Do older games sometimes look better from being less cluttered? (Minimalism?)

[Lyric Suite]

In real life for instance, there's no such thing as blurriness everywhere

Try to wave your hand fast and observe it.

Not the same thing, because your mind isn't conscious of it and doesn't interfere with vision. Motion blur in games doesn't mirror how this works in real life and only ends up being a visual obstruction.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I prefer less clutter in games.
I couldn't stomach The Witcher 3 when running inside houses and such, so much shit going around you that if not for the massive UI prompts you would be hard pressed to guess what you could interact with or not.

With simpler graphics my eye is drawn to that which is important.

Counterpoint: i had no issues with visual clarity in Kingdom Come Deliverance.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

In real life for instance, there's no such thing as blurriness everywhere

Try to wave your hand fast and observe it.

Not the same thing, because your mind isn't conscious of it and doesn't interfere with vision. Motion blur in games doesn't mirror how this works in real life and only ends up being a visual obstruction.

My mind is completely conscious of it. Motion blur in movies/games mimics the same effect, even if it is not identical to our vision. If an object is moving while its image is being processed by the camera/eye/brain, the resulting image is not a perfect clear representation, but it is blurred. Obviously if you follow a moving object with your eyes, then the blur is reduced (but then all the static background is blurred)

 

[Lyric Suite]

Motion blur in movies/games mimics the same effect

No, it doesn't. The only thing those effects mimic is diabetes.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Motion blur in movies/games mimics the same effect

No, it doesn't. The only thing those effects mimic is diabetes.

Yes they do. And you have diabetes.

 

[anvi]

I agree often the lower tech graphics of the past was better looking than modern fussy graphics. I think DEI is a big part of it. 20+ years ago most of the people in game development were coder wizkids and passionate digital artists and stuff. They had a lot of skill to make good looking games with performance in mind. Tech is far stronger now but I think a lot of the workers are talentless DEI types and working on higher level goofy software instead.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

In real life for instance, there's no such thing as blurriness everywhere

Try to wave your hand fast and observe it.

Not the same thing, because your mind isn't conscious of it and doesn't interfere with vision. Motion blur in games doesn't mirror how this works in real life and only ends up being a visual obstruction.

Motion Blur in games is designed to replicate how a CAMERA blurs when objects move, it has nothing to do with our perception.

People who play with Motion Blur on are absolute cringe, but to each their own. But anyone who thinks motion blur is "realistic" or "immersive" is just plain stupid. It purely exists to make games more "cinematic", in the same way chromatic aberration, depth of field and lens flares do. That's fine if you like these effects. I don't mind some subtle DoF. But motion blur generally looks horrible and leaving it on for "realism" reasons is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

I can't believe people on this forum are literally falling for the Ubisoft "cinematic gaming experience" meme.

But the real confusion in this thread is: Why has nobody mentioned the horrible "vaseline all over the screen" look of TAA, especially in UE5 games. Modern games look downright atrocious, they are blurry barely playable messes.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Motion Blur in games is designed to replicate how a CAMERA blurs when objects move, it has nothing to do with our perception.

But motion blur exists also in human vision. Not only cameeas. Note that the very functioning of a CRT monitor/TV relies on the existence of some kind of motion blurring in human visual perception.

 

[ds]

Your eyes track moving objects you are looking at to minimize motion blur. Same for rotating your head - the eyes do not rotate with the head but keep a mostly fixed direction and then quickly jump to the next direction once you have rotated your head enough. Your brain hides these saccades from you. So more than minimal motion blur from the camera makes no sense and you can't simulate motion blur for moving objects because the game doesn't know what the player is looking at - and you don't need to simulate it anyway because your eyes still blur fast moving objects you aren't tracking even when they are on a screen.

The main reason for motion blur in games is to hide that the frame rate is too low for object motion to appear smooth at the speed that the objects are moving at. But that only changes one kind of shit (motion stutter) into another shit (excessive blurriness). The only real solution is to render at a high enough frame rate and without motion blur. An different is when motion blur is used for artistic effect, for example to simulate drunkenness or make you appear to be moving faster (e.g. in racing games).

 

[Nifft Batuff]

So more than minimal motion blur from the camera makes no sense and you can't simulate motion blur for moving objects because the game doesn't know what the player is looking at

Yeah, this makes sense. However, there could be moving objects, a spinning wheel or a fan for example, that cannot be tracked with eyes and that you see blurred in real life in any case.

and you don't need to simulate it anyway because your eyes still blur fast moving objects you aren't tracking even when they are on a screen.

This makes less sense. The blur arises by the impression of the positions that the moving object occupies between one frame and the other too, that are not visualized on the screen.

 

[Inec0rn]

motion blur enjoyers -> Why would you want to simulate a blurring effect instead of rendering the image cleanly on the computer and letting your brain and eyes deal with the perceived motion blur?

disable retarded motion blur /thread.

 

[BrainMuncher]

@OP I think HDR tonemapping can contribute to this, when devs configure it to reduce contrast, so that the dark areas on the screen are brighter, and the bright areas darker, so that everything ends up being similar brightness. It can make the scene appear more cluttered on top of looking unnatural.

Above is a photography example, but the idea and techniques can be basically the same. When handled like this, it makes the whole scene flatter in an unnatural way, the contrast between different areas is lowered, so it ends up looking more cluttered.

Games started using and misusing HDR in the mid naughties.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

motion blur enjoyers -> Why would you want to simulate a blurring effect instead of rendering the image cleanly on the computer and letting your brain and eyes deal with the perceived motion blur?

disable retarded motion blur /thread.

This, basically.

But you're talking to motion blur enjoyers. Stop wasting your time on retards.

 

[Ezekiel]

I prefer less clutter in games.
I couldn't stomach The Witcher 3 when running inside houses and such, so much shit going around you that if not for the massive UI prompts you would be hard pressed to guess what you could interact with or not.

With simpler graphics my eye is drawn to that which is important.

So much detail in Witcher 2 and 3 that they had to give you a special sense to follow footprints. An N64 game would have simply had you look at the footprints.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Motion Blur in games is designed to replicate how a CAMERA blurs when objects move, it has nothing to do with our perception.

But motion blur exists also in human vision. Not only cameeas. Note that the very functioning of a CRT monitor/TV relies on the existence of some kind of motion blurring in human visual perception.

The point you are not getting is that the artificial rendering is not like the actual thing.

Motion blur in games is just visual distortion. It doesn't actually mimic how the real thing is experienced in real life. All it does is degrate the picture.

A few days ago i installed Dark Souls Remastered on the Deck and upon starting the game i was met with this massive blurriness which i instantly assumed was due the Deck not having enough juice to run the thing. I had set the TDP at 3W to save battery while playing Doom and i figured that just wasn't enough for this game... until i remembered that Dark Souls Remastered comes with motion blur enabled by default.

Here's a nice experiment. Pick up some action figure, and put it on a pottery turntable and start to spin the thing around. If your vision turns into a blurry mess go see a doctor because that shit ain't normal, but that's how motion blur ends up being in games.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I prefer less clutter in games.
I couldn't stomach The Witcher 3 when running inside houses and such, so much shit going around you that if not for the massive UI prompts you would be hard pressed to guess what you could interact with or not.

With simpler graphics my eye is drawn to that which is important.

So much detail in Witcher 2 and 3 that they had to give you a special sense to follow footprints. An N64 game would have simply had you look at the footprints.

The detail isn't the issue though, since i had no problem making everything out perfectly while playing Kingdom Come Deliverance. Hell, you could even easily see the plant you needed to harvest in the middle of a field full of different types of grass stalks.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The point you are not getting is that the artificial rendering is not like the actual thing.

I never declared that rendering=real thing. And I never said that blur is always a good thing in rendering. What I criticize is the stand of many commenters against any motion blur without having a clue. Or others that declares that motion blur does't exist in reality at all. Some ways to render motion blur in games are cancer, I admit, but there are instances where I think it is the less evil.

Motion blur wasn't even a recent invention of modern 3D games. You can find it everywere, even baked in the pixel hand drawn graphics of old 2D games. Think of how are represented the helicopter blades in any old videogame for example.

We are discussing the rendering of 4D reality on a 2D monitor in any case... I hope no one is expecting to have the real thing without any kind of interpretation/compromise.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Or others that declares that motion blur does't exist in reality at all.

All i've said is that in real life you don't walk around with your vision turning into a smudged mess for every little movement you make.

And nobody was talking about the use of motion of blur in any other context besides the modern implementation where it is used as a means to add MUH CINEMATIC experience to games, same as depth of field, vignetting, chromatic abberration and all the other shit effects that plague modern games, especially those of the "AAA" variety.

Look at this fucking shit:



Everybody creaming their pants at muh realistic graphics and not a single person telling the mongoloid who made this to remove all those shit blurry effects. I skipped through the video and everywhere there is bluriness. There's a scene where he jumps on the motorcycle and for a split second everything becomes opaque and blurry. That shit has nothing to do whatsoever with any kind of "natural" motion blur and if even if it did the effect doesn't actually resemble the real thing as it is experienced in real life.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Right, forgot to mention something related to that mini-rant about misguided realism. One of the worst offenders isn't blur, but head bobbing. How often do you notice your view bobbing up and down as you walk or run? Essentially never. Our brains have learned to ignore it. It isn't strictly related to cluttered environments, but that your screen shakes violently from the slightest movement is a large part of why some games look so busy and unclear.

It is retarded because our eyes are stabilized. For fucks sake, you can run over obstacle course and keep the viewpoint on the single object unless it is going out of your field of vision

 

[Ol' Willy]

"Let me tell you all about the games I never played"

The last game I played that didn't let you do this was wolfenstein 3d. Flight & mech simulators were played with a joystick where the HAT switch was used for looking around. Console driving games do the same thing with the right analog stick. FPS had a strafe button. You must have stopped playing FP in the 80s

It's a bit different, the proper way it is done in ArmA, where aimpoint and viewpoint could be controlled separately

 

[Ol' Willy]

Your brain hides these saccades from you.

My favorite smol experiment.

Look up into the mirror, look straight into one of your pupils and then throw the glance at another one. Keep jumping between left and right pupil and notice if you see your eyes moving at all - they seem motionless.

Then do the same but with frontal camera, smartphone or webcam. Preferably not of too high framerate. Now you see your eyes actually moving slightly

This is because while your eyes move they can't maintain focus, so brain just clips those blurry bits out of you perception entirely. And because mirror operates essentially at the speed of light, you can't see your eyes move, this movement is inside the blurry part which is clipped off. But when you use a hardware, the processing lag kicks in and you can actually see what you are not supposed to see

 

[Ol' Willy]

Finally getting to the point

the dark areas on the screen are brighter, and the bright areas darker, so that everything ends up being similar brightness.

This is one of the worst offenders and it goes against one of the main rules of what human could find pleasant and entertaining

Dynamics. It is true for music, cinema, literature, games and static/moving images too and pretty much anything else. You need to have the dynamics, the contrast between different parts. Loud - quiet, aggressive - soft, brutal - melodic, calm - dangerous, bright - dim, colorful - bleak, and so on. Ignoring dynamics, making everything of the same value, makes the thing simply unappealing

Stuff people mention here, like HDR, blur, filters, DoF, etc, they all do exactly the same - they kill the dynamics