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Yeah. It belongs in the same realm as Red Dead Redemption 2 where it's just hard to see how it can really look much better. The game looks near perfect.
I had the thought a while ago about how all of the well made games of the last +-10 years are probably going to hold up indefinitely. They look pretty much like real life, and I don't think 100% realism should really be the goal in visuals because having more of an "art style" that everything's in is better and makes it more cohesive. Kinda like how Minecraft looks better than some games that try to look "real".
The game was literally broken and unplayable for a month on new hardware (gtx 970) when I bought it. The response was atrocious too. Promised communications went undelivered on their forums and after a month, when it finally became playable, they offered a couple of skins as recompense.
That game is one of the absolute worst examples you could use as competent developers.
I was going to say I played it at launch on a new 970 and didn't have any issues. But then I remembered I got witcher 3 and Arkham Knight for free with the GPU and probably spent 3 months playing witcher before I started Arkham 😂
Yeah, they'd patched it by then. I remember getting a second game for free from Newegg as an apology because Arkham Knight was essentially unplayable on my graphics card at launch, even though it came with my graphics card!
I love this because I realize the people making these DUMBASS posts are a bunch of teenager that would have been too young to play Arkham Knight on release and know how much the game was hated, just like Wolverine if not more
The game was only hated because the PC port was broken. Which was then fixed. And the game still ran well on PS4 gen of consoles. So their point still stands. It was way ahead of its time.
But the Wolverine game runs great on ps5 too. I had no issues in my gameplay.
With Arkham Knight people had complaints about gameplay ( how so many missions required the batmobile to the point it felt shoehorned ) and certain story beats like the Arkham Knight being Jason Todd but swearing to us he would be a brand new character. For the record I loved AK but I remember seeing online how people were trashing the game
Ok but we're talking about Arkham Knight graphics, I don't see your point
edit: graphics and the fact that it ran so well back then despite looking so good, WITH the exception of the PC port, which they needed to fix, but works well now
I started playing Gears of War E Day's campaign last night and thought wow I haven't seen a world this phenomal looking since Arkham Knight. One of those games you just stop and look at random things because they look so good.
It's a bit of a shame that it only ever goes viral to dunk on modern AAA graphics though, because it was genuinely a ton of fun to play (outside of the goofy-ass Riddler Batmobile missions). Still one of the best superhero games ever, I think only Arkham City beats it.
Arkham Knight is one of those games where the art direction does half the work.
The rain, lighting, reflections and constant darkness make Gotham look incredible, but it’s also impressive how well the character models and animations have held up after 11 years. A lot of newer games technically look better, but don’t have the same visual identity.
It's not like 11 years ago we didnt have animators, lighters, riggers and power computers. It really depends on deadlines, budget and the rendering engine used and like you said art direction. Its not the advancement in technology so much at this point.
There's several reasons, but a big one is just the current development process.
As I've seen somebody else put it, when you release a game you get two things: a released game and a team that is able to release a game. Unfortunately, many studios and publishers don't really value that second one all that much.
So, you get layoffs, churn-and-burn, budgets for retaining employees lower than hiring new employees, and just generally treating anybody who isn't a director as if they're a replaceable cog (and sometimes not even the director is spared). When I worked in the game industry, it always killed me to watch somebody who we had trained up from a junior to a senior walk out that door because management wasn't willing to put in the work to keep them. All that time and experience just wasted (to say nothing about the overall affect on the remaining team).
AAA in North America is basically the worst about it, too. So, whether a team at a AAA studio is able to release a good game is basically down to luck. Did you just so happen to luck into hiring enough of the right people, dodge losing the wrong people, and not get hit by the publisher wanting to do a major pivot at the last moment to chase a trend? Congrats! You've released a good game. Prepare to be laid off or forced to work on a game the studio has no experience regardless.
something about how they render hair or faces or post processing is so similar. i can't quite pin it down. i have my gripes with e33 and its art direction but i definitely see where you're coming from
From my eye judging based on appearances it looks like both use old skin and hair tech but pushed to the extreme. A lot of modern games starting with the PS4 and XbOne era implemented newer features like subsurface scattering (light underneath skin) and other techniques that are cutting edge that run in real time (an early example I can think of is Uncharted 4 I think). The thing about things running in real time Vs baked details is that real time effects are currently noisy and fizzly because they are approximated in the same way our eyes have "garbage" data which the GPU (or our brain in our eyes' case) denoises but still results in artefacts. Older baked details don't have this noise and you can compare games like the new Onimusha game which uses old techniques against even games like Resident Evil Requiem which pushes newer tech and see the difference in image noisiness for more "accurate" details.
Like, even E33 isn't completely safe from noisiness because UE5 uses TSR which introduces some noise with particles and camera blocking.
E33 have a lot of noise, specially on hair and shadows. Also the mansion is a noisy mess, with the reflections going crazy all over the place (with very high settings)
The thing is that Arkham Knight ha such a strong visual artstyle that it still stands out looking better. Even with more recent games having technically more impressive visuals (textures for example) they still just do not look as good and lifelike. Because Arkham Knight has such an established and strong look it makes the world more immersive which makes the actual characters more believable and lifelike as well.
Each zone having its own strong visual identity as well, is fantastic
I was 50/50 on the game right up until the Flying Waters, that single area blew me away.
With the context of how the world came about, as the product of a child's imagination making a fantasy world to go on adventures with his stuffed toy and dog the paint, musical instruments everywhere, nonsense geography, and the steampunk/fantasy adjacent vibes are exquisite environmental story telling and just a phenomenally strong design language
Its much MUCH easier to make a game look gorgeous when its mostly linear with limited animation work in and out of combat. Arkham knight is several orders of magnitude more complex
okay…Cyberpunk 2077, TLOU2, RDR2, Horizon, Dead Space Remake. There is no way you’re about to sit here and say games made in previous years weren’t gorgeous
We had the technology to make bread as healthy and tasty as possible for hundreds of years, yet shitty toast "bread" sells in volume. Why would games be different?
Also Arkham Knight on release was such a technical dumpster fire, it was pulled from stores, refunded and then had a re-launch.
I think the main problem with new graphics is that they want to "show off" while older games tried to hide blurry/bad graphics with atmosphere and style.
This is something I’ve noticed. There’s no style anymore. It tries so hard to look realistic, that it forgets to actually look cool. Even games from the PS3/360 I personally feel look better. Not because of the graphics, but the style~ that they had:
Like sure. Wolverine technically looks better than Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. But there isn’t any flavor or edge to it! It’s so basic and boring for what should’ve been a badass set piece!
I clicked the link before reading the end of the comment and saw, "Oh, that's MGS RISING and some thing with a giant robot dude."
I didn't even see Wolverine until I read on.
I 100% agree, the uniqueness and creativity is being lost in the pursuit of realism.
This is the origin of the silent Hill 1 fog. To prevent the player from seeing a limited render distance and unrendered scenery they added fog and it also had the added effect of adding spooky ambiance which is why 1 and 2 are loved and as graphics evolved they kinda just stopped using the fog
In this case I think its just that the existing IP doesn't lend itself well to a AAA game. Wolverine just an invincible guy who cut people with his claws. That doesn't present many cinematic opportunities other than him cutting stuff with his claws.
B:AK had dedicated team of developers, meanwhile nowadays most of studios working on UE5 projects is employing contracting people for 12-18 months at a time to avoid paying raises and bonuses
That, and that executives got greedier than ever, they want game released, and they want it now, no matter how many shortcuts devs will take
We have really good games on UE5, Satisfactory, Split Fiction, The Finals, Hellblade II, Everspace 2... It's mostly AAA slop that uses too many of ready solutions from UE5
It was originally on UE4 but they upgraded the engine from 4 to 5 during development eventually ( this was back in 2023 iirc ) which in and off itself is a huge development task. I think they've done a pretty damn good job in terms of optimization with it too - ran almost flawlessly when I did a run last year. I was pretty happy with the end result.
The Coalition really cooked with Gears E-Day. I think it looks amazing on UE5, but they have some optimization to do. I’m calling it: Gears E-Day 2 will be the BAK of UE5
Early xbox one and ps4 era games had so much visual sauce: arkham knight, assassins creed unity, dead rising 3, the witcher 3, infamous second son, Star Wars Battlefront, mgsv, the order 1886, all master classes in art direction mixed with realism
Infamous and MGSV get slept on outside of their own communties when ut comes to just how good they looked for the time. Infamous after its ps4 pro upgrade STILL looks AAA, and MGSV while showing its age now can run on most mobile phones through things like gamenative. Mgsv as a PHONE game is subsequently making it impressive all over again
Not a completly fair comparison but as I said on other posts before. Would wolverine also playing at night with rain, it would automatically look more realistic. Put batman in a well lit room and it would instantly look worse. It is a weird effect that virtual stuff at night and rain looks more realistic for us.
This is correct. It's the rain, and the devs have even said that. The rain and lighting setting allowed for them to really make the game look better than most games at the time, and even stand up to now. Don't get me wrong, they had some incredible rain graphics, but, once you figure that out, it really adds to the realism. If you take out the rain, it doesn't look nearly as good (still good, Arkham Knight is an incredible game.)
Also, Batman's suit is less fabric and more armor. That is much easier to look realistic than fabric. I would say fabric textures have come a LONG way in the last 10 years. Wolverine's suit is more fabric-y with very detailed textures.
It's weird seeing how lifelike Batman is still. Wolverine is so much newer, they even used a real actor for it, and yet a lot of times you see him looking stiff and lifeless. I never had that thought in any of the Arkham games tbh
to be fair suicide squad does look really good from the little I remember from it. I remember their faces looking really really good. Unlike Wolverine...
thinking about this makes me feel bad in real life. it's like finding out a good friend has been talking about you behind your back. makes you long for the days when they were "good" but now you've been betrayed by something you thought would always be there for you
I think I read somewhere that Rocksteady heavily modified UE3 to do things it wasn't originally designed to do. Probably why it didn't look like any other UE3 game and looks better than some newer UE games?
This idea that UE games all look the same is nuts. UE games that use the basic shit with no art direction all look the same. There is nothing inherent in UE that causes games to look a particular way anymore than any other engine... Except maybe for the ease of use in getting things going which causes lazy developers to stop at that point and consider it "good enough" because they want to create a product instead of art.
baked lighting ROLES !! i know it takes a long time for devolpers to implement in game compared to the new tech which make it so so easier to implement lighting and shadows, however baked lighting looks so good compared to raytracing and for a fraction of the performance impact.
Isn’t Wolverine like all in game cutscenes too? Arkham games always looks great but they also had specific cut scenes between loadings at times whereas Wolverine is all rendered in game
Don't think using an alternate costume for Wolverine is fair for the comparison. But these scenes are completely different in terms of composition. One is in a bright office and the other is drenched in rain and shadow. Wolverine still looks amazing, just not in this scene
older games used to have baked in details "shadows, lights, etc" and it made games run smoother
now most of those details are running real time calculations even for static scenes that doesn't have Day and night cycles putting more stress and work on the GPU and CPU.
baking details takes a lot of time and many games released lately are "done" very close to the release date.
that's why there's tons of issues that get fixed years after release.
correct, also "realism" is often boring and flat.
you can look at puddles reflections and get wow'd but eventually will just overlook it
actual art direction with handcrafted lights, shadows and ambient light mood, fog, etc age well but also look way way better
but unfortunately it takes a lot of time and skill "which is rarely retained due to constant layoffs"
I feel like everyone’s so infatuated with lighting and volume metric effects. They certainly make things look better but not that much better. I’d rather have crystal clean visuals and frame rates and be able to see what is actually going on on screen.
Because graphics have basically peaked and much more goes into uncanny valley so the depth remains similar but breadth and environmental physics have gone up as well as fov, for example arkham knight and city were chosen to be in specific weather conditions for the vibe and to be less straining on systems by limiting depth of field for rendering while games with similar scale are now more often in sunnier and less inclement weather is utilized for depth of field, another thing that has cut down for this reason is fog.
Arkham is stylistically better but this post really shows off the insane level of fidelity possible with today’s engines. Wolverine looks fantastic if all you see is this clip.
I know it’s popular to hate on Wolverine right now, but you just can’t compare these scenes. One is at night in the rain while the other is indoors with harsh direct overhead lighting. Obviously the former is going to look better.
the thing here isn't about better or worse graphics, it mainly comes down to the lighting and how the lighting interacts with the texture of the costume. It also doesn't help that this isn't the default costume Wolverine is meant to be wearing in this cutscene, it's the one from DP 3 (but ofc yeah every suit should look good but just something to be pointed out). Another thing is there these are 2 completely different tones and artstyles being compared here as well. Also, I feel like this isn't an example of Wolverine looking bad at all (it doesn't), it's more that Rocksteady performed some kind of black magic with Arkham Knight, making it one of the most gorgoeus games of all time that's really stood the test of those 11 years.
I love the Arkham games and especially Arkham Knight still looks fantastic. But this is no reason dragging other games down. Wolverine was target of a completely overdone hate campaign with misinformation on every corner. The game has its problems but presentation & graphics are definitly not one of them.
Every clip I've seen of Wolverine just looks sauceless. It looks like that Avengers game that came out a while ago, and that isn't a compliment. I swear, game devs have decided that photorealism is the only way to make AAA games, but realism and insane textures don't mean shit if your game is boring to look at.
Art direction matters far more. Valheim manages to be beautiful a lot of the time and... I mean, look at it. Photorealism isn't the reason. (It's probably 80% great lighting)
It’s “easier” because instead of having an art director make decisions, you just tell all your artists to follow a single playbook of making everything to a standard.
I think the “gamers want good graphics” concept got stuck in gaming executives heads hard. People really cared about their ps2 looking insanely better than their ps1. People stood in line and talked about it. But how many people who were in line for the ps5 were talking about the same thing? Certainly not to the same degree.
People look at indie games and say they have great graphics but they actually just have an art style.
Isn’t it about the bites? The human eye can only process so many bites but the jump between the generations in terms of graphics was so big between say the ps1 and the ps4 that the ps5 doesn’t show the same progress.
I would say that it’s more about the scale of games than the graphics anymore. It used to be more apparent, halo ce and halo 2 is one example of the graphics improving drastically in a period of time but the difference between newer games in the same series than the graphics haven’t improved THAT much.
I think its just the poor art direction and mediocre lightning. I can play arkham knight at 1080p 30 fps with blurry visuals (ps4 version) and it would still be more visually interesting than Wolverine
Sure but it’s also makes sense that a dark game as Arkham easily hides some obvious mistakes which a game like Wolverine cannot. I’m not defending Wolverine but a dark color pallet is easier to work with.
That's exactly what great art direction is supposed to do, is overcome the "cannot"
You can't just wave your hand and say, "well it makes sense in Batman because it's rainy and gloomy" — a good art director will create the best, most sensible conditions for the most impactful presentation possible.
to me it is, by far. and it's the most "Feature complete" and the best open world superhero game ever made. if youre not into open world stuff, then I can understand why it's not the best.
City is definitely better. Knight looks absolutely incredible to this day, but it loses points for the batmobile sections (which unfortunately occupy a lot of the game) and the lackluster plot.
If your point is that Arkham Knight looks better from a technical standpoint, it doesn't . You just like the artistic direction of that scene better than the one you selected for Wolverine
I'm so tired of seeing this game on my front page in every subreddit I'm a part of. Why is "haha I hate this one thing so much!" an actual personality?
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