I kind of wish a dev would just go cam footage look ala Unrecord on UE5, crazy shaders, etc. Would hide some details but if they could get the look of this cam footage, i would be all in.
Agreed. Back when Motorstorm 1 was being reintroduced for PS3, I thought a big mistake was to not force that game into first-person view. It probably would have compromised the graphics even further after that bogus reveal trailer (cockpits add a lot of extra work for the game, plus within PS3 limitations of graphics and controls it might not have worked,) but it would have captured the in-the-race feel of that trailer. Mud on the windshield, racers coming up on your blindspot, having to constantly look to the side and behind to see your surroundings... players would have griped a blue streak that they couldn't see shit, and yes, that's bad for skill-play gaming (which Motorstorm ultimately went for,) but it would have
felt like the race of a lifetime...
(Whatever the graphics, there's bound to be an amazing VR game played in this perspectivesome day...)
I talk about this often, but when Gears was doing its Roadie Run, that was among the most stunning graphics of that gen. Normally, the game looks high end, detailed and artfully directed, but blocky and weirdly proportioned, plus it looked like a lot of what UE3 was doing at the time because UE3 was made in part for that game and that game used every part of the UE3 buffalo. Go into the run, though, and the camera breaks out of normal game'able viewing angles to get low to the ground , and the depth changes with a bit of zoom, and blur and shake and other effects are added in, and it looks way more "real".
Same world, same characters, same level of detail, not even a cut, but the effects feel like what we think it should look like to be in that moment. Stop running, and it looks like just a game again. A game's camera, a game's viewpoint, a game's effects (because gamers would turn off any blur/motion effects if they bothered them in playing the game otherwise.)
(This is Gears 5 I think, but just to show. We've gotten used to these effects by now and they don't stand out as much anymore, but the compression of focal length and motion effects still do good work. )