We don't need photorealism in games, but it does help with immersion. 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. Photorealism is essential for this feeling - at least for me .

The most amazing gaming experience I've ever had was walking around the city at night in Cyberpunk 2077. For the first time in my life, I felt I was actually in the future. Zelda can't pull that off with me, despite being a great game from other perspectives.

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treyd a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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theshackleford a day ago | parent [-]

> VR to be, while very cool, not some revolutionary new technology

VR despite its limitations is the one thing I’ve ever achieved “presence” in, as in feeling if for a brief moment, I was actually there.

Elite dangerous, OLED Unit, HOTAS. For a brief moment in time my brain believed it was in the cockpit of a spaceship.

	▲	andybak a day ago \| parent [-]
		I had a similar experience in a a game meant to simulate regular city car driving. Most releveant to this comment thread however was the fact that the graphics were very crude and not in a good way. I absolutely dispute the claim that realism equals (immersion/presence - I'm not getting involved in the debate about the distinction between the two)

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markus_zhang a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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TurkTurkleton a day ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. Immersion in a game world, at least for me, is less about how accurately it visually reflects reality and more about how detailed the overall world feels -- whether the designers have crafted worlds that feel like they live and breathe without you, that you could imagine inhabiting as someone other than the protagonist. For instance, I can imagine what it would be like to live in Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, whether I was a merc like V or just one of the nobodies trying to get by that you pass on the street; I can imagine living in Dishonored's Dunwall (or the sequel's Karnaca) in the chaos and uncertainty of their plagues; I can put myself in the shoes of one of the faceless, downtrodden members of the proletariat of Coalition-occupied Revachol in Disco Elysium; a lot of AAA games, on the other hand, feel like theme park rides--well-crafted experiences that are enjoyable but don't stick with you and discourage you from thinking too deeply about them because they don't withstand much scrutiny. But Cyberpunk 2077 is evidence that they don't have to be that way, and Dishonored and Disco Elysium are equally evidence that you don't need a half-billion-dollar budget and photorealistic graphics to create immersive worlds.

(edited to clarify that I'm not laboring under the misapprehension that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't a AAA game)

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dahart a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I recall a paper from GDC many years back that studied the perception of immersion and they measured and ranked maybe a dozen different factors. Graphics and visuals were surprisingly low on the list. The number one thing was the player’s sense of identity and clear understanding of their goals. Players tended to correlate realism with high immersion too.

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teamonkey a day ago | parent [-]

Oh that sounds really interesting, I’d like to track it down.

Was it this one? https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015464/Attention-Not-Immersio...

	▲	dahart a day ago \| parent [-]
		That’s definitely in the same realm, but not the one I was thinking of. I believe I’m thinking of something maybe 10 years earlier, it had multiple authors, at least one woman, and some of the authors were psychology researchers who were into games. I’d wouldn’t be surprised if this is a theme and avenue of research that has come up many years at GDC.

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genewitch a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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ehnto a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	XorNot a day ago \| parent [-]
		CP2077 was the game I drove most carefully in when not on a mission, just coz it felt right that V wouldn't be hooning around his home turf. The immersion was incredible.

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ascagnel_ a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	genewitch a day ago \| parent [-]
		DLSS really messes with the realism, however for actual gameplay it's less annoying to me than i thought it would be from such games as diablo IV and others in that cohort. If you want maximum quality, don't let an AI draw what the developers (artists) intended, just draw what the developers intended. i replied to a sibling comment with 4 photo mode screenshots, and you can see that there's a lot of variation in environment lighting, and all of the ambient light is pre-arranged by the design team and developers. In CP2077 a lot of quests are "go to <location> at dusk/dawn/night/noon, or between x&y time, because they want the scene to be cinematic, and it shows. Harsh fluorescent lighting on scenes with a doctor, muted, hazy interactions with a shady character or a scene with emotional turmoil, long shadows and lots of reds at the end of a story arc. It really feels like they put so much work into how everything looks in the primary and secondary stories. i can agree though that just "jobbing" it looks more like a run-of-the-mill shooter, though.

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Nicook a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Out of curiosity do you not get immersed in books?

	▲	glimshe a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I do, but not like cyberpunk. I like to both read and watch movies, but I feel a lot more immersed with images than I do with words. It's not a binary rating (immersed vs not immersed), it's a gradient that makes things resonate more strongly with photorealism. This is one reason, I believe, why some people can't stand animated cartoons. I like them but I know many people who won't even consider watching animation.
	▲	dostick a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can get immersed in anything. With games or VR realism, it’s like extra depth of immersion when your brain switch to think in same way as you think in real world rather than adapting to physics or terrain of fake world.

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andybak a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?