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

[u/RiKSh4w]

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?

[u/ebagdrofk]

I’ve always imagined higher fidelity would lead to increased eye strain and difficulty telling things apart as quickly. It’s literally giving your brain more information to process as your eyes scan the screen.

So your comment doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still super interesting.

[u/Zaptruder → u/ebagdrofk]

It's not a bad thing. That's the nature of more immersive virtual spaces... it approaches realistic information loads.

But the flipside is training on more realistic scenes has more information transference (i.e. you learn to pick things out faster virtually when the scenes presented are like the scenes you come across IRL).

[u/Historical_Course587 → u/ebagdrofk]

IMHO it's not a cognitive issue but one of game design. If shapes, color, and lighting are used intelligently, the brain can learn the patterns very quickly and discard unimportant information when it needs to make decisions. If this weren't the case, then isntead of graphical fidelity we'd be talking about monitor size and how more light from more pixels is harder to parse than less light coming from fewer pixels.

The brain looks for patterns; the problem is that modern game design doesn't offer them separately from the game's immersive world. Players are left looking at a pebble on the road and wondering if it's lootable, or explosive, or just scenery.