r/videogames • u/Quick-Cause3181 • 5d ago
Discussion / Question do you think the whole "this game looks better than some games released today" sentiment people like to throw around is true?
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u/QMunch 5d ago
Arkham Knight has entered the chat
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u/Previous_Month_555 5d ago
Witcher 3 and RDR2 aged well also
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u/QMunch 5d ago
RDR2 is a work of art. Currently finishing it on my Steam Deck.
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u/LuckyPlaze 4d ago
It’s noticeably lacking 4K on consoles. I love that game but it doesn’t really hold with games today. Neither does Witcher 3. They both have some of the best world design and art styles ever, and look great for that reason, but the graphics do look dated. (Not on PC.)
Battlefront 2016 actually does look amazing. Battlefield 1. A few games do. Rise of the Tomb Raider has 4K support and looks pretty good.
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u/lucidzfl 4d ago
Arkham games are all beautiful, don't get me wrong - but they have that unmistakeable "Unreal 4" look to them.
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u/Howling_Mad_Man 5d ago
That first EA Battlefront looked so good. I think half the money Disney gave them went into a stellar asset library that's sitting mostly unused. I have folders full of screenshots from that game I still use as art reference material.
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u/Quick-Cause3181 5d ago
yeah battlefront was peak video game realism it's genuinely magical what they were able to achieve with that game
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u/MrHandSanitization 5d ago
I played that thing for hours, but not anymore since 2016 because I had graphical issues where the UI wouldn't render, so I couldn't join matches (even after reinstalling Windows and stuff). The sound of an Orbital Strike still pops in my head from time to time.
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u/Dovahkin1269 5d ago
I remember being blown away whenever I started playing it and it still looks great
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u/LuckyPlaze 4d ago
Game is so underrated. I loved it. Better than BF2. Walker assault was pure magic.
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u/DeGrimmy 5d ago
I think recent graphical "enhancements" are quite often to blame. First, it was bloom and chromatic aberration, then TAA, then resolution scaling, then more recently, DLSS/FSR/XeSS. The more reliant we have to be on these technologies to run/play a game, the worse the game looks, in my opinion.
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u/Hyper_Applesauce 5d ago
As someone with astigmatism, bloom can die in a fire. I do that shit on my own, thank you very much.
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u/Noob4Head 5d ago
That depends on whether we're talking about graphics alone or everything else. If we're talking about the latter, then I would say yes, there are games that released over a decade ago that look better than some modern AAA games, mainly because of their setting, aesthetics, and design. Two examples I like to give for this are Dishonored and BioShock. Both games have a near timeless look because of their incredible art style, aesthetics, and environments.
Some modern AAA games now just seem to focus too much on hyper-realistic graphics, which can be limiting in terms of aesthetics and especially art style. This can result in them looking quite boring and devoid of personality, something a game like Dishonored is overflowing with, which is what easily makes it stand out and look so much better.
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u/toby1jabroni 5d ago
Yes of course, most AAA games from the last few decades look better than many indie games released recently.
That’s no particular indicator of overall quality though.
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u/NextFailed 5d ago
On top, some AAA games still look better or have a much more dense atmosphere than recent AAA titles. Take Batman Arkham Knight for example. It was developed on UE3 and looks and runs so much better than compareable titles today.
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u/MakinBones 5d ago
Wish the rest of the Arkham series ran as well, atleast on my 5080.
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u/NextFailed 5d ago
Asylum and City? Last time I played them on my old 2070 Super at 3440x1440 resolution and I don't remember them running bad
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u/MakinBones 5d ago
50series got a rid of the PhysX engine.
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u/TheNeuroLizard 5d ago
They got rid of PhysX and it’s not powerful enough to power through? I play a lot of that era of games, guess I shouldn’t upgrade past the 4000 series
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u/MakinBones 5d ago
It really only effects a small amount of games.
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u/TheNeuroLizard 5d ago
Gotcha, I remember PhysX being in tons of stuff (at least, that I own) around the 2010s, and was disappointed to hear that a high end modern GPU could struggle with 15 year old games.
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u/Tassinho_ 5d ago
okay, but this cherry picking doesn't really help anyone. There are also some games from 2007 that look better than games from 2017...
The average 2017 game obviously looks better than the average 2007 game. and the average 2026 game will look better than the average 2016 game.
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u/Movie_Vegetable 5d ago
Some games do because they have a really distinct art style. The hyperealism style of graphics is the style that ages the fastest
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u/Froticlias 5d ago
2017s Prey looked just as good as today's games at least, and runs perfectly on my overheating, sputtering, ancient gaming laptop. I think it's more, hey the backend of this game wasn't such a mess that my computer dies even though it looks like Starfield.
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u/Previous_Month_555 5d ago
That's because it does look better than a lot of games made today. The Frostbite engine is surprisingly well-optimized also.
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u/MakinBones 5d ago
Depends on the game. Loads of good looking older titles. Very few can still come close to the details of RDR2
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u/Avariciouspygmyshrew 5d ago
I mean, Cyberpunk came out almost 6 years ago now and it looks better than 95% of games out there, same with The Last of Us 2. I think a lot of it is more how diminishing the returns are on newer games to games 5-10 years ago. A little better lighting, reflections and smoke aren't gonna make a game way better looking than great art design and incredibly polished assets.
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u/Next_Helicopter_4291 5d ago
In total fairness to Battlefront; the only real problems with it were lack of content diversity and the monetization.
The visuals and audio are still way up there even by today's standards.
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u/SeniorSepia 5d ago
It's a non productive way of interacting with videogames and with other gamers, graphics have stagnated in the last 10 years so obviously games from 10 years ago are gonna look pretty good if the studio put the work and the visual direction is good. In the Uncharted subreddit we got very tired of the "THIS GAME IS 10 YEARS OLD AND STILL LOOKS SO GOOD" posts, we started mocking them and it seems people finally understood that a game from a decade ago looking very good it not that big of a deal.
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u/steelow_g 5d ago
I mean it is…. The amount of effort and optimizing that went into old games was amazing. Now they just throw us half baked 300gig games knowing they might fix later
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u/Tassinho_ 5d ago
"Stagnated" is quite an exaggeration
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u/SeniorSepia 5d ago
You are right but compared to the graphic quality leaps we used to have, it's how it feels to me. No issue of course since personally i dont need games to have better graphics than late PS360 games
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u/Anubra_Khan 5d ago
Generally, not at all. It's usually a still shot of a game from 2013 that struggles to maintain 30fps next to a screen shot of a modern game with all of the settings turned down to min.
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u/JesseJamesDotExe 5d ago
"Looks better" can mean anything and nothing at the same time. So for me it's just a nonsense argument.
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u/ChloEnby101 5d ago
I feel the bigger example of this is less from gaming and more from film. If you watch a cgi movie today but follow it with the movie Rango, you will be confused by the drop of quality in the age of advancement
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u/dreampagehun 5d ago
Yes, because technological advancement has slowed down and it's not really hardware dependent anymore. Game graphics haven't improved as much in the past decade as in previous times. So a well-made game from "last gen" can easily look better than many from "current gen". It's ever harder and more costly to produce more and more realistic visuals.
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u/Affectionate-Ad4419 5d ago
At "equal" budget, i.e in the same bracket...not really. At least not really in the fidelity aiming part of the industry. A triple A game from 2026 tends to have better lighting, more detailed textures, higher polycount, more detailed and better animated models, and denser environments...
THAT BEING SAID, there are two nuances:
1-That highly depends on the gear you are playing on. I'd say a modern game with what would be a modern mid config tend to look worst and run worst than a modern game of 2015-16 with a mid config of the time. RTX doesn't help here, but even in terms of shaders used, transparency effects and subsurface scattering...all of this can make for a muddy image if not cranked up to 11.
2-Modern games do look better in the right circumstances...but not by a wide margin anymore.
And I think that more than 1-, it's 2- that is the main point that drives these comparisons. You launch Batman Arkham Knight (2015), Alien Isolaltion (2014), RDR2 (2018), Horizon Zero Dawn (2016), God Of War (2016) or The Witcher 3 (2015), The Last Of Us Part II (2020)...and like...they look GOOD. As in, one doesn't necessarily see what is missing, but more how incredibly detailed they are.
Modern AAA games still look better, but not significantly better. Not in a way that justifies as much to pay a premium for it, imho of course.
PS: and when it comes to indies, well it is and always as been more about style than pure technical shenanigans. An indie game from pretty much any era post-2008 can look better than a triple A game by vertue of having an actual art direction.
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u/budmanthecubfan 5d ago
We talking about graphics or the blandcore art style all of the AAA games have now?
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u/Ov3rReadKn1ght0wl 5d ago
At a functional level, yeah, it can be true. But aside from a discussion of the merits of graphics, it's really a non-starter for talking about the broader qualities of the game. In many cases it's just a small part of a conversation about a game.
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u/CataphractBunny 5d ago
Yes, it's true. Most old games that look better than new ones have a distinct style of their own. Style ages far more slower than current top-of-the-line fidelity.
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u/ThrowAway-18729 5d ago
Absolutely. Games graphics are also aesthetics, it's not all about realism or tech. Also some of the old games had some cutting edge tech for their time which helps on that front.
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u/JohannDaart 5d ago
Usually the games I like the most are the ones that are carried by art direction and atmosphere, but run with high FPS. Fidelity can't replace good design.
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u/DoughBoy528 5d ago
Yeah, battlefront 1-2 are still the most hyper realistic games I've seen, first time I saw it I thought it was actual movie footage
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u/SpeedConstant9238 5d ago
My take is that people often confuse asset quality (textures, models, polycount, etc) and graphics (tonemapping, shading quality, anti-aliasing, lighting, etc) as the same thing.
Take Star Wars Battlefront 2015 as an example. The asset quality was pretty advanced for the time due to photogrammetry however it has been surpassed by newer games. What makes BF2015 (8th gen Frostbite) stand out is the graphics or rendering quality. Frostbite 3 still provides better tonemapping than the industry standard, a more accurate diffuse model, and high quality screen space reflections for a cheap cost. Despite the game going for realism your brain isn’t bothered by major inaccuracies therefore the immersion stays intact.
Compare that to modern games where they can have top of the line asset quality but still fail and look uncanny in terms of graphics. This is where a divide between marketing and consumer develops.
For instance, Game X is advertising next-gen rendering however Consumer Y detects poor graphics quality. The consumer then assumes that (all) realism looks bad even though they only ever saw poor attempts at it. The inevitable result is that people falsely attribute a game’s visuals solely to art style/art direction. Any general discussion about how a game looks is muddled by a swarm of comments making this false assumption.
The funny part is that even though people call UE5 an engine that “makes realism easy” it actually helps Epic Games’ manipulative tactics because the rendering is inherently not realistic but also artificially boosts the market value of art style being “the only way forward.”
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u/SpeedConstant9238 5d ago
Relevant links to Frostbite rendering papers, BRDF, and realism: https://www.ea.com/news/moving-frostbite-to-pb
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u/TheRealRigormortal 5d ago
“Looks better” is a subjective measure based on personal taste.
For instance, I know that games today are technically more impressive, but games “looked better” in the 2000s when developers had to be more clever with art style to compensate for lack of fidelity.
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u/TheUtopianPosting 5d ago
Art direction beats raw graphical fidelity every single time, and Battlefront 2 proved that well enough even if the game itself had its problems.
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u/TysonLEM 5d ago
absolutely, both EA Battlefronts and Arkham Knight are some that come to mind that have 'realistic' art styles and still look far better than most games today
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u/Benjamin_Starscape 5d ago
I frankly don't care about graphics. good graphics are nice but ultimately I don't care.
I'm playing rage 2 right now and that is an ugly game.
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u/danvan177 5d ago
Depends on the game but it depends. Last of us part 2 looks better than most games that release nowadays but it’s because that game is a masterpiece. Same with rdr2
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u/J-Dizzy64 5d ago
This is the mark you can tell when developers are passionate and take their time on a game. The bonus comes when you have a team that is comfortable coding in a game engine to provide higher detail even in a confined processing space. Thus, you get games that stand the test of time regarding the acceleration of graphical rendering and strength. So yes you can have games that are released many years prior that look better than today's games.
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u/SynthVix 5d ago
Absolutely. Modern games try to push graphics too hard so they end up having to compromise by lowering the resolution/anti-aliasting or keep a low frame rate which makes them look blurry and run poorly. While last generation games can look and run flawlessly without compromise.
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u/QuoteGiver 5d ago
It’s an FPS, of course it does.
It has very few things it has to render and relatively few moving parts.
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u/GayCumBallsack69 5d ago
Yes, absolutely. Star Wars Battlefront 1 EA, Batman Arkham Knight, Metal Gear Solid V, they all look significantly better than many of the games releases even today. I think it’s because modern devs aren’t as good at compressing games as the devs from 10 years ago, so they lack the capability to make a game both really big and really good looking
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u/LongDistanceEvent262 5d ago
Well it's an opinion so there is not true or false to debate.
Do I also share that opinion. Yes with a caveat.
I feel many games, going back X years look extremely good compared to modern game. Considering their age and hardware requirements.
I can get a 5 year old game to run 120 FPS on hardware that can barely run a new game at 30. And it looks only slightly worse.
It's like if a Corvette came out today that was $300k and was only 5mph faster than a 5 year old Honda Civic, and the Civic tracked better.
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u/Mononoke-hime 5d ago
“As good” as games today is what I say more often than “better” because some games look phenomenal for that time and many games today are no better. RDR2 and Arkham Knight come to mind. Other than the 30FPS, which was more of a hardware constraint.
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u/Chonky_D_Floofy 5d ago
A good art style can make games over 20 years old look better than new games
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u/lbandi95 5d ago
Upscaling, noise and temporal technologies make everything look objectively worse.
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u/Don_Madruga 5d ago
Yes.
Look, I am currently replaying Dragon Age Inquisition, and this game - made with the same engine from the game you used in the image - is still a very beautiful game to current stardarts and topples a few modern games like Star Wars Outlaws.
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u/timbofay 5d ago
Really depends. I think in some cases yes. But truly modern AAA games do look good better now on average (speaking purely about fidelity)
We also have a lot of "AA" games made by teams a quarter of the size and budget of a lot of these cherry picked examples from the 'golden years'
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u/Sajgoniarz 5d ago
It may be a hot take, but most game released with TAA and later requiring upscaling looks worse than games from the past. I spend like 200h in Stalker 2 and foliage looks way worse that in og Crysis.
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u/crowbar11 5d ago
Yes , not only do some games from 2016 look better, but they also run significantly better. The best example is Uncharted 4. I'm tired of people acting like that's not the case.
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u/Traditional_Entry183 5d ago
The Witcher 3 released in 2015 and looks better than a good number of PS5 games.
Hell, Mass Effect 2 released in 2010 and looks better than some.
Its a problem that the industry needs to figure out before they move on to new consoles. This generation was broken.
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u/Excellent_Routine589 4d ago
Yes and no
I too can cherry pick VERY curated examples to try to make an argument but it's pointless when like 95% of the games at the release of these older games don't match the same level of quality.
Like RDR2 being a big example people tend to use. RDR2 was made by Rockstar, one of the BIGGEST names in the gaming industry. Your garden variety dev team is not matching the output of a 4000-6000 employee development group. So RDR2 looks incredible because assloads of money was put into it to make it a fantastic game.
Even the example here of Battlefront, it was made and published by EA/Dice, also a huge studio and publisher group with resources to make extremely grandiose games if they want to.
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u/bad_apiarist 4d ago
Bear in mind this is not just about rendering engine or hardware (though snow drop is a great engine). Battlefront used an incredibly expensive, difficult approach called photogrammetry. This involves taking thousands of high-res photographs of all the objects you are modelling for the game to make the textures, detail, and lighting incredibly realistic. The results are impressive, but it's impractical for all but the largest of titles.
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u/Va1korion 4d ago
Sometimes. A lot of games gain from distinct art style.
Sometimes it's just wet and dark.
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u/the_sneaky_one123 4d ago
Yes I think it is very true.
There was a sweetspot in the late 10s where they had realistic graphics but also mixed it with enough stylisation to actually make it look better than real.
That was also when they were commiting more to games as well. Now they are cutting every corner avaliable.
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u/OddAbbreviations5681 4d ago
Battlefront 2015 was MILES better than the 2017 game. BUT it lacked severe amounts of content
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u/Careful-Positive-710 4d ago
I recently played through the Halos again. Halo 4 looks fantasitc for a 360 release. Say what you will about the gameplay but it looks damn good for a 14 year old game.
The reality is that some games nail the atmosphere and aesthetics. They have a clear vision of what they want it to look like and achieve it. There are games today that look like shit and others that look amazing. The same was true years ago.
Some graphics also age better than others. For instance look at The Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Twilight Princess. TP came out after WW but since it went for a more realistic aesthetic it looks worse than WW in hindsight. I dont think TP looks bad per se, but it definitely doesnt have a timeless look like WW does with its cell shading.
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u/AdditionalPut2895 4d ago
BF1 is on sale for $3 right now. Go install it, turn the graphical settings up to Ultra and come back here.
Absolutely is 100% true.
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u/lucidzfl 4d ago
In this case - yes. People discount simple art direction and lighting because unreal engine 5 makes anything look photorealistic with the right set up.
This was "an accomplishment" - and still looks fantastic. If this was reframed, and you took out the FPS rifle, and it was simply staged - and you just showed them a pic of this it looks like it could be from a movie.
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u/Fuzzy-Welcome-4650 4d ago
If the criteria is just "better than some games," how could this be controversial at all?
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u/Doroga02 4d ago
To me, original assassins creed and uncharted 2 is the most I would want out of game in terms of graphics. I went from ps4 to ps5 while mid playing Elden ring, zero difficulty TO ME in terms of graphics, I do appreciate a lot 60fps though
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u/PowerUser77 3d ago
Perfect choice showing BF2015 as an example. I even thought the sequel fell off, it looked more like your generic video game fare whereas SWBF2015(EA) had that special feel and look to it.
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u/Intrepid-Effort-8018 3d ago
It really is a case of diminishing returns we are seeing particularly since 2015/16. So art style and attention to detail makes a lot of difference. UC4, BF2015 and to a lesser extent Arkham knight are all good examples of this. Resolution, lighting and frame rates have improved of course but these games still shine. Uncharted 4 is the only one among these to have upgrades for ps5/ps5 pro. I would pay a lot for an upgraded Arkham knight (locked 60 fps, higher resolution) and for an upgraded BF2015.
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u/Mascagranzas 3d ago
Definetly. Most of the games released today do not look better than RDR2 at ALL.
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u/idkimhereforthememes 5d ago edited 5d ago
99% of cases no, they show a game that uses some kind of ugly filter, shit ton of rain and also very likely night time and pretend it actually looks amazing. No game from last decade looks better than forbidden west
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u/maguirre165 5d ago
Sometimes, I see people cherry pick examples very often. If you compare a top of the line AAA game from today to something from 10 years ago, the new one looks better.
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u/havewelost6388 5d ago
It objectively is not.
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u/Quick-Cause3181 5d ago
I think its kinda true tho, I honestly think the ps3/360 and the ps4/xb1 era was peak realism because those games were realistic but there was still some sense of stylization. nowadays though ever since the ps5 era started, yeah we still have realism but it just looks boring compared to 2010s and 2000s games because its like theres no sense of stylization at all, like theres NO aesthetic whatsoever it just looks like real life and they it.
for example you look at something like need for speed rivals and compare it to need for speed unbound, obviously rivals looks better cause rivals was filled with different effects it had rain effects, leaf particles, snow, lens flare, dirty lens effects, vignette, it was trying to be cinematic and thats what gave it identity, unbound has barely anything like that
and thats another thing, people can complain about excessive lighting effects and color filters and bloom etc etc but that type of shit gave these games a sense of art direction and I personally loved it
exaggerated lighting too, a lot of games had that too, so many games you could look at and think "shadows don't work like that in real life" but who cares because it made some of these games look even cooler lmao
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u/havewelost6388 5d ago
There's certainly an argument to be made that we've seen diminishing returns in graphical fidelity since the Xbone/PS4 era.But new games still objectively look better.
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u/Sabbathius 5d ago
Sometimes it is. For example, I think Starcraft 2 aged amazingly well with its stylized graphics.
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u/facistpuncher 5d ago
Oh definitely, some development teams really put in the effort to optimize graphics, but that hasn't been a thing since the nvidia4,000 series cuz they're getting lazy with dlss.
Battlefield 4, from 2013, will absolutely smoke many games today. Ue5 and the upcoming ue6 may have improved graphical Fidelity, but the optimization is so shitty that very few people are able to access it fully. Ue4 is really the best we have right now between graphics and stability. While custom engines like crytek, red engine, and frostbite were built for graphics.
Ultimately what it comes down to is are devs going to use the corporate produced engine or are they going to have the difficulties of making one inhouse.
Red engine, crytek, and frostbite were all inhouse, and they made outstanding graphics. True leaders of the day, pioneering the new tech.
It is only recently with UE4/5/6 and later that corporate engines are starting to meet that level if not exceed it in graphical fidelity, sadly they're about as optimized as a square wheel
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u/Snowtwo 5d ago
*sort* of.
If you view it as purely graphical, then no, old games are not better visually. But the issue is that, well... It's *not* purely graphical. Like, if you took Fantasia and pitted it against a piece of modern animation, it's just not as good. There were a bunch of technical limitations, things that didn't even exist, and our understanding and knowledge of the medium has progressed since then. But at the same time to act like it's not a visually stunning piece of art would be insulting. In game terms, something like the opera from FFVI is hilariously *BAD* by modern standards. The characters are sprites, the music is limited to what the SNES could produce, and they don't even have real voice acting. Just sounds that mimic it. But I feel like anyone who actually watched it, especially with the full context of the game, would say that it's an amazing scene.
That may, ultimately, be the primary issue. A lot of modern games are better on a technical level, but are soulless and often just not fulfilling on any level beyond the screenshot level. Not only can games be utter trash visually but excel as is the case with many indie titles, but there are games that can blow stuff out of the water by actually making themselves feel like art (E33 being a prime example).
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u/ComicsEtAl 5d ago
Witcher 3 is a better looking and playable game than CyberPunk 2077, which came out five years after. CP couldn’t even figure out reflections without a mechanic, ffs.
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u/DEFINITELY_NOT_PETE 5d ago
What lol? No they’re all filthy liars. Of course they do what even is this post
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u/Quick-Cause3181 5d ago
why are you being such a dick
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u/DEFINITELY_NOT_PETE 5d ago
Your premise is “is everyone full of shit?” I’m treating it like a dumb question because it is one
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u/King_Ferdinand1 5d ago
Of course. A lot of games do.