I mean you yourself literally posted a realtime cutscene from Bloober that is clearly better than what ND managed in their PS5 only game. We have seen Epic's engineers produce two, one playable, demos that look a generation ahead of TLOU2. You are ignoring Hellblade 2 from Ninja Theory. You are ignoring Fable, Horizon FW and downplaying Death Stranding 2 which looks like this. You are dismissing the Ubisoft games even though Avatar was already downgraded, shown running on PS5 and looks better than TLOU Part 1 despite being open world. You dismiss cyberpunk because it only looks good on PC, well ND is now doing dev on PC so there is nothing stopping them is there?
It turns out a lot of devs have topped ND but you are using arbitrary reasons to dismiss every other dev. When in fact you should be dismissing ND for not even adding RT reflections to TLOU when even this B Tier Insomniac studio managed it in 2020 and 2021 with Miles and Ratchet. Euro jank studios like the Metro dev have got RTGI working on consoles at 60 fps no less. This tech powerhouse with the ICE Team working internally couldnt even get a 40 fps mode working in TLOU Part 1.
I
love The Matrix demo, it blew my mind.
But we have to be real. It ran at 20fps and has like zero gameplay. It's all on-rails and is like 15 minutes long.
We have yet to see anything on the scale of an actual game come close to that. And I don't think any studio except R*, ND or GG can deliver such a thing.
And no, none of those devs have surpassed ND. TLOU 2 was a marvelous technical achievement only matched by RDR 2 last gen. That game is like 30 hours long and straight up looks like a PS5 game on 1.8 a TF machine. Both games today are still basically benchmarks, as in, if it doesn't blow those games away, it isn't next gen. And I'll bet all my money that their next SP game will wipe the floor with whatever most other devs put out. Thats just how it works with ND. And TLOU Part 1 was made mostly by VSG and Bend, it's hardly a ND production, just by name.
I absolutely am not downplaying HFW/Burning Shores, I go to war for those games harder than practically anyone here lol.
The Silent Hill gif I posted, if it comes out and looks like that, I'll eat my words - But these devs, time and time again, have proven me right, it
will be downgraded.
HellBlade II looked amazing in its first reveal, then they showed it again and it was downgraded to hell. Still a good to great looking game, but not the showstopper the reveal was.
I am
absolutely going to downplay all Ubisoft games until release. They simply do not deserve the benefit of the doubt after all of the HISTORIC downgrades they've pulled off over the past decade. They brought that on themselves. Like, we're talking Killzone 2, E3 level bull-trailers,
multiple times. And to me Avatar still looks worse than Burning Shores in every department.
If SW Outlaws actually looks like that I will buy 5 copies of it because I'd be so fucking happy.
That leaves us with CDPR and Kojima. CyberPunk looks amazing on PC, but only on PC. To be fair, Witcher 3 looked great on consoles. So perhaps Cyberpunk was just a one off. Im looking forward to the Expansion coming out. It should look great on all platforms.
Kojima Productions is also up there. Death Stranding looked amazing, as does DS2. Decima engine is fantastic, it has yet to produce an ugly game.
All I'm really saying is... There is the
truly elite (Naughty Dog, RockStar, Guerilla Games, Crytek) Then the
Great (CDPR, Kojima, Santa Monica, Playground Ninja Theory, etc) Then the rest (Insomniac, Sucker Punch, Blooper, etc) Everyone can make an amazing looking game, but other than the elite devs I listed, they have to prove they can - until it becomes a forgone conclusion that any game they release will be elite looking.
With R*, ND, etc, we never have to wonder if their next game will look incredible, its a forgone conclusion, they never miss.
I hope more devs join their ranks by the end of this generation.