With all due respect, but we've jumped the shark with tech and visual fidelity during the PS4 Pro/GTX 1080 PC era. Titles like Death Stranding, TLOU2 or, hell, even MSFS 2020 are photorealistic enough for most of the sane people out there. It's very hard to justify even more details especially when we're trading them for dev time.
Hell, the ever-mentioned The Order 1886 aged better than I thought (bar the somewhat basic facial animations and resolution issues). In 2024, visuals in games are not about the tech or even the ability to deliver something like HB2, when indie devs can create something like Bramble in a Nordic shed with a stock UE5. It's about pure scope, complexity of the visual language. Moreover it's a constand struggle with balancing the hardware budget between the gameplay mechanics, myriad of assets, procedural stuff and said fidelity. Plus there's some very lowly things like man hours, release window and production budgets.
Recently (on PC and PS5 at least), I was way more impressed by Alan Wake 2, Phantom Liberty (and 2077 with PT in general) and Horizon Forbidden West than with my 5 hours with HB2 with everything cranked-up to Ultra. Because unlike HB2 those games were full of life, tried to deliver some amazing new tech to bigger scope, were filled with interactivity and were bult around thoroughly unscripted gameplay situations. They are packed with myriads of characters, combat and non-combat scenarios, different means of traversal and some clever prosedural systems. The number of things that are running under the hood of games like CP 2077 or HFW is insane, considering they are both technically cross-gen titles, but still maintaining more or less consistent WOW visuals across the vast open-world and 50+ hours of mostly open-ended gameplay. In the meantime HB2 has like 1 attack and 1 block for the whole game. While animations are very lifelike, there's just so much you can do without breaking the immersion with tiny pre-recorded moveset.
In respect of scope, HB2 fails to impress massively. It's a restricted and fairly pre-recorder tech demo where you have a very narrow path without any real interactions or player's agenda for that matter. Very rarely you'll see more than 3 human beings in a shot at once. Everything is transpiring on deliberately sparse locations even if we forget about the idiotic corridor nature of the game. The fights are basically all the same because they are heavily pre-scripted, you have like one combat scenario for every fight in the entire game. The moveset is tiny, but I've mentioned that. Comparing with HB1 (not a big game by any stretch of imagination) even the puzzling is basically became a 'find-the-trigger' minigame, while the combat system (as a gameplay system) was scaled back to be more predictable for devs, so they can create the illusion of fluidity in all 10 animations they've pre-recorded in such details.
One can argue that any competent AAA dev could accomplish this level of fidelity with such a tiny scope, miniscule number of interactive systems and with 7 years of development and almost unlimited budget. That's why tech demos are not working for general public anymore, we know that the tech is there for years, it's not news. Scope, gameplay and interactivity is what really matters in the end, that's why the world is no fire by a DLC for a game that is made with an aging tech, that itself is based on an archaic PhyreEngine. The best possible fidelity is just a thing that is naturally expected form a platform-holders AAA title at this point, especially from a rich company like Microsoft.
The HB2 is a very expensive tech experiment that in grand scheme of things proves nothing to nobody and moves nothing industry-wide. Said industrtry is is already overspending on fidelity and in a bit of a crisis because of it.
Games like CP2077, RDR 2, GTA VI and Death Stranding 2 are what tech achievment mean. Because they strive to combine cutting-edge tech with never-before-seen scope or complexity of their systems. Perhaps they won't reach the same level of skin PBR or useless overanimation on MC face, but at this point of time it's not the thig that people really care abnout. Games like RDR2 are tech marvels to be looked upon for years to come because of sheer technological scope and gameplay complexity at the same time. Hellblade 2, on the other hand, will end up in the 'peculiar failures' bin, along with hollow, unimaginative and very restricted games like The Order 1886 and Beyond Two Souls.
Thanks for listening to my TED Talk, I guess.
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