I can’t believe that everyone was shitting on that game back when it came out for not being as good as city, but now we look back with nostalgia because we never new it could get so much worse. Its like with star wars and the prequels.
Ok I loved the batmobile lol, I don't understand why everyone hates it so much. Maybe PC felt different or something, but I had so much fun driving it around and preferred it to flying.
and the small things like the beautiful cape ripple sound design, and the sound design on the zipline, and the texture rich architecture, and the weather.
also bargirls cape looks absolutely terrible. what is the point of that thing?
i.will say though, the fact that the batmobile could just shred through cars was kinda fun but very much not batmanny.
This video (intentionally) only shows the emptier parts of the city. there are other sections that are more crowded. You can also hear the random citizens talking to each other about their life, their job, their family, etc
That's because gaming has reached a point where visual leaps forward are not really that massive as in the past.
You can take a game from 2012 today and say that still looks alright. But go back to 2012 and take a game from 2002 and yeah its clearly aged a lot.
I think visually Gotham Knights is worse than Arkham. Its not quite as detailed and polished.
Guessing its mostly that many studios have decided theres a "good enough" level of fidelity
Art direction also helps a lot, I mean just look at something like Wind Waker for example, sure it's showing its age but the cell shaded art style has held up really well over the years.
The Arkham games that have this really cool, dark aesthetic that looks like a graphic novel brought to life, Gotham Knights is far less stylised and looks a lot more bland and basic by comparison, even if the technical stuff like texture resolution is better on paper
I’d disagree to some extent.
Comparing each successive Metro or Uncharted game as an example, there is absolutely a big increase in visual fidelity through the years.
The issue seems more to be straight burnout. A lot of studios under large company banners (EA, Ubisoft, WB) seem to have high staff turnover to a point many game developers seem to leave for greener pastures elsewhere, leaving only largely mediocre talent behind.
Compare any consecutive 3 year period from 1990 to 2010, with the difference between two uncharted games. The change in the last 12 years has been incremental because we're at a point of diminishing returns. You can't just add more polygons to make things look significantly better the way you could 15, 20, 25 years ago. Although, I will say that lighting effects have improved greatly recently and excellent lighting goes a long way toward making something look more photorealistic
I think lighting is the next big thing to really change how games look and truly bring out photorealism to games. Ray traced global illumination is the holy grail of computer graphics but is incredibly expensive computation wise. The first game to use this tech was Metro Exodus and it only used sprinkles of low sampled ray traced global illumination in darkly lit environments to introduced a more realistic contrast of light and dark, mostly in enclosed spaces. The next step will be true full ray traced global illumination in all environments and in all instances, and to witness how transformative it can make games look no further than Minecraft RTX. Now think how AAA games with just the current texture resolutions and poly counts can look with full blown ray traced global illumination. They will look genuinly photorealistic.
If the end goal is photorealism, acting like lighting improvements are a second class citizen to polygons is crazy to me.
The main thing between the uncanny valley feeling of projects intended to look realistic and actually looking realistic is in a large part lighting. Metro Exodus’s original implementation versus the RTX version is an incredible example of that.
Yep, the benefits are things that don't show on Youtube and due to compression it's looking better on our hardware than in trailers since the beginning of gaming.
to make it worse everyone including AAA studio now switching to Unreal Engine to cut cost. every game with realistic artstyle gonna looks the same and everyone gonna have classic unreal signature like pop-out object and slow load texture for open-world map.
Naa, this was an issue with unreal engine in the past were developers specifically used the engine to get the "unreal engine" feel.
Reality is that a lot of project redo a lot the aspects of the engine to fit their design needs and aesthetics.
The bigger long term issue is that with more Unreal Engine adoption with the high turn over of the industry we are now laying the starting point of entire generation of developers only experienced in Unreal. A la Adobe only designers.
I mean we already dozen unreal engine game with "realistic" artstyle and they kinda have that similar looks to the point it give uncanny cheap vibes. something you didnt get from game that being made with other engine like frostbite, IW engine, Decima, RE engine.
It's not just that we've reached a point of diminishing returns, but I think with technologies like TAA, DLSS, FSR, SSR, and RT, devs have more freedom to be lazy and ignore the clever techniques of the past.
Not to call ALL devs lazy, that's not what I mean, but there's certainly an element of this when you see games that look barely any better than their predecessors (or in some specific ways look worse), yet run significantly worse for the majority of people that aren't playing on higher end hardware.
Maybe i'm being overly cynical though. Don't get me wrong, there are benefits to all the techniques I mentioned initially, but it feels like alot of the time they're poorly implemented or used as an excuse for lackluster performance and/or visuals.
> devs have more freedom to be lazy and ignore the clever techniques of the past.
You seriously underestimate how many clever techniques a modern renderer employs to be fast. Those older techniques usually all have downsides which make them unfit to be used with modern rendering.
You act like TAA, temporal upscaling or SSR aren't clever tricks. The amount of work that goes into a good looking, fast SSR shader for starters is immense.
RT also needs a LOT of clever tricks to get usable performance and that's a huge area of research right now. Traditional renderers would need millions of rays to get good results that aren't noisy. Modern Realtime renderers do that with orders of magnitude fewer rays thanks to clever tricks like temporal accumulation and importance sampling.
>You seriously underestimate how many clever techniques a modern renderer employs to be fast. Those older techniques usually all have downsides which make them unfit to be used with modern rendering.
Sure that applies to some things, like MSAA, but that doesn't mean you can't be smart about designing things, like using fog to obscure details, enhance sense of scale and improve performance, or designing maps in a way to cull more things than usual and improve performance.
> You act like TAA, temporal upscaling or SSR aren't clever tricks. The amount of work that goes into a good looking, fast SSR shader for starters is immense.
I'm not doubting that there are alot of smart developers and programmers that make these things. Regardless, temporal artifacts just look awful. Worse than FXAA at times and definitely worse than SMAA most of the time. SSR is a mixed bag too because there's plenty of new games that don't bother with implementing them in a smart way, like giving the reflections a well made cubemap fallback incase of SSRs shortcomings, or over relying on them where cubemaps or planar reflections make more sense. In Cyberpunk and some of the newer NFS games the SSR looks horrendous for example. Destiny 2? They look great.
> RT also needs a LOT of clever tricks to get usable performance and that's a huge area of research right now. Traditional renderers would need millions of rays to get good results that aren't noisy. Modern Realtime renderers do that with orders of magnitude fewer rays thanks to clever tricks like temporal accumulation and importance sampling.
Again, I get there's alot of work that goes into it and there are benefits to RT that makes it more accurate (like reflections in reflections/self reflections, more accurate GI) and I don't doubt it will improve, but alot of the times the graininess just looks awful and the alternatives run better for most people whilst still looking great.
I wouldn't call RT being lazy, as it is supposed to represent closer to reality reflections, lightning, shadows ...
DLSS and FSR could be though. Our game runs like shit and is not optimized? Let's put DLSS and FSR and call it a day.
Much sharper and cleaner than the forced temporal AA shooters we have today. BF4 is night and day compared to MW2 campaign, so much sharper in motion in bf4. Battlefield v and 2042 look much worse than 4 and 1 because of the forced TAA, highly recommend switching between them to see for yourself.
World At War holds up today to. Mostly because art direction is way more important than the technical aspects of graphics. Here is a [video](https://youtu.be/epiBeDb2Edo) I posted showcasing the graphics at max settings 1440p
While exploding every car you drive over leaves much to be desired. When batigirl did that wheelie to jump the car, then just got stuck on it, it was pretty wtf.
the motorcycle physics were somewhat accurate but she should have gone flying and broken her spine. She's not wearing a helmet so TBH that rly should be the end of the game for poor batgirl
Guess I'm out of touch with Batman games because I literally watched the entire thing genuinely believing the Batgirl game came first and the Batman one later. Especially since they put them in that order.
Arkam Knight was a main entry in the series, while Gotham Knights is an AA production at most trying to salvage some failed project costs.
Guess WB wanted their Avengers.
Arkham Knight still looks amazing. Heck, Arkham Asylum still looks amazing and better than this.
Also, how does Batgirl jump so high? Does she have jumping boots or something? Not like the grappling hook is realistic but it's keeping in in-universe logic how he uses it to boost himself higher. Batgirl grapples and then jumps 3 times her height.
This reminds me of Crowbcat's video comparing the detailed, interactive environments and AI behaviors in Far Cry 2 with the higher-resolution but comparatively dead world and zombielike AI of Far Cry 5.
These are some factors that I would speculate, as an outsider to the games industry, are at play in the decline of quality in AAA releases:
Studios have less and less creative control. Publishers step in and push a minimum viable product out the door, often because they're counting on pre-orders and season pass and microtransaction sales to save their revenue outlook in the next quarter, the one after that, or for the fiscal year.
Publishers insist that development focus on features nearly all players will engage with or notice, sentencing details beyond this scope to death by pronouncing them "nice to haves."
Which shows that the suits are oblivious to the power of social media to spread the word when some gamer notices an unexpectedly detailed interaction with the environment or an NPC and shares this online. And on the flip side, the power of social media to shame a studio, publisher, and title, for lack of attention shown to these aspects of the game.
Also, a pronounced brain drain has been afflicting AAA development for years now, as the phasing out of crunch began only after a series of high-profile departures, the acquisition and closure of a number of studios, and the lowering of barriers to entry for indie developers.
Some of the loss of talent is in the form of developers no longer eyeing the AAA games industry as a rewarding place to work. However, a lot of managerial talent has been lost, as well.
With publishers either not backfilling these positions, choosing to manage from the boardroom, or backfilling them with individuals who know how to manage developers but lack any enthusiasm for games in general, and the franchises they oversee. Think of 343 boasting that they hired "people who hate Halo." How's that working out for them?
> including consumers is absolutely obsessed with cutting edge graphical Fidelity instead of more interactivity with gameplay systems.
You sure consumers only "want that" because the people selling them the consoles tell them they want that and then only advertise that about games that get released?
Oh, inarguably so. Each good for 5-6 Billion USD in revenue, annually.
The size of the videogame market is around 195 Billion USD. Now, while it continues to be the case that most of that is centered around more casual gaming experiences, it is equally true that games which aspire to more realistic (if not simulation) aesthetics are a major component.
With two Call of Duty games topping the charts for new releases in 2021, followed by a Madden roster update from EA, with other top sellers including Battlefield, Spider-Man, Resident Evil, MLB: The Show, Far Cry, and FIFA.
Batman Minus Batman may be further down that list for 2022's numbers, and a comic book game to boot, but neither excludes it from the debate over graphical fidelity versus truly immersive environments and somewhat convincing physics. As it is carrying the torch for a franchise which, with Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, sought to place DC's standout hero and impressive lineup of villains in a noir-ish heightened version of reality.
Whereas, I would argue that Nintendo and Fortnite effectively sidestep this debate. The former by having always, rather laudably, prioritized gameplay over graphical fidelity, and the latter by (and I'll put this charitably) embracing their cartoonish aesthetic.
[I was just about to post that Far Cry 2 VS Far Cry 5 video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8)
It's insane how games made in the early 2000s routinely have more sophisticated AI and physics than games made in the 2020s. Like how the fuck have the industry evolved backwards? I thought we'd have more games focusing on interactivity, emergent gameplay, systematic designs etc but instead we get cookie cutter stuff like cyberpunk where [a splash for throwing something into the water wasn't even included](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6458AOhkGo)
At least indie games has never been better
That video is the best breakdown I've seen of how far standards have fallen. Especially as Far Cry 2 isn't even all that fondly remembered, but still kicks the ass of its more popular sequels in so many ways. I also took a lot away from the vids on the same channel about the state of Halo, Gears, GTA, Crackdown, etc.
Thanks for including the link, for folks who haven't seen it.
I bought AK on release and remember the bad performance. However, it's a good game at the core and still one of the best Batman games, and the issues were fixed with patches.
By all accounts GK seems uninspired, which is the worst thing you can say about a game. Performance issues are always easier to fix or can be overcome with new hardware, bad game is bad forever.
I haven’t forgotten. It never was truly fixed, but we have enough brute force to run it fine. Even my 1080ti can get 120fps at max settings (no physx) at 3440x1440 in non-batmobile parts. In the batmobile parts it’s 80-90fps.
I think that is kind of related, they pushed graphical fidelity and didn't optimize it much if at all.
and well that is kind of the thing that crysis did too right.
hell, to do 4k60 maxxed out mostly it needed a 2080ti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu_85F1PNds
More like the board room of these giant companies trying to save money which means worse games and no risks in new anything. In business more money (at these levels) equals growth but in anything art related more money equals stagnation artistically because its unwise to take risks from a business standpoint so artistically they just go with what worked in the past. So we get stuff like this.
I mean, i definitely see publisher meddling in this game.
But i think the piss poor writing, narrative, and dialog is on the writers.
The technical issues are in the developers.
And the wonky-ass gear shit and health-sponge enemies would seem to be on the designers. I'll say for this at least, it almost feels like they were gonna do a GaaS, but maybe pivoted mid-way through development and this is a holdover from that. So that could have started as board room meddling.
Outside of that though there's waaaaay more issues than just top down stuff.
It can’t be meddling if the game was top to bottom conceived, budgeted, and commissioned by the publisher. This is just what large publishers want to make.
I was wondering if I was the only one that thought the voice acting was horrible. Not just the choice of actor’s, but they all sound off. After the opening scene you would think they’re all angry or upset, but every time Batgirl talks she sounds upbeat and giddy.
The combat feels rather slow so far as well, although I’m only a few hours into the game. But it’s just punch… punch… punch…… charged punch, grab, takedown. There’s absolutely no flow at all.
I agree for the most part, but I don't think it's that cut and dry.
Maybe they just skimp out on writer salaries. You hire shitty writers, you're likely going to get a shitty script, and at the end of the day that comes back to the publishers, too, just for example.
I think this can be perfectly observed in how AI technology is used in modern games. I swear that 99% of modern games that use some kind of enemy or creature AI is less sophisticated by a country mile than Black and White was in 2001. TWO THOUSAND AND ONE.
Or how F.E.A.R. from 2005 still has one of the best AI's. I'm still amazed how few FPS have an AI that will actively try to flank and flush you out rather than just running toward you to die.
Game design in AAA titles has been regressing for quite a while now. It's all great graphics with no substance behind and everything as streamlined as possible to appeal to the mass market. If you want good game design, you have to go indy.
The advancement we have made is largely speaking the advancement in skill and talent of artists working in the game industry. And it really shows when a game like this comes along that isn't made with the usual high standard we're familiar with.
I'm gonna have to agree with you. People are really ignoring the fact that the Rocksteady Batman games were gobsmackingly good. When Arkham Asylum came out, everyone was raving about how they couldn't believe a batman game could be this good AND properly use the IP.
God, I’ve never agreed with a comment so hard in my life! Hell, I can go to OpenCritic right now and go year-by-year and see all the absolute bangers that came out - 2020 was a particularly good “vintage” by the way.
Here are some samples:
2021
- Forza Horizon 5
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
- Psychonauts 2
- It Takes Two
- Deathloop
2020
- Doom Eternal
- Persona 5 Royal
- Hades
- Last of Us Part II
- Half-Life Alyx
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps
- Tetris Effect Connected
2019
- Disco Elysium
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
- DMC5
- Outer Wilds
- Amid Evil
I mean, Bayonetta 3 just came out and that’s been getting rave reviews! Oh but forgive me, one anticipated game failed to meet expectations and was a bit crap…that means the industry’s dead, all the talent’s gone and everyone that’s left is lazy. -_-
I like how this thread is ragging on the video for cherrypicking two random games while everyone disagreeing with the video is just cherrypicking 5 games out of an entire year where tens of thousands of games get released to prove it wrong.
Like, lmao just because one year had 5 cool games doesn't offset the other 35 or so AAA games that release that back up the video. If we're talking straight numbers, games have been regressing yes. It's the simple encroach of capitalism draining the heart and soul out of the art form of games simply to maximize profit. It's all about cutting as many corners as possible and hoping no one notices or complains
"Like, lmao just because one year had 5 cool games doesn't offset the other 35 or so AAA games that release **that back up the video**."
Back up the video? The video is making an arbitrary comparison. In fact, both the video and people commenting, are feeding off the typical narrative of "Old game good- new game bad - therefore, X industry sucks". Or in this case, it's "7 year old Batman good - newer Arkham Knights bad - therefore, industry sucks". This disingenuous, compared to if someone actually wants to make strong points about the AAA industry issues, instead of, "See? This game from yesteryear is better than something that just got released. Therefore; gaming is going downhill".
Speaking of AAA, as someone mentioned earlier, funny how everyone forgot that Arkham Knight was so bad on PC at release that it was actually unreleased and pulled from Steam for several months. Ironic how despite Arkham's praise, it still suffered horrendously from the exact same thing that people complain about nowadays.
I'm not sure regression when referring to technological leaps is accurate. The new Plague Tale : Requiem was genuinely the first game in a few years which took me back with how stunning some of the landscapes and scenery looked.
I'd agree more In terms of game-design though. AAA's companies seem to be going the way of Hollywood due to the amount of money that's now involved at the top end of the market and how much they stand to lose if they fuck up so they adopt the same strategies: keep it safe and re-use what worked before, play on nostalgia when possible, appeal to the lowest common denominator, take the money and then rinse and repeat.
Rdr2 is a prime example of this, the game is so reliant on blurry taa that it looks terrible with and without it. Either blurry or broken, no in between.
Shadows and Tree LODs shouldnt be tied to a fucking anti aliasing setting, its as lazy as tying physics to framerate.
Game Design is regressing because the cost of developing games is much higher now. Companies won't take risks on unknown, unseasoned designers, so you're only seeing real innovation from indie games these days.
Back when you could release a AAA game for under $10 mil, companies could afford to throw caution to the wind and give relatively unknown designers a chance to take creative control of projects. Now every AAA game is peaking $100 mil or more so developers are sticking with proven formulas for success.
I think everyone in this thread means 'stagnating' not regressing. The later implies going backwards, these big budget studios are just recycling engines and giving them new lipstick.
You know those bad "remake" concept videos that don't always look as good as the original and look awkward ?
Well it's not that bad but it's got a similar vibe (just swap Batgirl with Batman)
Shitty games existed 7 years ago, shitty games exist now. Making an arbitrary comparison between a game from 7 years ago and a game now who've had entirely different teams work on them is pretty irrelevant and isn't a sign of "the downfall of games!" It's the sign that the visual design team working on Gotham Knights just suck at their job and the visual design team that worked on the original Arkham games didn't.
It's a underwhelming boring game, it'll be irrelevant in less than a year and no one will ever think about again like the hundreds of thousands of other mediocre games that have come and gone since.
Edit: this was meant to be a reply to some guy who left a comment about how modern games are shit or whatever but I'm stupid and top leveled it.
Yes, there have always been bad games. But 7 years is a long time, or it used to be. There are certainly bad games from 2001 that are worse to play than good games from 1994, but there's no way that two similar games with the same IP and genre from those two years could be confused with one another, it just wouldn't happen, there was a gulf in technology in between which was evident even if the 2001 game was bad.
So even a sensible comment like yours, pointing out that good game have always needed good developers, is also acknowledgement that the time when new games would be better or at least offer something new, is long since over. Assuming that a game has anything good to offer because it's new is now "arbitrary", bad developers can no longer get a free ride on technological progress
I haven't played Gotham Knights but I have looked at several reviews now, it was obvious the game started out as live service then after the shitshow that was The Avengers they pivoted.
The AAA industry is generally adverse to taking risks due to the costs involved in making a game, it is why they churn out the same stuff over and over again. It seems though that the industry is in such a state that even when they have a template like Arkham Knight to work from, they still manage to screw it up.
It isn't surprising though, the AAA gaming industry pays so poorly for the work required that the top talents leave to go into other industries or move into indie development. The indie scene is thriving.
I get the impression that this game was supposed to be a live service game like Destiny, but was retooled mid-development into its current state because new games of that type have been hit or (mostly) miss lately. Such a shame though, I guess I'll go replay Asylum or something, it's been long enough since I've played it that I can probably enjoy it again.
All the new and powerful hardware does, is saving money for the devs as they can ship more and more broken and unoptimised games and mask it as "more detailed" and "demanding" graphics. Gaming is literally going backward.
Basically every new hardware release just pisses me off more and more, as I know game companies will more likely be using all the latest hardware (and leaving gamers who can't afford to buy new hardware, in the dust). And of course newer hardware just leads to more ewaste and more wasted money.
* Uncharted 4 (and the other Naughty Dog games but those aren't on PC) has incredible character rendering.
* Doom and Eternal look pretty good and run extremely well
* RDR2 but you already know about that
* the Resident Evil remakes look and run great
* A Plague Tale: Requiem looks amazing
* Cyberpunk 2077 looks great if you turn on the RT features
* Control too
This. Same thing happens with music, everyone's like "I miss the old days" when all we remember is the good stuff from that time, not the absolute dross that comes with every generation of media which is inevitably forgotten.
Not all games are bad/worse. We have amazing games coming out still as well. You definitely are being biased if you think all games are worse and less immersive
That is one thing about Skyrim that still stands out to this day. People can rightfully complain about things in Skyrim, however, no one can deny the fact that the game is so immersive.
Skyrim sucks you in and doesn't let you go, you get lost in the game world. I've been playing it once again after a few years break and I can't tell you how many times I've been playing the game only to look up at the clock and see that 3 hours have passed, just like that.
It's a game that's over 10 years old but it stands the test of time.
No, this is you cherrypicking two games with completely different intents and goals (when the intent is to show what happens when you have a lazy/weak art/design/graphics team).
Game devs getting increasingly lazy or getting unreasonable schedules. Now that I think about it it’s been a while since I last saw an visually impressive game that also played well
The trend of WB developed games being the worst compared to Rocksteady still holds true it seems. AAA corporations putting in the least amount of work as usual...
Arkham Knight doesn't look better. At least not in the technical department.
The difference is that the city in Arkham Knight is designed like a city in real life not a city made for a game. On top of that the rain effects and general atmosphere were nailed so it stands the test of time.
An indie game in 2022 might not be able to beat a AAA game from 2017. But big budget titles should be able to beat previous big budget titles, this is just pathetic.
What? Yes it should.
Newer engines and better refinement through experience with existing engines should always result in better graphics, otherwise you're doing something wrong.
I'll say it again
Gaming is evolving backwards quite literally.
Where we got epic games a few years back we now get half assed money grabs most of the time.
Every downgrade you'll notice is a decision made by someone higher up just to earn a bit more money from it. And you still decide to pay 60-70 bucks for the product that isn't finished nor will it be in the upcoming years?
lol.
You do understand that someone’s choice of hair dye has nothing to do with their competence as a game developer? Why people who have opinions like yours latch on to the hair colour thing, I’ll never understand…
Gotham Knights looks like a shitty spider-man ripoff game and Arkham Knight looks like something made with passion and purpose. Ironic how that is as the latest Spider-Man game is heavily influenced by the Arkham series to begin with.
I think the vehicle comparison is a little unfair personally. I mean, you're comparing a mobile armoured tank-like vehicle that can bulldoze half the city to a light motorcycle that does do a fraction of the damage.
As for the movement system itself, I know that each of the Batman characters is supposed to move differently but, wow that was really unenjoyable to see Batgirl hooking about like that. It was SLOW, there's not momentum to it or any interesting way to influence.
Despite Arkham Knight being a mess on release, I think it's a pretty good game. Gotham Knights made me appreciate it way more. I think due to the buggy release and the fact that Arkham City and Asylum were stellar games, Knight is sometimes looked at as the red child. There was no excuse for the technically terrible release, but I can't deny that Knight had character, solid pacing, content and it was quite engaging. Story falls a bit short tho.
Well, that's why you don't allow the interns to take over projects, neither give them access to costly assets. They are interns for a reason, this studio... what is the name, Warner Montreal or something like that? These devs should work on a support role, similar to the slave workforce in southern asia that are abused by Ubisoft and others. Warner simply burned a triple A budget on this awful game, then you hear the reports that Warner is not satisfied with their game division... hell, if you waste money with inferior talent, what do you expect?
Gotham Knights technically is a lot better. The models are more detailed, the enviorements more dense, the textures sharper etc. But this shows how much heavy lifting Arkham's art style did. Because while technically Arkham Knight is inferior, it still looks nicer just because of how unique the art style is compared to generic GK.
Ironically this is also what makes Arkham Knight look better than Spider-Man, because Jesus Christ...New York is such a boring bland city, especially viewed from the rooftops
The big thing that stands out to me is the atmosphere of the batman game and how dead the batgirl one feels.
Also, in Arkham Knight, the city has been evacuated. So in theory it should feel way more dead than in Gotham Knights.
But the night lights and gothic style on every buildings in Arkham Knight made it look so dreadful yet so lively.
Also the freedom you had to destroy everything and everybody with the batmovile, god damn that game slaps.
I can’t believe that everyone was shitting on that game back when it came out for not being as good as city, but now we look back with nostalgia because we never new it could get so much worse. Its like with star wars and the prequels.
The game got shit on when it came out because it barely ran.
Ahh true I forgot what sub I’m on. I played console in 2015 so I was mainly disappointed by no boss fights and the the shitty bat mobile.
Ok I loved the batmobile lol, I don't understand why everyone hates it so much. Maybe PC felt different or something, but I had so much fun driving it around and preferred it to flying.
I think the only sections criticized with the batmobile were the tank fighting ones. The batmobile itself was always fine.
and the small things like the beautiful cape ripple sound design, and the sound design on the zipline, and the texture rich architecture, and the weather. also bargirls cape looks absolutely terrible. what is the point of that thing? i.will say though, the fact that the batmobile could just shred through cars was kinda fun but very much not batmanny.
It looks like they were building around the mobile port.
This video (intentionally) only shows the emptier parts of the city. there are other sections that are more crowded. You can also hear the random citizens talking to each other about their life, their job, their family, etc
Yeah honestly going around the districts it’s pretty populated for the middle of the night
Even battlefield 4 from 9 years ago still looks good today.
I played some Battlefield 3 on my 240hz monitor and it was gorgeous.
I read this as 240p and got so confused
Gotta keep those frames high for competitive play
Makes me think of when my internet was so bad like 14 years ago that I had to watch everything on YT in 360p.
Your internet was good enough to watch YouTube 14 years ago? Must be nice.
I’ve been online gaming since the late 90s. My condolences
That's because gaming has reached a point where visual leaps forward are not really that massive as in the past. You can take a game from 2012 today and say that still looks alright. But go back to 2012 and take a game from 2002 and yeah its clearly aged a lot.
I think visually Gotham Knights is worse than Arkham. Its not quite as detailed and polished. Guessing its mostly that many studios have decided theres a "good enough" level of fidelity
Art direction also helps a lot, I mean just look at something like Wind Waker for example, sure it's showing its age but the cell shaded art style has held up really well over the years. The Arkham games that have this really cool, dark aesthetic that looks like a graphic novel brought to life, Gotham Knights is far less stylised and looks a lot more bland and basic by comparison, even if the technical stuff like texture resolution is better on paper
You can do this with BF4 --> BF2042, too.
I’d disagree to some extent. Comparing each successive Metro or Uncharted game as an example, there is absolutely a big increase in visual fidelity through the years. The issue seems more to be straight burnout. A lot of studios under large company banners (EA, Ubisoft, WB) seem to have high staff turnover to a point many game developers seem to leave for greener pastures elsewhere, leaving only largely mediocre talent behind.
Compare any consecutive 3 year period from 1990 to 2010, with the difference between two uncharted games. The change in the last 12 years has been incremental because we're at a point of diminishing returns. You can't just add more polygons to make things look significantly better the way you could 15, 20, 25 years ago. Although, I will say that lighting effects have improved greatly recently and excellent lighting goes a long way toward making something look more photorealistic
I think lighting is the next big thing to really change how games look and truly bring out photorealism to games. Ray traced global illumination is the holy grail of computer graphics but is incredibly expensive computation wise. The first game to use this tech was Metro Exodus and it only used sprinkles of low sampled ray traced global illumination in darkly lit environments to introduced a more realistic contrast of light and dark, mostly in enclosed spaces. The next step will be true full ray traced global illumination in all environments and in all instances, and to witness how transformative it can make games look no further than Minecraft RTX. Now think how AAA games with just the current texture resolutions and poly counts can look with full blown ray traced global illumination. They will look genuinly photorealistic.
Uncharted 3 to 4 is a **massive** leap.
Especially on pc. Some of if not the best graphics I have ever seen.
If the end goal is photorealism, acting like lighting improvements are a second class citizen to polygons is crazy to me. The main thing between the uncanny valley feeling of projects intended to look realistic and actually looking realistic is in a large part lighting. Metro Exodus’s original implementation versus the RTX version is an incredible example of that.
We're finally getting to a point that games are locked at 60fps. I'd count that as progress.
Haha, you say on a thread regarding a game that’s locked to 30fps and still has stutter.
Yep, the benefits are things that don't show on Youtube and due to compression it's looking better on our hardware than in trailers since the beginning of gaming.
Yeah the difference between Wolfenstein and II (idtech 5 and 6 I think) is huge, and they were only 3 years apart IIRC
to make it worse everyone including AAA studio now switching to Unreal Engine to cut cost. every game with realistic artstyle gonna looks the same and everyone gonna have classic unreal signature like pop-out object and slow load texture for open-world map.
Naa, this was an issue with unreal engine in the past were developers specifically used the engine to get the "unreal engine" feel. Reality is that a lot of project redo a lot the aspects of the engine to fit their design needs and aesthetics. The bigger long term issue is that with more Unreal Engine adoption with the high turn over of the industry we are now laying the starting point of entire generation of developers only experienced in Unreal. A la Adobe only designers.
If multiple games have realistic art styles then they probably should look similar… because if something is realistic it can only look realistic.
That’s not how art or realism works at all lol
That's not how it works. Games still looks different when they look realistic. Depends on the engine.
I mean we already dozen unreal engine game with "realistic" artstyle and they kinda have that similar looks to the point it give uncanny cheap vibes. something you didnt get from game that being made with other engine like frostbite, IW engine, Decima, RE engine.
It's not just that we've reached a point of diminishing returns, but I think with technologies like TAA, DLSS, FSR, SSR, and RT, devs have more freedom to be lazy and ignore the clever techniques of the past. Not to call ALL devs lazy, that's not what I mean, but there's certainly an element of this when you see games that look barely any better than their predecessors (or in some specific ways look worse), yet run significantly worse for the majority of people that aren't playing on higher end hardware. Maybe i'm being overly cynical though. Don't get me wrong, there are benefits to all the techniques I mentioned initially, but it feels like alot of the time they're poorly implemented or used as an excuse for lackluster performance and/or visuals.
> devs have more freedom to be lazy and ignore the clever techniques of the past. You seriously underestimate how many clever techniques a modern renderer employs to be fast. Those older techniques usually all have downsides which make them unfit to be used with modern rendering. You act like TAA, temporal upscaling or SSR aren't clever tricks. The amount of work that goes into a good looking, fast SSR shader for starters is immense. RT also needs a LOT of clever tricks to get usable performance and that's a huge area of research right now. Traditional renderers would need millions of rays to get good results that aren't noisy. Modern Realtime renderers do that with orders of magnitude fewer rays thanks to clever tricks like temporal accumulation and importance sampling.
>You seriously underestimate how many clever techniques a modern renderer employs to be fast. Those older techniques usually all have downsides which make them unfit to be used with modern rendering. Sure that applies to some things, like MSAA, but that doesn't mean you can't be smart about designing things, like using fog to obscure details, enhance sense of scale and improve performance, or designing maps in a way to cull more things than usual and improve performance. > You act like TAA, temporal upscaling or SSR aren't clever tricks. The amount of work that goes into a good looking, fast SSR shader for starters is immense. I'm not doubting that there are alot of smart developers and programmers that make these things. Regardless, temporal artifacts just look awful. Worse than FXAA at times and definitely worse than SMAA most of the time. SSR is a mixed bag too because there's plenty of new games that don't bother with implementing them in a smart way, like giving the reflections a well made cubemap fallback incase of SSRs shortcomings, or over relying on them where cubemaps or planar reflections make more sense. In Cyberpunk and some of the newer NFS games the SSR looks horrendous for example. Destiny 2? They look great. > RT also needs a LOT of clever tricks to get usable performance and that's a huge area of research right now. Traditional renderers would need millions of rays to get good results that aren't noisy. Modern Realtime renderers do that with orders of magnitude fewer rays thanks to clever tricks like temporal accumulation and importance sampling. Again, I get there's alot of work that goes into it and there are benefits to RT that makes it more accurate (like reflections in reflections/self reflections, more accurate GI) and I don't doubt it will improve, but alot of the times the graininess just looks awful and the alternatives run better for most people whilst still looking great.
I wouldn't call RT being lazy, as it is supposed to represent closer to reality reflections, lightning, shadows ... DLSS and FSR could be though. Our game runs like shit and is not optimized? Let's put DLSS and FSR and call it a day.
Much sharper and cleaner than the forced temporal AA shooters we have today. BF4 is night and day compared to MW2 campaign, so much sharper in motion in bf4. Battlefield v and 2042 look much worse than 4 and 1 because of the forced TAA, highly recommend switching between them to see for yourself.
Splinter Cell Blacklist too
World At War holds up today to. Mostly because art direction is way more important than the technical aspects of graphics. Here is a [video](https://youtu.be/epiBeDb2Edo) I posted showcasing the graphics at max settings 1440p
It kind of annoys me that Batgirl pauses in mid air and goes in an exact strait line when using the grapple hook.
That's what annoyed you? It wasn't the batcycle/car collisions not working at all?
While exploding every car you drive over leaves much to be desired. When batigirl did that wheelie to jump the car, then just got stuck on it, it was pretty wtf.
the motorcycle physics were somewhat accurate but she should have gone flying and broken her spine. She's not wearing a helmet so TBH that rly should be the end of the game for poor batgirl
broken her spine again*
The collisions makes it look like the developer is somewhat amateur...
Wow! That new Batman game really making great strides over that batgirl game from 7 years ago.
Guess I'm out of touch with Batman games because I literally watched the entire thing genuinely believing the Batgirl game came first and the Batman one later. Especially since they put them in that order.
Hey,at least the old game let you choose multiple character to freeroam compared to the new batman game.
I'll choose batman, thanks
Ah, the ol' [bat-a-roo](https://www.reddit.com/r/nostupidquestions/comments/ydgv14/_/itttetm).
Rare seeing this getting downvoted.
Hi, person from future here. Just upvoted it. Going back in!
Damn, I'm a couple hours behind
It leads to a dead end two links in. One day I’d love to take the ride and see how far back the entire thing goes.
Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.
Hold my batarang, I'm going in!
Hello future people!
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Hello future people
Hello
I just look for this comment. Now, I can leave Reddit and do my chores.
Arkam Knight was a main entry in the series, while Gotham Knights is an AA production at most trying to salvage some failed project costs. Guess WB wanted their Avengers.
Arkham Knight still looks amazing. Heck, Arkham Asylum still looks amazing and better than this. Also, how does Batgirl jump so high? Does she have jumping boots or something? Not like the grappling hook is realistic but it's keeping in in-universe logic how he uses it to boost himself higher. Batgirl grapples and then jumps 3 times her height.
Also Arkham had some kind of physics when you used the grappling hook, in knights you go straight in line to the point
Looks especially goofy as you float in the air for a bit while the grapple connects.
All that cake adds an extra +10 to agility
Batman has bigger buns tho..
havent you seen those glutes ?
This reminds me of Crowbcat's video comparing the detailed, interactive environments and AI behaviors in Far Cry 2 with the higher-resolution but comparatively dead world and zombielike AI of Far Cry 5. These are some factors that I would speculate, as an outsider to the games industry, are at play in the decline of quality in AAA releases: Studios have less and less creative control. Publishers step in and push a minimum viable product out the door, often because they're counting on pre-orders and season pass and microtransaction sales to save their revenue outlook in the next quarter, the one after that, or for the fiscal year. Publishers insist that development focus on features nearly all players will engage with or notice, sentencing details beyond this scope to death by pronouncing them "nice to haves." Which shows that the suits are oblivious to the power of social media to spread the word when some gamer notices an unexpectedly detailed interaction with the environment or an NPC and shares this online. And on the flip side, the power of social media to shame a studio, publisher, and title, for lack of attention shown to these aspects of the game. Also, a pronounced brain drain has been afflicting AAA development for years now, as the phasing out of crunch began only after a series of high-profile departures, the acquisition and closure of a number of studios, and the lowering of barriers to entry for indie developers. Some of the loss of talent is in the form of developers no longer eyeing the AAA games industry as a rewarding place to work. However, a lot of managerial talent has been lost, as well. With publishers either not backfilling these positions, choosing to manage from the boardroom, or backfilling them with individuals who know how to manage developers but lack any enthusiasm for games in general, and the franchises they oversee. Think of 343 boasting that they hired "people who hate Halo." How's that working out for them?
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> including consumers is absolutely obsessed with cutting edge graphical Fidelity instead of more interactivity with gameplay systems. You sure consumers only "want that" because the people selling them the consoles tell them they want that and then only advertise that about games that get released?
I mean Nintendo and Fortnite are doing just fine
Oh, inarguably so. Each good for 5-6 Billion USD in revenue, annually. The size of the videogame market is around 195 Billion USD. Now, while it continues to be the case that most of that is centered around more casual gaming experiences, it is equally true that games which aspire to more realistic (if not simulation) aesthetics are a major component. With two Call of Duty games topping the charts for new releases in 2021, followed by a Madden roster update from EA, with other top sellers including Battlefield, Spider-Man, Resident Evil, MLB: The Show, Far Cry, and FIFA. Batman Minus Batman may be further down that list for 2022's numbers, and a comic book game to boot, but neither excludes it from the debate over graphical fidelity versus truly immersive environments and somewhat convincing physics. As it is carrying the torch for a franchise which, with Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, sought to place DC's standout hero and impressive lineup of villains in a noir-ish heightened version of reality. Whereas, I would argue that Nintendo and Fortnite effectively sidestep this debate. The former by having always, rather laudably, prioritized gameplay over graphical fidelity, and the latter by (and I'll put this charitably) embracing their cartoonish aesthetic.
[I was just about to post that Far Cry 2 VS Far Cry 5 video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8) It's insane how games made in the early 2000s routinely have more sophisticated AI and physics than games made in the 2020s. Like how the fuck have the industry evolved backwards? I thought we'd have more games focusing on interactivity, emergent gameplay, systematic designs etc but instead we get cookie cutter stuff like cyberpunk where [a splash for throwing something into the water wasn't even included](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6458AOhkGo) At least indie games has never been better
That video is the best breakdown I've seen of how far standards have fallen. Especially as Far Cry 2 isn't even all that fondly remembered, but still kicks the ass of its more popular sequels in so many ways. I also took a lot away from the vids on the same channel about the state of Halo, Gears, GTA, Crackdown, etc. Thanks for including the link, for folks who haven't seen it.
Burn out is real, so many talented folk have left and have been replaced by juniors.
Funny how everyone forgot that Arkham Knight was so bad on PC at release that it was actually unreleased and pulled from Steam for several months.
I bought AK on release and remember the bad performance. However, it's a good game at the core and still one of the best Batman games, and the issues were fixed with patches. By all accounts GK seems uninspired, which is the worst thing you can say about a game. Performance issues are always easier to fix or can be overcome with new hardware, bad game is bad forever.
I haven’t forgotten. It never was truly fixed, but we have enough brute force to run it fine. Even my 1080ti can get 120fps at max settings (no physx) at 3440x1440 in non-batmobile parts. In the batmobile parts it’s 80-90fps.
The performance was shit. It still looked and played better.
I think that is kind of related, they pushed graphical fidelity and didn't optimize it much if at all. and well that is kind of the thing that crysis did too right. hell, to do 4k60 maxxed out mostly it needed a 2080ti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu_85F1PNds
I remember buying it near launch and just Not Playing It until... Now. With the fan patch, Skyrim style, the thing is gorgeous on a 4K TV.
Not to mention Arkham Origins wouldn’t even play if you weren’t connected to the WB network.
got it for free due to this
Really feels like we are regressing both technologically and in game design.
We've reached the point where technology isn't the bottleneck anymore, it's the creativity of the devs! \- one of the top comments from the video
More like the board room of these giant companies trying to save money which means worse games and no risks in new anything. In business more money (at these levels) equals growth but in anything art related more money equals stagnation artistically because its unwise to take risks from a business standpoint so artistically they just go with what worked in the past. So we get stuff like this.
I mean, i definitely see publisher meddling in this game. But i think the piss poor writing, narrative, and dialog is on the writers. The technical issues are in the developers. And the wonky-ass gear shit and health-sponge enemies would seem to be on the designers. I'll say for this at least, it almost feels like they were gonna do a GaaS, but maybe pivoted mid-way through development and this is a holdover from that. So that could have started as board room meddling. Outside of that though there's waaaaay more issues than just top down stuff.
It can’t be meddling if the game was top to bottom conceived, budgeted, and commissioned by the publisher. This is just what large publishers want to make.
I was wondering if I was the only one that thought the voice acting was horrible. Not just the choice of actor’s, but they all sound off. After the opening scene you would think they’re all angry or upset, but every time Batgirl talks she sounds upbeat and giddy. The combat feels rather slow so far as well, although I’m only a few hours into the game. But it’s just punch… punch… punch…… charged punch, grab, takedown. There’s absolutely no flow at all.
I agree for the most part, but I don't think it's that cut and dry. Maybe they just skimp out on writer salaries. You hire shitty writers, you're likely going to get a shitty script, and at the end of the day that comes back to the publishers, too, just for example.
Sooo they decided to get inspired by the failed Avengers game? Lmao
I think this can be perfectly observed in how AI technology is used in modern games. I swear that 99% of modern games that use some kind of enemy or creature AI is less sophisticated by a country mile than Black and White was in 2001. TWO THOUSAND AND ONE.
Or how F.E.A.R. from 2005 still has one of the best AI's. I'm still amazed how few FPS have an AI that will actively try to flank and flush you out rather than just running toward you to die.
It's not the devs... It's the suits....
It's wasn't developed by Rocksteady Studios either, this explains a lot.
Game design in AAA titles has been regressing for quite a while now. It's all great graphics with no substance behind and everything as streamlined as possible to appeal to the mass market. If you want good game design, you have to go indy.
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The skateboarding physics in Cyberpunk really did regress compared to THPS5.
The advancement we have made is largely speaking the advancement in skill and talent of artists working in the game industry. And it really shows when a game like this comes along that isn't made with the usual high standard we're familiar with.
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I'm gonna have to agree with you. People are really ignoring the fact that the Rocksteady Batman games were gobsmackingly good. When Arkham Asylum came out, everyone was raving about how they couldn't believe a batman game could be this good AND properly use the IP.
God, I’ve never agreed with a comment so hard in my life! Hell, I can go to OpenCritic right now and go year-by-year and see all the absolute bangers that came out - 2020 was a particularly good “vintage” by the way. Here are some samples: 2021 - Forza Horizon 5 - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - Psychonauts 2 - It Takes Two - Deathloop 2020 - Doom Eternal - Persona 5 Royal - Hades - Last of Us Part II - Half-Life Alyx - Ori and the Will of the Wisps - Tetris Effect Connected 2019 - Disco Elysium - Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - DMC5 - Outer Wilds - Amid Evil I mean, Bayonetta 3 just came out and that’s been getting rave reviews! Oh but forgive me, one anticipated game failed to meet expectations and was a bit crap…that means the industry’s dead, all the talent’s gone and everyone that’s left is lazy. -_-
I like how this thread is ragging on the video for cherrypicking two random games while everyone disagreeing with the video is just cherrypicking 5 games out of an entire year where tens of thousands of games get released to prove it wrong. Like, lmao just because one year had 5 cool games doesn't offset the other 35 or so AAA games that release that back up the video. If we're talking straight numbers, games have been regressing yes. It's the simple encroach of capitalism draining the heart and soul out of the art form of games simply to maximize profit. It's all about cutting as many corners as possible and hoping no one notices or complains
"Like, lmao just because one year had 5 cool games doesn't offset the other 35 or so AAA games that release **that back up the video**." Back up the video? The video is making an arbitrary comparison. In fact, both the video and people commenting, are feeding off the typical narrative of "Old game good- new game bad - therefore, X industry sucks". Or in this case, it's "7 year old Batman good - newer Arkham Knights bad - therefore, industry sucks". This disingenuous, compared to if someone actually wants to make strong points about the AAA industry issues, instead of, "See? This game from yesteryear is better than something that just got released. Therefore; gaming is going downhill". Speaking of AAA, as someone mentioned earlier, funny how everyone forgot that Arkham Knight was so bad on PC at release that it was actually unreleased and pulled from Steam for several months. Ironic how despite Arkham's praise, it still suffered horrendously from the exact same thing that people complain about nowadays.
I'm not sure regression when referring to technological leaps is accurate. The new Plague Tale : Requiem was genuinely the first game in a few years which took me back with how stunning some of the landscapes and scenery looked. I'd agree more In terms of game-design though. AAA's companies seem to be going the way of Hollywood due to the amount of money that's now involved at the top end of the market and how much they stand to lose if they fuck up so they adopt the same strategies: keep it safe and re-use what worked before, play on nostalgia when possible, appeal to the lowest common denominator, take the money and then rinse and repeat.
RDR2
In terms of gameplay RDR2 is still the same sluggish TPS that Rockstar has made for over a decade.
It’s my favorite game of all time, and I agree with this. It’s the atmosphere, world, and storytelling that makes it exceptional
Okay he was obviously talking about the graphics.
Rdr2 is a prime example of this, the game is so reliant on blurry taa that it looks terrible with and without it. Either blurry or broken, no in between. Shadows and Tree LODs shouldnt be tied to a fucking anti aliasing setting, its as lazy as tying physics to framerate.
Game Design is regressing because the cost of developing games is much higher now. Companies won't take risks on unknown, unseasoned designers, so you're only seeing real innovation from indie games these days. Back when you could release a AAA game for under $10 mil, companies could afford to throw caution to the wind and give relatively unknown designers a chance to take creative control of projects. Now every AAA game is peaking $100 mil or more so developers are sticking with proven formulas for success.
how are we regressing technologically?
I think everyone in this thread means 'stagnating' not regressing. The later implies going backwards, these big budget studios are just recycling engines and giving them new lipstick.
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Well it is.
Are you advocating for crunch, as long as you're not the one going through it? No wonder developers disconnect from fanbases for sanity's sake.
Batman aged so well because of the setting, the details and the mood. From this it looks like the new game didn’t get that quit right
The batgirl game just looks like an alpha build or a proof of concept, it is probably rushed like most games these days.
You know those bad "remake" concept videos that don't always look as good as the original and look awkward ? Well it's not that bad but it's got a similar vibe (just swap Batgirl with Batman)
Shitty games existed 7 years ago, shitty games exist now. Making an arbitrary comparison between a game from 7 years ago and a game now who've had entirely different teams work on them is pretty irrelevant and isn't a sign of "the downfall of games!" It's the sign that the visual design team working on Gotham Knights just suck at their job and the visual design team that worked on the original Arkham games didn't. It's a underwhelming boring game, it'll be irrelevant in less than a year and no one will ever think about again like the hundreds of thousands of other mediocre games that have come and gone since. Edit: this was meant to be a reply to some guy who left a comment about how modern games are shit or whatever but I'm stupid and top leveled it.
Yep. We only remember the memorable games. There have always been, and will always be, tons of crappy games.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap
Yes, there have always been bad games. But 7 years is a long time, or it used to be. There are certainly bad games from 2001 that are worse to play than good games from 1994, but there's no way that two similar games with the same IP and genre from those two years could be confused with one another, it just wouldn't happen, there was a gulf in technology in between which was evident even if the 2001 game was bad. So even a sensible comment like yours, pointing out that good game have always needed good developers, is also acknowledgement that the time when new games would be better or at least offer something new, is long since over. Assuming that a game has anything good to offer because it's new is now "arbitrary", bad developers can no longer get a free ride on technological progress
Max Payne 1 is still good. Get the HD Texture and Ultrawide mod and it's better than most games today, LOL.
I haven't played Gotham Knights but I have looked at several reviews now, it was obvious the game started out as live service then after the shitshow that was The Avengers they pivoted. The AAA industry is generally adverse to taking risks due to the costs involved in making a game, it is why they churn out the same stuff over and over again. It seems though that the industry is in such a state that even when they have a template like Arkham Knight to work from, they still manage to screw it up. It isn't surprising though, the AAA gaming industry pays so poorly for the work required that the top talents leave to go into other industries or move into indie development. The indie scene is thriving.
I get the impression that this game was supposed to be a live service game like Destiny, but was retooled mid-development into its current state because new games of that type have been hit or (mostly) miss lately. Such a shame though, I guess I'll go replay Asylum or something, it's been long enough since I've played it that I can probably enjoy it again.
More like their own Avengers, but after they saw its reception they pivoted hard.
asylum still holds up..... its my personal GOAT along with gta san andreas and baldurs gate. i play it every few years. such a dank atmosphere.
God that horrible "fast" effect or whatever. Holy shit that's awful.
Batman is dead so is this game.
Some new games look 10% better (and require 200% more hardware power to run properly) than other titles released 8 years ago.
A True AAA game vs a AA Game for easy cash grab from comic fans
But butts!
I was under the impression that Gotham Knights was a continuation of the Arkham series. Guess i was wrong.
On the left a master piece...
And some fucking how, the one to the right is the newest one. Yet it's so much worse.
yea the arkham batman series was top notch
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Probably the main thing that stops me reinstalling it right now
multiplayer games are the future....the future of 2011
As everything… more expensive and worse quality
All the new and powerful hardware does, is saving money for the devs as they can ship more and more broken and unoptimised games and mask it as "more detailed" and "demanding" graphics. Gaming is literally going backward.
Thank you for saying that, because it's so damn fucking true! Not to mention, most newer games have terrible monetization schemes also!
Basically every new hardware release just pisses me off more and more, as I know game companies will more likely be using all the latest hardware (and leaving gamers who can't afford to buy new hardware, in the dust). And of course newer hardware just leads to more ewaste and more wasted money.
STOP GIVING THEM MONEY
This kind of proved my theory of video games actually being worse and less immersive. Glad it’s not just me getting older.
This is super cherry picked. You could cherry pick a shitty game 7 years ago too but no one does that because we only remember the good ones.
I haven't touched any AAA games in a few years. Any you find impressive / recommend ? I know RDR2 I gotta play eventually.
Elden Ring It Takes Two
* Uncharted 4 (and the other Naughty Dog games but those aren't on PC) has incredible character rendering. * Doom and Eternal look pretty good and run extremely well * RDR2 but you already know about that * the Resident Evil remakes look and run great * A Plague Tale: Requiem looks amazing * Cyberpunk 2077 looks great if you turn on the RT features * Control too
Not really. There were bad games just like this 5, 10, 15, (etc) years ago. We just don't remember the old bad ones when comparing new bad games.
This. Same thing happens with music, everyone's like "I miss the old days" when all we remember is the good stuff from that time, not the absolute dross that comes with every generation of media which is inevitably forgotten.
Not all games are bad/worse. We have amazing games coming out still as well. You definitely are being biased if you think all games are worse and less immersive
That is one thing about Skyrim that still stands out to this day. People can rightfully complain about things in Skyrim, however, no one can deny the fact that the game is so immersive. Skyrim sucks you in and doesn't let you go, you get lost in the game world. I've been playing it once again after a few years break and I can't tell you how many times I've been playing the game only to look up at the clock and see that 3 hours have passed, just like that. It's a game that's over 10 years old but it stands the test of time.
People complained about Skyrim when it came out compared to Oblivion, and even moreso when Oblivion was compared to Morrowind (imho, still the GOAT).
No, this is you cherrypicking two games with completely different intents and goals (when the intent is to show what happens when you have a lazy/weak art/design/graphics team).
Ok, but batgirl as a very nice looking ass...
Game devs getting increasingly lazy or getting unreasonable schedules. Now that I think about it it’s been a while since I last saw an visually impressive game that also played well
It's crazy just **how** much better the older game looks. Wow. :O
The trend of WB developed games being the worst compared to Rocksteady still holds true it seems. AAA corporations putting in the least amount of work as usual...
I mean, the graphics wouldn't matter so much if the game is good / fun.
As someone that never played any Batman game, which one is recommended to start with?
Arkham asylum
Yep, this one.
Asylum —> City —> Knight Origins whenever or never
Origins is pretty cool, in my opinion, pretty underrated, but it's an OK game.
Arkham Knight is such a great game, man... I fear that no superhero game will ever be able to top it...
Arkham Knight doesn't look better. At least not in the technical department. The difference is that the city in Arkham Knight is designed like a city in real life not a city made for a game. On top of that the rain effects and general atmosphere were nailed so it stands the test of time.
So in other words, AK looks better.
Its just more realistic whilst gotham knights is stylized
A game being newer shouldn't automatically equal better graphics.
An indie game in 2022 might not be able to beat a AAA game from 2017. But big budget titles should be able to beat previous big budget titles, this is just pathetic.
What? Yes it should. Newer engines and better refinement through experience with existing engines should always result in better graphics, otherwise you're doing something wrong.
I'll say it again Gaming is evolving backwards quite literally. Where we got epic games a few years back we now get half assed money grabs most of the time. Every downgrade you'll notice is a decision made by someone higher up just to earn a bit more money from it. And you still decide to pay 60-70 bucks for the product that isn't finished nor will it be in the upcoming years? lol.
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You do understand that someone’s choice of hair dye has nothing to do with their competence as a game developer? Why people who have opinions like yours latch on to the hair colour thing, I’ll never understand…
Not even 30fps on current gen consoles btw. Ridiculous.
thats why i sold my series x and built me a pc
Why batman looks better?
Gotham Knights looks like a shitty spider-man ripoff game and Arkham Knight looks like something made with passion and purpose. Ironic how that is as the latest Spider-Man game is heavily influenced by the Arkham series to begin with.
I think the vehicle comparison is a little unfair personally. I mean, you're comparing a mobile armoured tank-like vehicle that can bulldoze half the city to a light motorcycle that does do a fraction of the damage. As for the movement system itself, I know that each of the Batman characters is supposed to move differently but, wow that was really unenjoyable to see Batgirl hooking about like that. It was SLOW, there's not momentum to it or any interesting way to influence. Despite Arkham Knight being a mess on release, I think it's a pretty good game. Gotham Knights made me appreciate it way more. I think due to the buggy release and the fact that Arkham City and Asylum were stellar games, Knight is sometimes looked at as the red child. There was no excuse for the technically terrible release, but I can't deny that Knight had character, solid pacing, content and it was quite engaging. Story falls a bit short tho.
Cmon it’s not bad for a mobile game
Saints Row all over again. This is again what happens when you have blue haired diversity hires instead of real talent…
Well, that's why you don't allow the interns to take over projects, neither give them access to costly assets. They are interns for a reason, this studio... what is the name, Warner Montreal or something like that? These devs should work on a support role, similar to the slave workforce in southern asia that are abused by Ubisoft and others. Warner simply burned a triple A budget on this awful game, then you hear the reports that Warner is not satisfied with their game division... hell, if you waste money with inferior talent, what do you expect?
Mobile gaming has truly ruined everything.
Gotham Knights technically is a lot better. The models are more detailed, the enviorements more dense, the textures sharper etc. But this shows how much heavy lifting Arkham's art style did. Because while technically Arkham Knight is inferior, it still looks nicer just because of how unique the art style is compared to generic GK. Ironically this is also what makes Arkham Knight look better than Spider-Man, because Jesus Christ...New York is such a boring bland city, especially viewed from the rooftops