> For racing games or flight simulators or such it is less of a problem,

Cars are also easier to make photorealistic. Less uncanny valley effect, lots of flat shiny surfaces.

What absolutely breaks immersion for me in most AAA car games is the absolute lack of crash, scratch, and dirt mechanics. Cars racing around the track for 2 hours don’t look like showroom pieces! Make ‘em dirty darn it. And when I crash into a wall …

I’m really excited to try Wreckfest 2 when I get around to it. Arcade-ish driving, not super photorealistic, they put it all on realistic soft body collision physics instead.

I think it's like porn. Not sure about you guys, but for me soft-core always looks better than HD hardcore. Soft-core encourages imagination and conveniently covers any body part that is a bit far from perfect.

And that's why I always think ladies who wear just enough clothes are way more sexy than nude ladies.

Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone.

This is true in Wukong too, which is otherwise a very good-looking game. There are various points where rocks and scaffolds look just as climbable as those in the game area, yet the game engine places an invisible wall in your way. It breaks immersion instantly.

I find this an interesting argument. I wonder if it's a generational thing.

If we define immersion as "your vision focuses on what's inside the screen and you ignore the world around the screen, and you mostly ignore that your control of the player character is through a keyboard and mouse", then I've experienced immersion with every first person game ever, including Minecraft. I never considered that some people might need photorealism for that at all. There was another commenter that mentioned being unable to walk over a short wall due to character controller limitations as being immersion-breaking. I agree this is annoying but the qualia of it is more like a physical confusion rather than being something that actually breaks my experience of the game.

I'm also thinking this might be related to why I find VR to be, while very cool, not some revolutionary new technology that will fundamentally change the world.

I’d argue that immersion has little to do with graphics, even for FPS. Actually I had more immersion in some text adventure games than in some AAA games — and not out of nostalgia because I never played the said text adventure games before.

I’d agree that certain degree of graphics helps with immersion, but photorealistic graphics only offers cheap immersion which turns off the immersion centre in the brain — Ok this is just my babble so 100% guess.

I bought cyberpunk when it released, i may have even pre-ordered, i don't remember. I played about 20 minutes after the title drop, you know the one. It was buggy, and didn't really look that good to me, on my samsung 4k monitor.

I then played it again, on the same monitor, last year, and i was pleased with the gameplay, but again, i didn't find anything that remarkable about the overall graphics. the fidelity was great, especially at distance, due to 4k.

I'm 50 hours deep in literally as i type this (about to launch the game), and this time, this time it is completely different. I have an LG 2k HDR screen with "Smart HDR" and i finally - finally - get it. Your eyes have to adjust just like in real life, to go from dark indoors to bright outdoors. you can see tail-lights and headlights in the mountains of NPCs driving around. lasers sweeping you are menacing.

Even fallout 4, which is the first game i played in 4k 10 years ago, looks easily 10 times better in HDR. And i only have the "vanilla+" mod set, 5GB of mods, not the 105GB modset.

I coined the phrase 4 or 5 years ago, that HDR stood for: Hot Damn, Reds! and really, reds are still my least favorite part, they burn to deeply, but from watching several movies on an HDR 4k TV and being real unimpressed, to just these two games, my entire viewpoint has drastically changed.

I didn't know you could put arbitrary people into photo mode in CP2077, and also pose them and move them around, so i was just entering photo mode as best i could and lighting and fiddling with the curves; however, these all took over 4 seconds to "render" to the final image, which i found interesting: https://imgur.com/a/DTesuhF

You're not alone, Cyberpunk's blend of near-future with realism whilst maintaining a clear art style that is not total realism is very immersive. I have spent countless hours wandering around Night City, not even playing the main gameplay.

There's something about the image quality of Cyberpunk that looks off to me, and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe the hair rendering? Shadowing?

It's clearly going for photo realism, but it somehow looks worse to me than older, lower-fidelity games.

Out of curiosity do you not get immersed in books?

> We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion.

This is a blanket statement I would disagree with.

> Many people, like me, feel like they are inside the game world, rather than playing a game with a TV/monitor in front of them

I can't disagree with a statement about personal preference.

So which is it?

I totally agree with your last paragraph except to add: there has actually been some great advances in interaction, but people vote with their playtime, and I think the reality is that the "median gamer" is totally content with WASD + mouse/the typical controller thumbstick movement. In the same way that so many are content that many game mechanics boil down to combat and health bars.

I am personally not content with that and I explore all I can, and am trying to make games that skirt the trends a little bit.

But that stark contrast between visual fidelity but a lack of interactivity has been a pet peeve of mine for a while. You can even do so much more with just mouse and keyboard interactions, but I think it's overshadowed by the much lower risk visual fidelity goals.

I think chasing photorealism also hurts the modding community, which hurts the players. No ordinary modding community could push out photorealistic contents in a realistic span of time. I think that's why we are seeing less and less mods nowadays comparing to the late 90s and early 2000s.

For FPS, HL2/Doom3 is probably the last generation that enjoys a huge modding community. Anything above it pushes ordinary modders away. I believe it is still quite possible to make mods for say UE4, but it just took such a long time that the projects never got finished.

In certain way, I so much wish the graphics froze by the year 2005.

Let's see how GTA VI will change this and the industry.

I personally like Cyberpunk's 2077 style, it looks great maxed out with HDR. Yes, the models aren't the best, but the overall look/vibe is spectacular at times.

> In Cyberpunk, you still have to wait around in elevators, which seem like diegetic loading screens.

Cyberpunk has vanishingly few elevators. While it may be a loading hide in some spots, it's certainly not indicative of the game which otherwise has ~zero loading screens as you free roam the city including going in & out of highly detailed buildings and environments.

> I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077, and while the graphics are great, it's clear they could do more in the visual realm. It doesn't use current gen hardware to the maximum

I'm not sure how you can reach this conclusion to be honest. Cyberpunk 2077 continues to be the poster child of cutting edge effects - there's a reason Nvidia is constantly using it for every new rendering tech they come out with.

I don't agree here.

Nintendo games don't look like cheap cartoons at all. They are absolutely not photorealistic but they do put a lot of work on the aesthetics/art and it's most of the time relly impressive once you take the hardware limitations into account.

Mario 64 ran on the same console that was known for its 3D blur.

Mario Galaxy 1&2 (which are still totally modern in terms of aesthetics) ran on what was basically an overclocked gamecube.

Mario Kart 8 which is still more beautiful than a lot of modern games ran on the Switch, which is itself based on a 2015 mid-range smartphone hardware.

There are tens (if not hundreds) of indie and B-games that offer the same experience as most current Nintendo titles. Nintendo is doing well more because of nostalgia - it's the parents buying those consoles for their kids because they have very fond memories with Nintendo from their own childhoods.

>Control

Did we play the same game? Some of the best lore-building and environmental theming around, paired with some cool mechanics?

Sure, the combat got repetitive but this was hardly something to "just sell GPUs"

I'm on the gameplay > graphics bandwagon too but StarCraft II and Age of Empires IV are proof that 3D is not the problem.

Yeah that’s fair.