The fact of the matter is that this is not an example of a massive improvement in world modeling, simulation or light transport.
It shows that you can get a lot of the way towards people saying ‘wow that looks real’ just by using high def HDR textures and a good environment map. In almost every other respect this render is far from state of the art.
And as you say, if that impresses people then that’s great! The team have discovered the shortcut to where to put in the effort to convince viewers! The goal of this kind of game environment engineering is to create sufficient verisimilitude to have the player suspend disbelief - and this seems to do the trick for a lot of people.
But looked at critically it’s surprising how many ways this engine is producing bad results and yet people are willing to overlook and say they’re blown away by the realism. Maybe the uncanny valley for environments is not as deep as we thought.
From my limited experience, that's always something the CoD teams have done incredibly well: maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief as their core KPI.
Technologies or tricks that enhance it are used. Technical masturbation that's ancillary is eschewed.
In the first CoD game, the illusion shattered instantly when you deviated from the expected path (e.g. linger in an area, backtrack, or take an odd turn).
But that was part of the focus and prioritization of effort... they could have improved that, at the expense of making the main path less stellar. They didn't.
I've gotta admire the focus and feature discipline.
Edit: One of the core things that strikes me from the video (not having seen generations of intervening games) is how far human animation libraries and mocap has come. At some point, they've climbed enough of the opposite wall of the uncanny valley not to have it be obviously wrong. Glad we finally got there.
And other side note, everyone should remember this is a multiplatform release. They don't have the luxury of spec'ing to the latest and greatest hardware from Nvidia and AMD. This has to run on consoles with decent performance and with a minimum of per-platform code rework and optimization.
> maintain focus on suspension of player disbelief
Something that really struck me when I when I first played Half-Life 2 was how much it all felt like a movie set, where everything was designed to look fantastic along this one narrow path that you're quickly ushered along, but there was absolutely nothing beyond that path. It's all just lovingly detailed facades.
That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.
> That's the story with all linear AAA games. I think for most players the illusion works great, but I can't help but see the artifice.
It's okay, since this a stylized classic HN insight porn comment.
Calling it an "illusion" is a really dumb take. It reminds me that hardly anyone in this forum reads fiction, and even if you created Ready Player One for them, they'd do exactly what the game designers gave them to do.
Anyway, Call of Duty games have a great variety of levels. "Defend Burger Town" comes to mind as a Modern Warfare 2 (2009) level you could explore pretty freely.
Half Life 2 had open set pieces. Uncharted 4 has possibly the best chase sequence in gaming. It would be so stupid and reductionist to call that an "illusion," just because they have some paths for your car to take.
What do you want? Even the real world expects you to walk and drive along paths. That's just architecture dude. It exists just as often in "open world games" like Red Dead Redemption as it does in "sequence of setpieces" games like Call of Duty.
I appreciate it because of how well it captures the look of a real world location. I've seen a lot of games attempt to capture the spirit of a real place and not get nearly as close as this.
I agree it's not an example of massive improvement technically, but I think it's pretty good work that pushes incremental improvements in a forward direction.
That may just be a reflection of the kinds of games you’ve been playing. Forza Horizon has been doing an incredible job of creating convincingly real locations at high frame rates for a while now, for example[1]. In terms of busy, detailed urban environments that feel solid and alive, look at Half Life: Alyx. Others have pointed to the Matrix unreal demo that shows off some truly gamechanging techniques for environmental modeling and realism.
It is absolutely brilliant world modelling. I'm looking at it on a small screen, but the level of detail and accuracy blows my mind. I've never seen anything this detailed and accurate.
The only thing that makes it immediately obvious that this is from a game, is the clunky movements from the people. They should really start putting some effort into that.
Some things to look more carefully at, then, if the only thing you noticed was the character animations:
- the screen space reflections are broken in the left-hand 10% or so of the screen
- early in the clip there is some weird z-buffer error where reflections from the boat’s roof are showing in front of the car windows
- although the water surface has reflections that make it appear not to be flat, its geometry cuts off along the side of the boat in a pure straight line
- there are tearing artifacts a couple of times where we are seeing the top of one frame and the bottom of another (may be a screen recording artifact rather than a rendering one though)
I don’t think these are merely being ‘nit picky’ - these are clear ways in which the render is a long way short of ‘realistic’.
As I say, great modeling and texturing with environmental PBR clearly does a lot of work convincing a viewer a place is ‘real’. But it seems a bit sad to present that in an engine which has such glaring flaws and ignore them. Other engines exist that do this better.
I was commenting primarily about the modelling, which is absolutely amazing with the exception of the way people move. That the rendering is not perfect is a different issue. I still maintain it's incredibly good at first glance. That there are details that betray it as a render is hardly surprising, but by far the most glaring thing giving it away is the way people move.
I just watched it again on a bigger screen, and I didn't really notice any of the details you mentioned. It's clear it's a render from the slightly artificial look many things have, which is especially the case for people. But the city scene in general looks absolutely fantastic. If you know games that look more real than this, I'd love to know which.
It shows that you can get a lot of the way towards people saying ‘wow that looks real’ just by using high def HDR textures and a good environment map. In almost every other respect this render is far from state of the art.
And as you say, if that impresses people then that’s great! The team have discovered the shortcut to where to put in the effort to convince viewers! The goal of this kind of game environment engineering is to create sufficient verisimilitude to have the player suspend disbelief - and this seems to do the trick for a lot of people.
But looked at critically it’s surprising how many ways this engine is producing bad results and yet people are willing to overlook and say they’re blown away by the realism. Maybe the uncanny valley for environments is not as deep as we thought.