given the current state of the industry and its talent drain, diminishing returns might be true and have happened prematurely.
I believe the absolute BEST course of action that can restore the glory of the videogame industry is to at least upgrade the cinematography of games [because other aspects if used correctly are at least decent] to make the most of the engine and avoid grapgically bland games without unique visual identities [akin to the ones we have been getting the past 5-6 years]
when I look back at all the games we seem to have praised on this thread, a pattern emerges. The majority of those games and even demos had proper directions in terms of cinematography, lighting, color grading.
They might not have utilized the absolute cutting-edge tech of the day [Callisto Protocol was on UE4], yet they managed to impress us with their clever presentation of lighting, shadows, and colours.
any videogame project where Hollywood technical talent [ and I don't mean actors or writers ] or simply people who were passionate about cinematography were present, the game turned out astonishing visually [The Matrix Demo, The Order1886, Senua2 , etc.]
Yeah, Callisto is a cinematic powerhouse you'd expect from ND and maybe Kojima. Except they only have that level of cinematography in carefully crafted cutscenes whereas Callisto somehow managed to make every single room and corridor have hollywood quality cinematography. Hellblade 2 last year felt the same, except its a much smaller game than callisto.
I think ND is going for bigger and more sandboxish game design for a while now, which makes it very hard to light each individual room and hallway like Callisto devs were able to do. They need something like UE5 that allows them to have realtime GI which handles most of the lighting and lets devs iterate quickly. I was just talking about the KCD2 interiors yesterday and how I find the lighting/materials lacking. Then i played Black hawk down and the first mission is basically you climbing down an unfinished building and the lighting in random hallways is perfect. yes, nanite is probably helping with that amazing material quality, but i never for a second felt like there was something wrong with the lighting in all those indirectly lit corridors.
This is a F2P game made by an unknown dev and its perfect. I am pretty sure ND already has a bunch of hollywood talent. The original ND co-founder Jason Rubin specifically said that he went out and got artists from hollywood to work at ND. They just need a better engine. The cutscene they showed was still fantastic despite the stupid female character design, but since the game will most likely be a bigger open world game, they will need to do a lot of handcrafting to make it look perfect in every lighting condition and if GG couldnt manage it with almost 500 devs i dont know how ND with its 250 devs can either.
The industry is full of hollywood caliber talent already. Mafia looks amazing. At least the cutscenes they have shown so far are lit beautifully. Amy Henning's game is likely being made by ex-hollywood artists and cinematographers, and neither of these teams are massive. They just need a great engine.
P.S Callisto is a UE4 game yes, but they actually used several Ray tracing techniques to make it look as good as it does. They not only use Ray traced reflections and shadows, but actually art'd the whole game around Reflections and shadows. the non-RT modes in that game literally dont have shadows and reflections on diffused materials. On top of that, they use a very advanced form of RT reflection that works almost like a RTGI solution by bouncing off light even on cement walls. Lastly, they have something called translucent ray traced reflections which go through enemy body parts giving it a subsurface scattering style effect. It may not be UE5, but it is super high tech.
