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What game, in your opinion, has the best graphics?
Completely ignoring gameplay, which game do you think has the most amazing graphics? Which game do you look at and it makes you question how far technology has come? Or maybe which game has such effective art direction it completely sucks you in?
For me, it's Horizon Forbidden West. I just went back to the DLC after taking a break from it. I forgot just how good it looks! I swear it looks like every grain of sand is modeled, and the character models are insane.
I think a lot of games nowadays look fantastic, to the point where it looks like a movie, or an anime or a cartoon (DBZ Fighters / Guilty Gear, Hi-Fi Rush, for example) or whatever. No Man's Sky really does a great job of selling you on real-life FTL space travel - the feeling of flying into a black hole in that game is unparalleled, truly. The execution of these art styles can be fantastic, but as an independent game developer myself, I personally find more interesting what developers did when constrained under primitive technology like the PS1, N64, and DS. (EDIT: Really, every console generation had stand-out games, not just those in the early days of 3D, but that era was rather interesting, both for 3D, and for higher-resolution 2D games on PS1 and N64.)
It seemed like those eras afforded you just enough tech for game artistry to be able to execute a cohesive artistic direction effectively, and even have some extra for convincing extra effects like lighting or ambient occlusion, even without having anything approaching the technology to actually do it.
For example, there were a lot of PS1 games that looked fantastic, even going by today's standards, like Vagrant Story or Megaman Legends. Maybe the technical aspects were primitive, but the shots chosen in cutscenes and the fake lighting in Vagrant Story are still, in my opinion, incredible, and Megaman Legends had excellent clean texture work. It was particularly of note for the characters' faces in cutscenes, even with different, perspective-incorrect faces for particular angles, which really pushed the characters' ability to emote and "look good". The inability to actually have a full 3D model for a face meant they had to use texture mapping effectively for faces, and the restrictions allowed their artistry to come out in full force.
That's what I think, anyway.
The race for fidelity and ultra realism has ceased to provide any excitement for at least 15 years. Everything is pretty enough by default, beauty is determined by artistic choice rather than technological advancement. With that in mind, I'll say that World of Warcraft, back in Cataclysm when I first played it, or even now in Classic WoW, is one the most visualy striking games I ever played.
Also, Super Mario 3 on the SNES and Katamari Damacy on the Playstation.
I played it back starting in early 2005 and had no concept of what an MMO was at the time. It was truly remarkable. I loved walking around an exploring and running into other players. No game has ever made me feel the way that Gabe did 20 years ago.
I agree for the most part but I would draw that line at the PS4 + XBox One instead of 15 years ago.
IMO the one exception is Microsoft Flight Simulator. I haven't played the new one except briefly via gamepass streaming on the Xbox (bad experience) but that's a genre where graphics seem to be hard, improvements are costly, and improvements look amazing.
Microsoft flight sim is a masterpiece of technology. I can appreciate that people find it boring (for myself, I love it and built my current computer specifically because of it), but rendering the entire world at least semi accurately is a huge achievement. And that's the worst case scenario, for places with poor satellite data available where they use AI to render approximations of buildings but with an accurate footprint and general colouring and height of said building.
In places with photogrammetry, the resolution can be astonishing. The apartment we used to live in had an accurately coloured balcony and I could tell our one window had the air conditioner in it.
I've been able to fly vfr rules in the sim and easily fly from the city I live in now and follow the roads and towns back to my hometown, and I've also been able to plan vfr flights on other continents and countries I've never been to, using maps to plot physical landmarks and land in backwater locations using dead reckoning.
It's just a huge achievement all over
I second Red Dead Redemption 2. Recently I've really appreciated the attention to detail and technical marvel of Cyberpunk 2077, it's truly gorgeous.
I'm eager to see the consumer-tuned Gaussian splatting capture/trainer tooling that's bound to come in the next handful of years. The potential for fully-convincing low cost captured VR environments feels so close I can almost taste it.
I suspect we'll also see deep models appear that will gap-fill the trained-down gaussian clouds.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has a much more impressive photogrammetry Church - https://youtu.be/sHrHyGdpMAw - and it’s a decade old.
Would absolutely love another Mirror's Edge, or something like it. Most of the look-alikes I've played are good, but don't seem to capture the same sense of flow. Even the sequel felt like it lost something IMO but I've never really been able to put my finger on it.
Death Stranding is absolutely stunning and surprisingly well-optimized on PC. My eyes would well up a bit going into new spaces, sorta like finding beautiful nature IRL.
Death Stranding is like the highest production shit-post on the planet and I loved every minute of it. The characters look absurdly good in that game.
It’s doing something really smart with (what I assume to be) photogrammetry assets for its environments. But most environments are endless, empty fields of rock. What impressed me the most were the character animations, which are, hands down, the best I have ever seen in a video game. Somehow better than Naughty Dog’s. I have no idea how they did it but they basically look like weirdly lit real-life studio footage. The animations are perfect.
I think with the new Path Tracing, Cyberpunk 2077 is the absolute king. The game aesthetics fit a reflection heavy world, which is where path tracing shines.
RDR2 can look stunning in its detail, even if the lightning isn't quite there.
However there are games who I would say that have perfect graphics and it would not matter if it released in 20 years in the future.
Hollow Knight is probably the best example. That gane is polished to a ridiculous degree. Cuphead is another example of eternal visuals. To a certain degree, Disco Elysium painterly textures and exaggerated models as well, although I guess it could use more polish.
Ghost of Tsushima has always impressed me on a graphical level.
Everyone's talking about 3D-rendered games, but for hand-drawn pixel art graphics I still think the Metal Slug series did it best.
Ten years on and Fez is still the most visually accomplished and compromise-free game I’ve laid eyes on. It's also strong aesthetically, but what it achieved in 3D -- projecting a perfectly convincing four-sided sprite-based 2D world -- is unparalleled in my opinion.
Seamlessly turning your perspective on the world is as impressive today, and the wonder of it is a unique experience conceptualized entirely in video game language. On the surface or for a lay observer it may seem banal, but to an enthusiasts like myself it’s like being shared some incredible secret or hilarious inside joke.
I think Outer Worlds was stunning, not to be confused with Outer Wilds (which is also beautiful).
I don't know if it's because I love the aesthetic of a fantasy alien world better than the nitty gritty Night City of Cyberpunk, but I've always found the former more beautiful than the latter.
and no one brought up Sable???
Red Dead Redemption is stunning
So I recently got an Nvidia RTX 4090 and I've been pumping the graphics settings on everything that I can.
Based on my first-hand testing, I think that the graphically best looking game right now, by a huge margin, is Ratchet & Clank: A Rift Apart on PC.
I remember trying out the new Cyberpunk update after playing R&C and it just looked so much worse in comparison.
Cyberpunk 2077 has the most impressive graphics in terms of 'high fidelity' I've seen so far.
For stylized visuals the Ori games are very beautiful.
Oh, and I really liked the art design of Control.
Honestly... Minecraft.
Not so much the raw game itself, though I love exploring and there's some really nice terrain generation, but the stuff that can be built. Aweinspiring.
I couldn’t choose just one. So here is a list of some pretty darn good ones.
SaGa Frontier 2
Iconoclasts
Legend of Mana
Atelier Ryza
Eastward
Spiritfarer
My gaming history is a really weird patchwork, so I'm just going to point out a game I think is notable. The Complex: Expedition is realistic to the point that it can be mistaken for actual footage at times, and that sort of perceptual blurring really works well given the subject matter.
Others have mentioned Cyberpunk 2077 with it's amazing fidelity and light tracing but I'm amazed nobody's mentioned the quality of the facial and body animations, they are incredibly realistic in terms of reading facial expressions and body language.
There is “the most amazing graphics on a high end PC if you have one” and then there are handheld consoles where the graphics are carefully matched to fit the display. I have an ongoing project to get screenshots out of a 3DS emulator and make a decent red-cyan stereogram and like a lot of stereograph projects I have yet to gotten it to really work.
I like the stereo graphics in Super Mario 3D Land and also some of the boss fights in Matio & Luigi Dream Team. For that matter I am a sucker for processing 3D graphics through shaders to get an illustrative effect as in Pokemon Sun and Moon and the Valkyria Chronicles series.
For that matter on the Vita with OLED many games such as Killzone Mercenary and Gravity Daze came off as absolutely perfect.
I still think F-Zero GX's graphics are perfect. Mind it still just looks quite good for a twenty y/o game, but it conveys the stupid speed of the game without losing clarity, even when you're utterly breaking it with snaking and whatnot. Every little bit works - the zoom-out when you boost, the little laughing portraits from the characters as they whizz by, the menus are great... And it basically never drops 60 FPS.
Breath of the wild, for sure. The light, pastel colors and rainbowy gradients, along with the cell shaded anime-esque characters. It's perfect.
I hope that the rumored "Breath of the Wild ported to Switch 2" that was shown to industry insiders at Gamescom is real and gets released. BotW was already amazing running on a potato. An official port to newer hardware? Yes please!
Cyberpunk 2077 was like that when I first played it. Playing again I'm left marveling at the absolutely massive, detailed space folks made. It's not easy shit to do, especially when your world has its own rules and cultures and things. Every once in a while the light is just right and the details in place such that it looks...real enough? Like I find myself thinking about how it would feel out there in the rain, the unease of walking under a flickering streetlight in a bad part of town, the sort of baseline suspicion you use when you're out in spots you're not supposed to be at.
Pretty cool for a game to evoke those feelings, and I think graphics go the longest way in this instance. When I try getting further in, really picking apart the world, I see the seams. But there are lots of moments where the seams disappear and I'm left thinking "hot damn this shit is cool".
I find the best looking games are the ones that force me to use my imagination to fill in the gaps. Minecraft, Valheim, and especially Dwarf Fortress. No amount of polygons in a AAA budget title can compete with the detail and personality you can create for yourself.
For technological marvel and realism, Cyberpunk looks fantastic. Raytracing hits different with all the neon and LED lighting.
For art direction, I feel like Life is Strange: True Colors is perfection. Just the right amount of fidelity with the right amount of cartoon-ness. I can honestly see myself enjoying every video game with this art direction.
I maynot be the best qualified to answer that as:
From my own experience though it is Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Talos Principle.
I loved how SotTR looked, thejingle, the water, the ruins, everything.
And if you played Talos Principle, you would recognize one of three (different than puzzle) locations, one of them is situated in a valley between tall rocky mountains with waterfalls and sun shining into the valley, I was blown away when I saw that. I just stood there and looked around for a few minutes in absolute awe!
Everything peaked at Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in terms of graphics and music and I will not be fielding further comment on that bold statement :)
Pong.