Why exactly does lighting in older games always look better?

Why exactly does lighting in older games always look better?

re4 demake.jpg - 728x1024, 108.87K

because you can see all the objects on the screen more clearly

fedoras are awesome

hqdefault.jpg - 480x360, 23.9K

I miss time when we were allowed to have contrast in games.

jeets can not into coding

It's precooked

Because they valued clarity over realism. Left is more clear, right is more realistic.

Actual artists did the effects

FREYA SEX

Why did they get rid of the typewritter skeuomorph
UI?

Because it was lovingly crafted and optimized instead of just slapping a lighting technology that $2k cards can't run well on everything. It ages well.

right is realistic and if you played on an OLED you would be blown away. I played part of FF16 on a normal LED and when I switched to an OLED shit was like a night and day difference just because of proper blacks.

Left would look fine on any display because it's intentionally made to look bright like that fir gameplay reasons but is not realistic.

All in the artist.
On the left he did it by hand, on the right the she left it to an algorithm that did it for her.

back in the day of black and white film they had to use contrast to create scenes that made sense visually. otherwise they would just have footage that was uninteresting grey sludge. importance of contrast was understood and utilized even after black and white film faded into history because movies shot on film still required same contrast parameters to be projected. it was after the dawn of digital media that contrast became truly unneeded in a mechanical sense in the film industry. I believe since video games, particularly these movie games like RE4, emulate movies they also draw from the aesthetics of the movies. you could put a movie from 2005 side by side with a movie from 2025 and probably have the same result as the pic in OP.

re4 remake is going for the "boo haunted house" atmosphere, probably to make that zoomer audience go poggers!!

more game, less movie

NOOOOOO WHY IS MY HORROR GAME DARK NOW!!!!! YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO SEE EVERYTHING IN A HORROR GAME!!!!

I feel like that's a big part of it to be honest. Media and art in general lack contrast these days. Don't know if it's because of post modernism or what but it makes things look so bland.

Arms-created.

Literal handcrafted graphics, including lighting placement and baking. It pops out more, resulting superior clarity and contrast. It's what the pre-GC movies aimed for and often achieved too.

resulting superior clarity and contrast.

Nope its because of CRT which has better contrast than LCD

Then it should come back relatively soon as everybody has high end oleds now. Game dev cycle is like 5 years max. So ~2027 we should start seeing more games with high contrast.
I had the diablo 2 hud burned into my last crt

Incorrect. Many consumer CRTs got surprisingly shit contrast compared to even 10-15yo LCDs, which have already all but disappeared from the mainstream market in favor of LEDs.

The pictre you're demonstrating is trying to tackle the problem of shitty COLOR VALUES in modern games. This is often simplified into "contrast" in layman's terms, but it goes a bit deeper than that.

The tl;dr still is: oldschool game devs used real art theories to make their low-res, low-poly, small texture games truly "pop out" and be easy to "read", where as modern UE5 slop is made by Indian DIY Blender zoomers who've never even mixed watercolors together, and only focus on some pointless macro details within their already flat-looking PBR texture workflow... all while lighting is left for automated approximation tools, like Ray Tracing.

This is where the "anti-soul fog" meme kinda originates from as well, as the pile of volumetric effects exaggerates the flat appearance of modern vidya.

You're the problem. Die

It's baked. Just like yours truly.

Media and art in general lack contrast these days. Don't know if it's because of post modernism or what but it makes things look so bland.

The new Nosferatu movie was so fucking good, bros.

Nope its because of CRT which has better contrast than LCD

No, it's because devs are fucking faggots now.

Both wrong. Modern IE post 2010 games were all being made using HDR and that just gets tone mapped to SDR. Play any of these games on an HDR capable monitor (and find a way to disable tone mapping and LUT) and you will be blown away.

Play any of these games on an HDR capable monitor

I won't, and that's not an argument for the generally terrible lack of macro detail and depth in modern video games.

Carefully crafted lighting by artists vs Rajeesh ticking off a box

Original was the CRT minded development days

Pretty much everyone was already using an LCD 13 years ago.

Why do 'CRT games' look better on LCDs than modern games then?

they dont

left looks better on LCD still

"ummm actually its because of CRTs"

retard???

While the left all looks good, it looks more like fantasy, a well lit fantasy video game location, and it does it well
The art style direction changed with the remakes to go for realism instead and it does it well.

I think both look good and have their own positive attributes, but obviously because realism to this level wasn't possible 20 years ago devs are gonna try and go for realism now. I guess GTA has had a big impact on the industry which also is partly a reason for the ultra detailed realism push

Also I know Re4 dials back the zombie horror in favour of being more of an action thriller, but the remake lighting does amp up the horror more.

Give an example of an older game that looks bad on LCDs.

Realism fags ruined art direction

Retard or AAA shill?

they do

art instructors literally tell students that contrast is a bad thing

durrrr people were using LCD at the time!!!

Doesn't change how they developed games at the time, it took years for developers to realize their method of lighting from CRT era won't work on LCD as it makes everything less visible. They changed the contrast so things are more easily visible for LCD.

Deferred rendering and post-processing effects are to blame

Cause their consumers use LCD, they cant see contrast

massive blown out lens flare

better

do you have worms in your head?

but left still looks better on my own LCD that I'm viewing right now.

Original was the CRT minded development days

no it wasn't you mongoloid

Wow, now it looks so much better on my LCD!

CRTs have better contrast

that means games also need good contrast

LCDs have bad contrast

that means you need bad contrast, washed out games

what having a double digit IQ does to a man

How did people like this take over the culture at large. I mean you look at that image and you realize its everything, these are the polyamorous types, the trans types, the vegan types, the cucks. The people in that room took over culture from 2014 to 2022

everyone is low IQ but me, all these developers are idiots for doing the same thing! Its not LCD its everything single developer in existence

They are a product of their environments, mostly college and university which have been taken over by jews and their golems. You aren't born with a fedora on.

Your logic is completely fucking broken you fucking giga dumbass.
Low contrast game + high contrast monitor = okay this might be fine
High contrast game + low contrast monitor = okay this might be fine
High contrast game + high contrast monitor = old games, this is good
Low contrast game + low contrast monitor = wtf this is shit, like modern games

where the hell is your brain

check out their channel

turns out even the fedora guy trooned out

Shit contrast monitor = hard to see shit with contrast seeCRT is easier to see, developers removed contrast cause of LCD so everything is more visible

RE4

Movie game

Please fucking play the games you're talking about, you brown.

based opinion

why are you lying?

Pre-rendered and artistically curated light illusions instead of dynamic algorithm-based light systems.

Looks like it was just poorly filmed lmao. I hope they sued the camera guy. Clearly a fraudster.

I haven't played Resident Evil 4 Remake yet. Why does everything look so dark and soaking wet? It's like my screen is is darkened and they drenched every single character did the ice bucket challenge.

Hand-crafted lighting vs. just leaving it up to the engine.
Imagine if you were filming a movie and instead of carefully tuned set lighting you just used natural light. Same difference.

Because baked lighting can be used as a tool in artistic design. Realistic lighting can be too, but more often than not game devs care more about what an environment's lighting would look like realistically as opposed to what's more aesthetically pleasing.

I'm playing this game on my chink handheld and I'm impressed by how good that game looks for a PS1 title.

All your doing is proving that CRTfags are some of the most retarded people still living

Shitty low-res screenshots with bad brightness settings. For all the faults the Remake has, I never saw the lighting as one.

The right side of that image has significantly more contrast than the left side does.

Ruining the atmosphere is a pre-requisite for Resident Evil remakes.

og vs remake.png - 772x2144, 2.06M

There are many technical reasons I can point out but anything and everything I say will boil down to this: in the old days, generally speaking, devs used to actually give a fuck and took great care of the visuals so they would look a very specific way. Now? Not so much, just use MUH REALISM and call it a day. Games now are kinda like fast food. It's not even a cae of OLD GOOD NEW BAD, it's genuinely the way things are now. Nobody really cares anymore, they just pump out whatever and people buy it.

It's way better on the remake though

It's because the technology didn't do the artist's jobs for them. And I don't even mean this in a "lazy devs" kind of way. With PBR and global illumination you press a button and it just works and needs a few tweaks to get rid of the small issues. It'll look good enough from the get go. No manager in charge of optimizing costs is gonna approve wasting time redoing it all by hand when it's already good enough. The old days things were not, in fact, good enough with the press of a button. Either the artist went through hand placing things to make it look good or it wouldn't. A good artist would make it look great while he's at it. There was no auto-good-enough button.
PBR ruined videogame visuals forever.

apparently you weren't lying, he's just putting zero effort into his appearance other than painting his nails and wearing dresses then saying he's non-binary.

Epic, fedoras ARE awesome

bro just buy a $5000 tv because we don't feel like optimizing the picture for the kinds of tvs most people have

Intentionality

youtube.com/watch?v=L6_NhO2tRbs

I've been playing through Infamous the last few days and one thing I noticed is just how properly dark the underground sections are. Youtube compression doesn't do it justice, but anything that's not lit up is straight up pitch black, and all the electricity effects really stand out. Overall, the game has a drab and grey color palette, but the actual contrast is so good. I feel like games don't do this level of darkness anymore

This is completely glossed over in 99.99999% of comparisons between modern and legacy rendering when in reality it's the only thing that matters.

We had it SO fucking good, it's indescribable

SED.jpg - 650x455, 37.86K