautological for the sake of affecting elevated taste and elitist insight others lack. The truth is games look all sorts of ways and explore wildly different art styles, scopes and concepts. But the discourse is antagonistic and narrow. People latch on to games not to praise them and explore them but to complain and wear them down, and so gaming gets reduced to whatever we don't like, with whatever we do like being passed as a secret hidden gem or an outlier even when it's wildly popular. It's why there's more discourse about Concord, which is a game that looked bad, wasn't great and nobody played, than about Marvel Rivals, which is a game that is just as expensive but looks bright and colorful and cartoony and is extremely popular. In the games industry people sometimes refer to that look as a "mainstream look", because so many popular games look like that. It's the look of Fortnite and The Sims and World of Warcraft and Team Fortress, and it's gradually going more anime as mainstream games pivot to Asia, becoming the look of Genshin Impact, and Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Rivals.
This is a talking point people like to drop to feel fancy and elevated that implies that we're somehow still living in an industry circa 2008 when home console single player action adventure games dominated the sales charts and smaller games were a dying breed barely kept alive by a group of plucky indies. For better and worse, we haven't lived in that world for a while. If anything, I miss the mid 2000s AAA approach to gaming. Nobody is doing it outside of Sony and a couple weirdos like Sam Lake, and it was a comforting, creative, interesting approach that has unfortunately run out of runway while presumptuous commentators keep beating a dead horse because either they didn't get the memo or because it's perhaps too depressing to look at the real state of the industry.
Did I drop the Socratic pretense too hard? Got too real? We can go back to pretending we don't know what we're talking about if that makes everybody feel better.
I don't understand what you're saying. Or, I do, but if I do, then you don't.
I think you're mixing up technique with style, in fact. And really confusing a rendering technique with an aesthetic. But beyond that, you're ignoring so many games. So many. Just last year, how do you look at Balatro and Penny's Big Breakaway and Indiana Jones and go "ah, yes, games all look the same now". The list of GOTY nominees in the TGAs was Astro Bot, Balatro, Wukong, Metaphor, Elden Ring and Final Fantasy VII R. How do you look at that list of games and go "ah, yes, same old, same old".
Whenever I see takes like these I can't help but think that people who like to talk about games don't play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming. Because man, there's so much stuff and it goes from grungy, chunky pixel art to lofi PS1-era jank to pitch-perfect anime cel shading to naturalistic light simulation. If you're out there thinking games look samey you have more of a need to switch genres than devs to switch approach, I think.
Look, don't take it personally, but I disagree as hard as humanly possible.
Claiming that realism "makes every game look the same" is a shocking statement, and I don't think you mean it like it sounds. That's like saying that every movie looks the same because they all use photographing people as a core technique.
If anything, I don't know what "realism" is supposed to mean. What is more realistic? Yakuza because it does these harsh, photo-based textures meant to highlight all the pores or, say, a Pixar movie where everything is built on this insanely accurate light transfer, path traced simulation?
At any rate, the idea that taking photorealism as a target means you give up on aesthetics or artistic intent is baffling. That's not even a little bit how it works.
On the other point, I think you're blending technical limitations with intent in ways that are a bit fallacious. SotC is stylized, for sure, in that... well, there are kaijus running around and you sometimes get teleported by black tendrils back to your sleeping beauty girlfirend.
But is it aiming at photorealism? Hell yeah. That approach to faking dynamic range, the deliberate crushing of exteriors from interiors, the way the sky gets treated, the outright visible air adding spacing and scale when you look at the colossi from a distance, the desaturated take on natural spaces... That game is meant to look like it was shot by a camera all the way. They worked SO hard to make a PS2 look like it has aperture and grain and a piece of celluloid capturing light. Harder than the newer remake, arguably.
Some of that applies to GoW, too, except they are trying to make things look like Jason and the Argonauts more than Saving Private Ryan. But still, the references are filmic.
I guess we're back to the problem of establishing what people mean by "realism" and how it makes no sense. In what world does Cyberpunk look similar to Indiana Jones or Wukong? It just has no real meaning as a statement.
Hell, no. 120 fps wasn't even a thing. That flash in the pan moment was when 1080p60 was the PC standard and 720p30 the console standard and the way the hardware worked you could hit max specs on a decent PC every time. It lasted like three or four years and it was wonderful.
By the point we started going above the NTSC spec on displays the race was lost. The 20 series came out, people started getting uppity about framerate while playing some 20 year old game and it all went to crap on the PC front.
As for AA, I don't think you remember FXAA well, or at least in relation to what we have. ML upscaling is so much sharper than any tech we had a couple of gens ago, short of MSAA (and frankly even MSAA). The problems that have become familiar in many UE5 games are not intrinsic to the tech, they have a lot to do with what the engine does out of the box and just how out of spec some of the feature work is.
I feel like people have gotten stuck with some memes (no motion blur! DLSS bad! TAA bad!) that are mostly nostalgic of how sharp 1080p used to look compared to garbage-tier sub 720p, sub 30 fps console games. It's getting to the point where I have so many major gripes with a lot of modern games but I feel it becomes one of those conversations you can't have in public because it gets derailed immediately.
In any case I think we can at least agree that it's been an awkward couple of generations of PC hardware and software for whatever reason and GPUs, engines and displays need to get realigned in a way where people can just fire up games and expect them to look and run as designed.
I agree that it's a meme comparison anyway. I just found it pertinent to call out that remasters have been around for a long time.
I don't know that I agree on the rest. I don't think I'm aware of a lazy game developer. That's a pretty rare breed. TAA isn't a bad thing (how quickly we forget the era when FXAA vaseline smearing was considered valid antialiasing for 720p games) and sue me, but I do like good visuals.
I do believe we are in a very weird quagmire of a transitional period, where we're using what is effectively now a VFX suite to make games that aren't meant to run in real time on most of the hardware being used to run them and that are simultaneously too expensive and large and aiming at waaay too many hardware configs. It's a mess out there and it'll continue to be a mess, because the days of a 1080Ti being a "set to Ultra and forget it" deal were officially over the moment we decided we were going to sell people 4K monitors running at 240Hz and also games made for real time raytracing.
It's not the only time we've been in a weird interaction of GPUs and software (hey, remember when every GPU had its own incompatible graphics API? I do), but it's up there.
Well, yeah, but again, that's not new, and it's something every game has to do, better or worse.
I'm aging myself here, but if you must know, the time that stands out most to me in the "graphics over gameplay" debate is actually... 8 bit micros, weirdly.
There was a time where people mostly just looked at how much of a screen a character filled, or whether the backgrounds scrolled and just bought that, while a subset of the userbase and press was pleading to them to pay at least some consideration to whether the game... you know, could be played at all.
But hey, I'll split the difference. Instead of SMB 1, which was a launch game and literally wasn't running on the same hardware (because mappers), we can do Mario 3 instead.
Or, hear me out, let's not do a remaster at all for current gen leaps. Here's a PS4 vs PS5 sequel one.
It doesn't work as well, though, since taking the absolutely ridiculous shift from 2D to 3D, which has happened once and only once in all of gaming history, is a bit of a cheat anyway.
Oh, and for the record, and I can't believe I'm saying this only now, LttP looks a LOT better than OoT. Not even close.
Nothing was going harder for visuals, so by default that's what was happening. They were pushing visuals as hard as they would go with the tech that they had.
The big change isn't that they balanced visuals and gameplay. If anything the big change is that visuals were capped by performance rather than budget (well, short of offline CG cutscenes and VO, I suppose).
If anything they were pushing visuals harder than now. There is no way you'd see a pixel art deck building game on GOTY lists in 2005, it was all AAA as far as the eye could see. We pay less attention to technological escalation now, by some margin.
Absolutely they went for realism. That was the absolute peak of graphics tech in 2004, are you kidding me? I gawked at the fur in Shadow of the Colossus, GTA was insane for detail and size for an open world at the time. Resi 4 was one of the best looking games that gen and when the 360 came out later that year it absolutely was the "last gen still looked good" game people pointed at.
I only went for that year because I wanted the round number, but before that Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and that was such a ridiculous step up in lighting tech I didn't believe it was real time when the first screenshots came out. It still looks great, it still plays... well, like Silent Hill, and it's still a fantastic game I can get back into, even with the modern remake in place.
This isn't a zero sum game. You don't trade gameplay or artistry for rendering features or photorealism. Those happen in parallel.
Really? Cause I don't know, I can play Shadow of the Colossus, Resident Evil 4, Metal Gear Solid 3, Ninja Gaiden Black, God of War, Burnout Revenge and GTA San Andreas just fine.
And yes, those are all 20 years ago. You are now dead and I made it happen.
As a side note, man, 2005 was a YEAR in gaming. That list gives 1998 a run for its money.