Hmm. I like the author's main point in many video games doing this unrealistically, but there are a few sticking points that are relevant from the past few years:

  - The omission of discussing HDR monitors, and how you can't really capture that on a screenshot. This is a game changer, especially with new games and monitors.
  - The omissions of discussing Unreal5 games that have come out in the past few years. (e.g. Talos principle 2, Hellblade 2, Stalker 2)
  - Not enough examples of games that do it well, with A/B comparisons of similar settings
  - The Nintendo screenshot as an example of doing things right isn't working for me.

Another interesting example of lighting done well is Kingdome Come Deliverance 2. The details don't look nearly as nice as, e.g. UE5 game and it unfortunately doesn't support monitor HDR, but it has very realistic looking lighting and scenes.

▲ cubefox a day ago | parent [-]

The article is from 2017.

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the__alchemist a day ago | parent [-]

Oh wow. I wonder what the author thinks of the new trends! I bet he or she would be pleasantly surprised by some of them.

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cubefox a day ago | parent [-]

Yeah, since then there were some games with very natural looking contrast and colors, perhaps most notably Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Or, years later, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 (2025), which you already mentioned. As a negative example: as far as I can tell, Horizon Forbidden West (2022) mostly doubled down on the exaggerated color contrast he criticized in the predecessor.

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the__alchemist a day ago | parent [-]

Concur on Forbidden West having the same problem as HZD that the author mentioned. I remember thinking about the dark/indoor areas with accent lighting, and vegetation in particular compared to similar scenes in Talos Principle 2. (Similar release dates) HZD wasn't in the same league as Talos.

	▲	cubefox 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. I think it comes down to the following property of the tone mapping curve: if there is high brightness contrast, the colors of the bright parts should become desaturated. It's probably why this screenshot looks so realistic: https://ventspace.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/i... The contrast is very high, but the colors of the bright part has appropriately low color saturation. Which seems to match how our eyes, and cameras, perceive things when there are large differences in brightness (which a display can't directly reproduce, which is why tone mapping is necessary in the first place). Most engines in the past apparently did this wrong, they kept the color saturation the same irrespective of brightness.