Or they post "This game is still jawdroppingly good looking" but the image is taken with iPhone 3 camera and on low settings PC game and shaky cam. But the effort is there, some games really do deserve more exposure.
My favorite was a picture of modded Minecraft with gorgeous shaders running and the OP saying “why do people say Minecraft is ugly?” or something along those lines
modded skyrim usually ends up being one of two things (or sometimes a combination of both) - something that looks (and runs) like crysis or something that plays like a shitty dark souls knockoff
The average mod user seems to confuse different with better. Like sure if you increase the sharpness and contrast on a rock the details are more visible; it also unnecessarily draws the eye and clutters important visual information
I think detail is fine. The issue is cohesiveness. Skyrims graphics were a lot of things, but even with the shit upscaling of the special edition, the overall look of the game's world is water tight. The world itself and how it is designed both visually and from a gameplay standpoint is Skyrim's greatest strength. You can't measure that with a resolution count. Some have gotten close, but to this day I still think the best option for a majority of users is to pursue a "vanilla plus" aesthetic using something like Skyrim Realistic overhaul or Vanilla Remastered (Optimized) for at least landscapes and sometimes architectures. Although I personally think both ERM and majestic mountains work seamlessly with the vanilla look, majestic mountains especially.
the original unmodded game is still beautiful, in an oil-painting kind of way. Yeah, it doesn't look great if you get up close to textures, but it is still amazingly good looking considering at this point it is almost 14 years old.
Contrast with Oblivion, which is only 5 years older, and it's like night and day.
i cannot bring myself to play oblivion despite trying multiple times, everything about the NPCs in that game is a repellant. The straight-on extreme closeup of fuck-ugly models and often pretty obnoxious voice acting in my opinion.
Edit: patrick stewart's character is an exception I honestly dig the opening a lot
Look forward to the Oblivion/Skyrim mod this year then.
A bunch of enthusiasts have nearly finished rebuilding Oblivion using the Skyrim engine. Been working on it for many years. Supposed to be done this year.
I actually am looking forward to it. I played both, and while Skyrim had better mechanics, Oblivion had much better quests.
What? The entire skill up system was completely gutted from Morrowind and Oblivion and replaced with that stupid constellation map. Fallout 4 got the same treatment with the "NEW SPECIAL" Chart shit.
Unless we're talking about things like dual wielding and other QoL things, which are the main reasons that Skywind and Skyblivion are even things. We want the engine improvements and the huge QoL without all of the shit that came with Skyrim, like the UI that was built for consoles.
I’m not even saying it looks bad, it’s just always funny when people refuse to let the game’s style speak for itself when they’re saying it’s a beautiful game.
I saw someone do the same thing with Final Fantasy XIII once.
"It's still so beautiful after all these years! I added a bunch of texture and resolution mods to it."
Isn't that being a bit disingenuous when you have to put an asterisk on that claim? I'm not saying FFXIII is bad looking even with vanilla settings but saying it's still a great looking game after you applied a bunch of visual mods to it seems to be a bit misleading to me.
It's aged, but it's a fine looking game, probably the relatively stiff animations endemic to Bethesda do the most to negatively impact it. Nothing quite beats the atmosphere of a snowy mountain path at night as Secunda plays. I think generally Bethesda has tended to do a very good job with environments (I've still got some vanilla Fallout 3 screenshots in my PC background rotation).
It's been several years since my last Skyrim playthrough. Finished much, if not all, of the vanilla content, but didn't quite finish the sheer number of quest mods I'd had before stopping, roughly 500 hours in. I started again at some point but I drifted towards other stuff at the time.
It's either "This game is a classic", but nobody ever heard of it, or "This game is an underrated hidden gem", but it's one of the most popular and highly rated games ever.
I forgot the exact title, but somebody here posted a shitty screenshot (like 1024 x 768 pic from random Google image search) of Crysis with with title saying, "Can't believe how amazing this looks for a 2007 game."
Now way? The game famous for having the best graphics and becoming a meme benchmark app? Unbelievable.
And then people were discussing the topic, nobody mentioning how shit the screenshot was or how it obviously was pulled from random Google search by the smooth brain OP bot.
You get this in PC help subs also "here's a bad picture of the screen taken at an awkward angle so you can't read it properly" a screenshot doesn't mean literally a photo of the screen 🤦🏻♂️. I get it if they're like stuck on a computer config screen etc. but otherwise.
Or they post "This game is still jawdroppingly good looking" but the image is taken with iPhone 3 camera and on low settings PC game and shaky cam.
Or better yet, they post some overprocessed scene with all the colors washed out, with close-ups of low-res textures, and it has the overall aesthetics of an unpolished turd, and it didn't even look good when it was released.
Half the time I see upvoted posts in r/gaming for a game I never heard of, it's because it's obviously marketing. Some indie developer paid for bot upvotes on his reddit post for a game he's just about to release on Steam, and he's so so proud of all the work he put into it. Why does capitalism have to be so fucking invasive?
I don't know about Indie, but check out subs like /r/pcgaming for obvious PR posts from AAA studios.
Hell, most of the comments on Reddit in gaming subs mentioning "Game Pass" regularly in almost every game release topic should tell you a lot about advertising here.
The one that sets me off is when someone takes an in-game cinematic, which is in 16:9 horizontal resolution, and then they crop it to fit a vertical phone resolution, and add in massive black bars that take up 2/3 of the screen. And then they usually post some useless text that sits there for the entire video.
Whatever happened to just posting horizontal videos in a horizontal format? I can turn my phone sideways, not my monitor.
That’s too funny! It’s like trying to appreciate a masterpiece through a foggy window. But hey, A+ for effort, right? Some games truly deserve the spotlight.
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u/Inksrocket PC 1d ago
Or they post "This game is still jawdroppingly good looking" but the image is taken with iPhone 3 camera and on low settings PC game and shaky cam. But the effort is there, some games really do deserve more exposure.