I’ve been saying it, here’s a quote from June 2024…
Fable looks good but I’m extremely surprised to see the reactions to it (especially from certain posters drooling over it in this thread). I was expecting it to be ripped apart in here lol.
Personally I don’t think it looks much better than Forbidden West which was cross gen and on a weaker console. Not that I’m complaining it looks good and it’s a complement to be compared to Horizon 2 imo. Is there a 4k video of out or only the IGN video. If so what the fuck are they thinking. 2025 and showing off your graphical showpiece with a 1080p IGN YouTube video full of compression.
In terms of Monster Hunter Wilds it can certainly look poor (mainly due to some really questionable textures) but believe me it has its moments visually. I’m playing in the 60fps mode on PS5 Pro.
Also when people are comparing it to World there’s way, way more going on per frame in Wilds so it has to be budgeted in the render. It’s baffling how some of you don’t understand this? It’s the same as the Astrobot PS5 thread from today. It’s a nice but not stunning looking game but part of the reason for that is because they prioritised physics simulations over pure visual fidelity.
Shock horror but in a Monster Hunter game the star of the show are the Monsters. They get most of the polygon and texture budget then there’s the fact that multiples of those same monsters can fight each other and that parts can be broken off them while they’re fighting which leads to much more fun and emergent gameplay. They can effect water, oil, sand, fire, electricity and geometry in real time on top of a larger, more connected environment which uses a much more precise lighting system instead of hiding a lot of the visual limitations with one of the most hideous uses of extreme bloom outside of Wind Waker HD lol.
All of these things have to be taken into account. They could have just made World 2 and it would have looked much better (probably very close to the Wilds cutscenes) but then there’s no compute left for the gameplay improvements and World interactions they wanted to implement.
Also I keep bringing it up but the most important reason for most of the disappointment around visuals this gen are very simple and I’m surprised John from DF didn’t bring it up in his explanation. We have went from the industry targeting 30fps on PS4/XBO to 99% of games targeting 60fps this gen as the base then scaling up for the ‘fidelity mode’. That means developers have 16ms less to work with per frame on average thus the visuals have been held back this gen more than other generations.
If tomorrow every publisher mandated that every game was 1080p base resolution at 30fps you’d see a massive visual leap overnight but people online and on these very forums bitched and moaned and bitched and cried for over a decade for 60fps console games and it’s ended up hurting the very high end PC players that used to cry about it so much in the process because the base experience has to run at fucking 720p base resolution at 60fps on a Series S. (soon to be 720p/30fps on Switch 2).
Video games are a bunch of very early in development choices. Sometimes developers focus on the visuals. Sometimes they focus on world interactivity. We simply don’t have the power (on consoles which 99% of AAA games target) for both unfortunately.
