What graphical elements do you think will make this gen look dated in the future?

[Lant_War]

As time goes on, graphics age, new stuff comes out that makes the old stuff look super dated and archaic, that's just the way it is. However, games with good graphics never seem graphically dated when they come out, so, without knowing how next gen games look like, what things do you think will the 8th gen of consoles be known for graphically?

For me, the main thing will probably be the "clay" look many characters have while in-game. Horizon Zero Dawn and Red Dead Redemption 2 both suffer from this while playing the game (not during cutscenes, before anyone asks), and with stuff like Ray Tracing coming with the next generation of consoles, it'll only make them look even worse.

So, what do you think?

 

[Bomblord]

IMO this gen and a large chunk of last gen has hit a point that I don't think it'll ever look bad by any objective standard.

 

[ILikeFeet]

reflections and AO. RT reflections and AO are gonna ruin SSR and SSAO

 

[internet rabbit]

probably the overuse of chromatic aberration or reflections only loading in when you look at them a certain way

 

[RCSI]

Certain screen space reflections will look wrong compared to RT reflections.

 

[EarlGreyHot]

I think this gen will age really well actually

 

[Lant_War]

IMO this gen and a large chunk of last gen has hit a point that I don't think it'll ever look bad by any objective standard.

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Biggest problem with last gen imo is the low resolution and muddy textures, plus the overuse of bloom and awful motion blur at the beginning.

 

[skeezx]

whatever this gen's analogue of 7th gen's gray/brown glaze and tacky UI is

one of those things you don't particularly notice until years later

 

[Aesthet1c]

30 FPS. I kind of feel like we're starting to enter a renaissance where 60 is going to be the norm in 5-10 years.

 

[MasterYoshi]

Vegetation and hair.

 

[a Master Ninja]

Lighting is the big one.

Also fairly low LOD settings are very noticeable in most of today's open world games.

 

[rashbeep]

bad ao

 

[PSOreo]

Things used to hide loading screens; like elevators and pushing slowly through tight gaps.

edit: Sorry I missed the word "graphical". I guess there's a lot of blue and silver used in a lot of games and shadows could be better.

 

[Desfrog]

30 FPS. I kind of feel like we're starting to enter a renaissance where 60 is going to be the norm in 5-10 years.

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Nah, ray tracing and developers pushing better world/AI interaction will ensure 30fps is here to stay on consoles.

 

[jelly]

Shimmer, LOD, resolution.

 

[Rotobit]

A few games still have texture pop-in, but not nearly as many as last gen. Jedi Fallen Order is kinda the biggest recent culprit.

Besides that, maybe extremely simple menus that use sans serif fonts? They'll always look stylish but they don't fit every franchise that's had 'em. Also faux-mouse cursors in console games.

 

[dirtyjane]

Dithering, Draw Distance (hopefully) and Shadows will be an outlier, with each generation especially shadows got an huge upgrade.

 

[Haze]

Certain screen space reflections will look wrong compared to RT reflections.

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Yeah after playing control with RTX on PC I can vouch for it being a revelatory experience. It's truly a quantum leap when properly implemented and not just used as marketing.

 

[skeezx]

Also fairly low LOD settings are very noticeable in most of today's open world games.

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pretty sure LOD will always get taxed no matter what

 

[pswii60]

LoD pop in. It's fucking awful on consoles thanks to Jaguar, and affects so many games. MHW is unplayable on consoles because of it as far as I'm concerned.

 

[dodo]

I agree with the OP that a big one is gonna be the difference between "cutscene" and "in-game" models. Obviously that's been a thing in pretty much all games with real-time cutscenes (and will probably continue to be, just with even more granular details and effects) but I'm hopeful that with the bigger overhead of next-gen hardware things like subsurface scattering and other material shading on characters in 3D games will be visible during gameplay more often as we go forward.

 

[Travo]

Hair that looks good and not quite as shiny.

 

[chrisPjelly]

Chromatic abberation and spamming particle effects all over the place

 

[OryxTheBakinKing]

This generation will age well.

I'm playing AC: Unity again on PC after having finished it a few years ago on Xbox and that game is stunning and a really remarkable achievement at 60fps. Same with The Witcher 3.

 

[Deleted member 59519]

The occasional low-res texture here and there that look like they're from PS2 games.

 

[Mahonay]

Hair. Facial animations. LOD.

 

[HeyNay]

Clipping. I can't play a single game without noticing some character's arms traveling through their clothing, or layers of accessories poking out of each other. I still can't understand why this hasn't been solved yet, but I hope next gen is able to do away with it. Looks so bad.

 

[Puffy]

Drinking fluids

 

[Deleted member 13645]

Hair. Facial animations. LOD.

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Facial animation is a big one for me. It looks really strange in a lot of games. Like Horizon Zero Dawn something about the faces is super off to me, despite how gorgeous the rest of the game is. There's a lot of games where it's really stiff or awkward looking. Not as bad as last gen obviously, but I feel like the end of this gen has had some stunners in facial animation between games like Gears, TLoU2, AC Odyssey, etc. that really spoiled me and makes the rest of the generation look all the more weird.

 

[asmith906]

Biggest increase Next Gen will be CPU power. Weak cpu's have severely limited performance this gen

 

[J75]

Any game that was chasing for photo realism but didn't go through a photogrammetry process to scan real people and elements.

Also, not a graphical element per say but i feel every early gen game from 2013-2015 that didn't implement some sort of temporal AA solution is gonna start look dated going foward.

 

[JahIthBer]

Shadows & Reflections, a lot of games have had their shadows toned down for performance issues & it makes the games look flatter, AC post Unity, FFXV, Witcher 3 come to mind.
Just having cloud shadows back alone gives games more "pop" to their lighting.

 

[xXJonoXx]

Chromatic Aberration

 

[Greywaren]

Lighting and reflections, and maybe physics and facial animations.

 

[c0Zm1c]

with stuff like Ray Tracing coming with the next generation of consoles, it'll only make them look even worse.

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Yeah lighting and reflection will probably be the one that will age the worst if ray tracing is to become ubiquitous in future games, with current games beginning to look cruder and less sophisticated in those respects.

 

[AgeEighty]

Hair and faces, especially their animations. Physics and lighting.

 

[McNum]

Chromatic abberation and spamming particle effects all over the place

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That seems about right for me. Especially early this generation with all the sparks flying everywhere. CA, of course, needs to die. But I wouldn't mind it being this generation's effect of shame, like brown filters and bloom were for the last one.

 

[Akela]

Screen space reflections, especially the fringing you see at the edges of the screen and the ghosting artifacts you see for objects in front of the reflective material:

Bit of an extreme example coming from someone's UE4 project, since the effect can be hidden somewhat using cubemaps, but even in AAA games the effect can be noticeable.



Look at this video of the Control - at 0:15 you can see how the SSR reflections fade out and as the camera pans upwards and around the areas at the screen edges, honestly once you pay attention to it, it's probably one of the most immersion breaking issue that faces games today. I can't wait for ray traced reflections to become mainstream since it fixes all of those problems.

Speaking about ray tracing, I think the standard "plasticy" look of games today will probably be another thing that will look dated. PBR texturing helped improve the look of games considerably compared to last gen, but the problem is, the rasterization rendering that games use simply isn't accurate enough to solve the problem completely. Even with high end games such as Death Stranding, there's a slight plasticy look to the way that characters are rendered along with the world as a whole that smudges out much of the detail that exists in those assets and gives those games that distinctive "video gamey" look, that should be improved with more accurate ray traced lighting.

 

[ApeEscaper]

Motion blur. Don't need motion blur when you have 60fps+

 

[Jaded Alyx]

Hopefully we'll see the end of clothing moving like it's part of a character's body. For example, metal armor "breathing" with the character.

 

[Grue]

Facial animation is a big one for me. It looks really strange in a lot of games. Like Horizon Zero Dawn something about the faces is super off to me, despite how gorgeous the rest of the game is.

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Seconded. I'd go so far as to say it doesn't stand up today to be honest.

I turned off the HUD and drank in the landscapes; but man, I got ripped right out of that immersion every time a cutscene kicked in.

To answer the thread question (and perhaps to defend H:ZD a little); I would expect everything about human models to continually improve but remain slightly uncanny valley for a while.

I also agree that improvements in lighting will drastically differentiate future generations from the current one, once we have the chance to look at contemporary games in retrospect. Ray tracing is already doing wonders to some 'low tech' games.

Edit: Cut down when I realised I started talking about non-graphical elements.

 

[Edgar]

Shadows & Reflections, a lot of games have had their shadows toned down for performance issues & it makes the games look flatter, AC post Unity, FFXV, Witcher 3 come to mind.
Just having cloud shadows back alone gives games more "pop" to their lighting.

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Cloud shadows are so cool. I remember AC 1 having that was mind blowing

 

[Reinhard]

The over abundance of chromatic aberration and full screen motion blur, plus film grain. None of that stuff belongs in video games, it just ruins the graphic fidelity and for god's sake, use per object motion blur instead.. And the crazy amount of particle effects some games use.

 

[Birdseeding]

Overly large contrasts between light and dark areas. Some games really crank up that contrast in trying to avoid the washed-out midtones of the previous gen, but it goes way, way over the top the other way a lot of times.

 

[MarineSparks]

Current gen focuses heavily on cinematography. Even going down to emulating aspects of film such as chromatic abberations, lens flare, and motion blur.

 

[Drakhyrr]

The over abundance of chromatic aberration and full screen motion blur, plus film grain. None of that stuff belongs in video games, it just ruins the graphic fidelity and for god's sake, use per object motion blur instead.. And the crazy amount of particle effects some games use.

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The Order 1866 comes to mind. Models, textures and animations were great, but each one of your points was so overdone that the game often looks bad. And good thing it was short, because these things gave me headaches.

 

[Buff Beefbroth]

1080p and lower resolutions, LOD and distance textures.

 

[Jer]

IMO this gen and a large chunk of last gen has hit a point that I don't think it'll ever look bad by any objective standard.

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Yeah, I'm kind of here. I feel like we're in real diminishing returns territory, to the point that late gen PS3 games still look really good today. I doubt 10 years from now the average person is going to think this gen's games look bad, even if there's some technical stuff that's improved.

 

[Traxus]

IMO this gen and a large chunk of last gen has hit a point that I don't think it'll ever look bad by any objective standard.

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You're gonna look back on this post in ten years and laugh. Distinctive art will age better than games going for a flatter photo realistic style though, as has always been the case.

 

[Garlador]

We're getting their with skin and advances in subsurface scattering and facial deformation technology.

Let's see those pore stretch and contrast realistically:

And, yeah, hair remains tricky with limited rendering power.