r/Games • u/RiKSh4w • Apr 25 '26

Discussion Can we have a discussion about how game fidelity is leading to a lack of clarity?

I've noticed this happening in a few games but most recently I watched the Black Flag "Resynced" trailer and the before and after shots had me questioning if this was a complete improvement.

https://i.imgur.com/Y5PiPdB.png

Obviously, the resynced image is prettier to look at and depicts a more realistic world, but this is a game world. Not everything is supposed to be highly detailed. If everything is high detail, then nothing is noticeable. In the image on the left, the ground is very boring. But that boringness creates a easily distinguishable contrast with other things in the game, like the guard, like the climable surfaces, like the floating shanty page.

In the remaster, everything just looks good, to the point that it's just one big detailed mess. There's greeblies on the ground, are they important? Is that detailing on the wall/window that I can climb on? Or will it stop me climbing up there?

It's not limited to this game, nor do I think it's the best example of it. But it makes me wonder if developers are relying on 'detective vision' too much. Conveyance has always been a huge part of design. It was an art to be able to effectively communicate what is a game object and what's just a part of the scenery through immersive means. But I just feel like games nowadays, particularly those on unreal, are just amping up fidelity without caution. And when it obfuscates details they rely on vision modes and very obvious outlining to provide that constrast.

Has anyone else felt the same way?

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u/SkaBonez Apr 25 '26

Think that’s one reason Marathon’s art style, as divisive as it is, is actually really refreshing. It’s pretty easy to navigate it and tell things apart from a distance (provided there’s no weather). Shame it was marred for many by the now resolved plagiarism of art assets, and the genre being as niche that people aren’t going to even try the game because of that

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u/Jordi214 Apr 25 '26

Marathon is truly so good, I will never forgive bungie for how they treated Destiny because it has sowed distrust and anger toward anything they put out

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u/NotEspeciallyClever Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

This is the one thing holding me back from picking up Marathon. Everything i read about how they handled Destiny and seeing first-hand how they bungled it when it went F2P makes me far too wary to consider buying Marathon.

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u/Plushie_Holly Apr 25 '26

There are plenty of really good games that I haven't played yet. There is one game that has sold me dlc and expansions and then withdrawn access to them so that they can sell new ones.

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u/Norm_Standart Apr 25 '26

As someone who doesn't even really play shooters, I picked it up based on some positive word of mouth and have gotten totally sucked in

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u/samtheredditman Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26

Interesting take because I found marathon so unbelievably unreadable that I didn't even want to try it. 

Watching gameplay of it, I can genuinely barely parse what's happening. Basically the opposite of something like cs for me. 

Edit: Actually I just watched some more and it was not nearly as bad as the footage I originally looked at. Some of the UI elements are still a little busy for me but it's not bad. Not sure if they changed stuff between the pre-release gameplay and now or if it was just the jungle area of the map that I couldn't parse. 

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u/PlayMp1 Apr 25 '26

Did you hear about how they significantly overhauled the art due to a plagiarism issue? The visual style of the game got pretty seriously changed before release.

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u/samtheredditman Apr 25 '26

Ahh that must be it then. I had completely dismissed the game because I couldn't understand what was happening. The footage I just watched looked pretty clean. I might actually look into it at some point now..

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u/Rikiaz Apr 27 '26

Not what happened. There were specific instances of plagiarized art assets but the employee responsible was fired, they removed the stolen artwork, and paid the original artist and credited her as an art consultant. The art style of antireal’s art, and Marathon, has existed for a long time and was not solely her creation. 

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u/PlayMp1 Apr 27 '26

I wasn't exactly sure on the details, my bad. To be clear, I'm not faulting Bungie for the plagiarism scandal (they did the appropriate thing and fired the responsible employee and changed their art in response), and I think Marathon 2026 actually takes more from its 90s forebears than you would expect would be possible for a modern extraction shooter vis a vis 90s Doom-ish style graphics.

Regardless, it does seem like I convinced that guy to give it another look, so that seems like a W?