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.