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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   2713 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Hyper realism in video games is a mistake. Dialogue scenes should be like paintings, or a series of paintings / illustrations with ambient moving parts (like in a good documentary). You can never make the human face appear hyper-realistic enough to exceed the value of a good painting or illustration. Do the characters of Miyazaki lack expression, or the faces of Caravaggio? No. And hyper realistic environments are also less memorable, filled with too much clutter.

You can never make the human face appear hyper-realistic enough to exceed the value of a good painting or illustration.

Never is an awful long time, dude. Have you seen what generative AI can do today? In 5 years, I bet it's seamless in a tech demo. In 20, I bet it's in games that run on plebian-tier graphics cards (if the human race makes it that far).

Have you seen BG3? I'm playing though it now. It's not remotely hyper realistic, but the body language, facial expressions, and fully voiced characters make a better experience than it would be without those things.

I don't think Metal Gear Solid would have been nearly as iconic if it didn't successfully replicate the look, sound and feel of an action movie. Sure, by today's standards it's not "hyper realism", but by the standards of the day it was.

Depends on the type of game, but largely agreed.

Also, voice acting is a mistake. Too many resources get locked up in creating art that only applies to one or few paths. The result winds up being either a bad movie that stops every so often so you can press buttons or play a minigame, or a game that cripples itself to cater to the needs of the bad movie that's been grafted onto it like a second head.

voice acting is a mistake

That's crazy. Games like e.g. TF2 were made iconic in part due to their voice acting. I can't even imagine it without VA.

I think there's a significant difference between VA in a game like TF2, versus a game like BG3. In the latter case developers inevitably have to decide between a) having only some lines voice acted, b) the budget ballooning to get all the VA work paid for, or c) cutting content. RPGs have a lot of dialogue which often branches, that's really hard to do VA for.

Haven't played BG3 so I can't comment on the quality of VA there.

Generally speaking, there is a special effect of the human voice that you can't get with walls of text. Obviously it can be poorly executed, however.

Nevertheless I suspect that with AI speech generation this will be largely moot in the next decade.

The VA is great in BG3, because they went for option 2. Everything gets voice acting and it's really nice, but I just don't think that's sustainable for most games. You're right that AI generated voice work will probably render it moot though.

Thowaway lines are one thing, but for anything with a plot, I think it does more harm than good.

I can't really imagine e.g. Witcher 3 without VA either. People want to hear people's voices rather than read some text in their head.

Seems like this depends entirely on what aesthetic the game is aiming for. Would The Matrix have been a better film if it were in the style of a Miyazaki film? Or as an animated version of a Leonardo da Vinci painting? From a certain perspective you might consider the Mona Lisa to be "better art" than The Matrix, but being real people with some minor CGI added worked for what it was going for and made a fantastic film.

We're not there yet, but if we can reach the point where hyper-realistic faces in games can actually be mistaken for real actors, there's a huge range of applications where it would actually be useful and better than a stylized game character because it fits the aesthetic the game intends, even if such situations are the minority.

I thought L.A. Noir did it well, with the facial expressions being a key, load-bearing gameplay element.

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