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[Chris23]

Those nominations though...

 

[LukasTaves]

lmao whaaaaaat

halo 5? it's not ugly but come on. no Witcher? mgs? battlefront? Hardline? GTA v PC? Arkham Knight?

halo instead? and the hobbit...???

might as well have Fallout 4 and Ark up there while you're at it, make things real competitive *rolls eyes

Halo 5 does have incredible looking realtime cutscenes though, which I would consider among the best graphics in realtime I've seen.

 

[sora87]

It runs like garbage. Then again, so did Ryse so who knows. Until Dawn sits well below a number of other games, though, and pales next to The Order.

I was really impressed by it myself, similarly as I was with The Order

 

[Dictator93]

Those nominations though...

Yeah, Halo 5 on there but no battlefront?

Kinda weird.

Halo 5 does have incredible looking realtime cutscenes though, which I would consider among the best graphics in realtime I've seen.

Yeah, the cutscenes look very good in halo 5. So there is that.

 

[Fafalada]

I think you're being way too harsh. The Order plays very nicely. The mechanics are highly refined and the game FEELS great to play. It's just super narrow in scope.

So was The Bouncer.
Although I would question the mechanics part - it's a competitive 3rd person shooter when you're allowed to play it as one, but the rest of the mechanics - and there's a considerable amount - are a mix of rushed and just plain silly.
But the analogy holds - Bouncer was a competitive brawler for its time, it just didn't let you experience it for very long. I found both games fine for what they were(hell Bouncer probably didn't get enough respect for doing all it did at 60fps) - but beyond visuals they were both entirely forgettable affairs as well.

It runs like garbage.

Performance issues aside, Until Dawn at least had environments that feel like traversing a world rather than studio sets though.

but not so much Cinemaware's games.

To be fair, CW games varied greatly in quality(some were quite terrible as well) so lumping them all together is a bit unfair. But my main point was CW games(for most part) respected player agency and actually had stakes even with their deliberately campy narratives. The Order does neither, the narrative had all the stakes of watching a 4th transformers movie after just finishing the first 3, and gameplay scope left nothing to the player agency either.

 

[PulseONE]

Those nominations are...strange...

No Until Dawn? No Driveclub? No Arkham Knight?

 

[nib95]

Halo 5 and Destiny over Battlefront? That's...unexpected.

 

[low-G]

The other nominees were:
-Halo 5: Guardians
-The Hobbit: A Thief in the Shadows
-Destiny: The Taken King
-Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Dire.

Yeah the nominees is why I don't trust ANY award / GOTY / assessment. Too many morons.

However I accept Order as at least one of several excellent looking games.

But the FACT remains, Battlefront should have won. EA probably didn't even submit it?

 

[tuxfool]

But the FACT remains, Battlefront should have won. EA probably didn't even submit it?

Everybody expected COD to win it again...

Spoiler

I still can't get over that, lol.

 

[CaptainofIndustry]

Congrats on its first and last award

I really don't think these kinds of comments are necessary.



Anyway, congrats to RAD. Job well done.

 

[Javin98]

The Order totally deserved it, looks absolutely incredible, especially the facial animations, materials work and lighting. However, I think the heavy post processing look hurts the IQ more than I would like. Even with film grain and vignette off, it's still a bit too much. Ditto for Batman Arkham Knight, but I still think both look amazing. Also, not surprising that half of the posts here are about the gameplay and plot. Typical The Order thread. Never change, GAF.

 

[jett]

Those nominations are...strange...

No Until Dawn? No Driveclub? No Arkham Knight?

Like every other awards show ever, I assume someone involved in the production needs to care about the award and submit their creation for consideration.

 

[TM94]

That vampire schlong




No but it deserved this award anyway, looks astonishing, congrats to the artists and rest of the team at RAD.

 

[DeepEnigma]

Black Bars though

Spoiler

/s I still want a sequel badly and this was deserved.

Do do I. I rather enjoyed the story.

Witcher 3 falls off for me due to animation and transitions. The game just doesn't feel fluid in motion. It feels like an older games with a new coat of paint slapped on top. Also, the default foliage is UGLY as sin and kind of ruins the look for me.

Arkham Knight and Battlefront are definitely my runners up behind The Order.

Heh, I actually like The Order as a game. I was revisiting some old Dreamcast games the other day and it occurred to me that The Order is a similar type of experience to Berserk (Sword of the Berserk) for the DC. A game focused on cinematic story telling with small chunks of gameplay. The Order plays much better than that, of course, but it's a similar type of thing. The Bouncer as well is a good comparison as it was cutting edge as hell when it hit in December 2000. Just insane visuals with lots of cut-scenes and limited gameplay.

Precisely how I felt. Still have my copy, and will pop it in one day to play it again. It was so close, that if it had a sequel, I am confident they would have corrected the lack of game play length issues. The controls were and still are more solid and tight than any 30fps game out there.

Well deserving of the visual award by far.

 

[Pif]

It runs like garbage. Then again, so did Ryse so who knows. Until Dawn sits well below a number of other games, though, and pales next to The Order.

Not below Halo 5 for damn sure.

 

[Melchiah]

To be fair, CW games varied greatly in quality(some were quite terrible as well) so lumping them all together is a bit unfair. But my main point was CW games(for most part) respected player agency and actually had stakes even with their deliberately campy narratives. The Order does neither, the narrative had all the stakes of watching a 4th transformers movie after just finishing the first 3, and gameplay scope left nothing to the player agency either.

To my recollection some parts of It Came from the Desert, like shooting the giant ants and escaping the hospital, were pretty tedious as well. So, it's not like it didn't have its share of flaws as well.

One of the flaws outside of gameplay mechanics with The Order was the predictable plot. You could foresee it right in the beginning who was going to be

Spoiler

the turncoat.

What did that poster say when Ryse won the siggraph though, metacritically, it's gameplay is worse than 1886? Just a curiosity anyway (perhaps to get some perspective).......

From this thread:

Well, people play games and not graphics. It's not unusual to talk about the gameplay, especially when a game focuses more on graphics than on gameplay.

From Ryse trailer thread:

I didn't see too much gameplay but obviously you did? Really, we only have old footage of gameplay - there is close to none in this trailer so why do people behave it would be when this thread is about the trailer?

Seems like the same didn't apply here.

Those nominations are...strange...

No Until Dawn? No Driveclub? No Arkham Knight?

Driveclub was released in 2014.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Given this a graphics discussion, I have every bit of inclination as to why this is less about the topic at hand and more about crapping on the game.

To the people responsible for making a fine engine, kudos. The game night not have been well received but this award is irrefutable.

 

[Skux]

People shit on the game (and rightfully so), but you gotta give credit where it's due, it looks amazing.

- Some of the best post-processing effects in a game. Even chromatic aberration is tastefully used to emulate the imperfections of a 19th century lens.

- Best depth-of-field implementation I've seen in any game, period.

- Great materials rendering. Cloth, wood, iron, glass, concrete, everything in the game has a texture and reflective quality you'd expect in real life.

 

[dark10x]

So was The Bouncer.
Although I would question the mechanics part - it's a competitive 3rd person shooter when you're allowed to play it as one, but the rest of the mechanics - and there's a considerable amount - are a mix of rushed and just plain silly.
But the analogy holds - Bouncer was a competitive brawler for its time, it just didn't let you experience it for very long. I found both games fine for what they were(hell Bouncer probably didn't get enough respect for doing all it did at 60fps) - but beyond visuals they were both entirely forgettable affairs as well.

I can agree mostly. I also like The Bouncer. There is one key thing that hurts The Bouncer that The Order sidesteps - constant loading screens, save screens, and stat screens. Every fight in The Bouncer is generally shorter than any battle in The Order and after each fight you get a screen asking if you want to save as well as an upgrade screen. Between all that is loading. The Order does a much better job with flow from cut-scene to gameplay and back. It's pretty seamless. Basically, The Bouncer feels like a game that interrupts itself constantly.

Also, battles in The Order tend to occur in larger areas that you move through. Each Bouncer fight is basically confined to a single room separated by cut-scenes or loading. Like each train car early on is a single "room" and the game cuts between each car - even restarting music each time. It all feels as if it were pieced together from disparate chunks.

Of course, part of that is due to its age, but there is a lot more they could have done to work around it. Those after battle screens are just awful for pacing.

That's why I drew the parallel to Berserk on Dreamcast first - it isn't bogged down by those issues and kind of flows forward like The Order though it plays worse than either game.

 

[Javin98]

People shit on the game (and rightfully so), but you gotta give credit where it's due, it looks amazing.

- Some of the best post-processing effects in a game. Even chromatic aberration is tastefully used to emulate the imperfections of a 19th century lens.

- Best depth-of-field implementation I've seen in any game, period.

- Great materials rendering. Cloth, wood, iron, glass, concrete, everything in the game has a texture and reflective quality you'd expect in real life.

I'm honestly not a big fan of heavy post processing in games, though. Like I said earlier, Batman Arkham Knight and The Order are a bit blurrier than I would like. I personally prefer a sharp image with little post processing, like MGSV, SW:Battlefront (despite being 900p) and DriveClub, just to name a few games on my PS4.

 

[viHuGi]

Nothing comes close on graphics but the game could have been better.

 

[Artex]

Loved that game. Haters gonna hate.

 

[Oneself]

The Order totally deserved it, looks absolutely incredible, especially the facial animations, materials work and lighting. However, I think the heavy post processing look hurts the IQ more than I would like. Even with film grain and vignette off, it's still a bit too much. Ditto for Batman Arkham Knight, but I still think both look amazing. Also, not surprising that half of the posts here are about the gameplay and plot. Typical The Order thread. Never change, GAF.

Yep, well deserved as it is truly the best looking game of 2015, no contest.

 

[Dictator93]

Well deserved win of course.

Some things are not my cup of tea regarding the technical make up of the game in some ways (baked lighting, low AF, and CA make me sad), but it is just so darn consistent visually. Really awesome asset quality and materials.

 

[Zombie James]

As it should. Easily the best looking game of last year and the entire generation so far.

 

[Jolkien]

Well deserved. I hope Sony don't let it die, I had fun playing it, and I thought they did a very good job with the weapon and how the game play.

I was also very interested into the lore and the world depicted in the game. Hopefully it gets a second chance.

 

[DeepEnigma]

I'm honestly not a big fan of heavy post processing in games, though. Like I said earlier, Batman Arkham Knight and The Order are a bit blurrier than I would like. I personally prefer a sharp image with little post processing, like MGSV, SW:Battlefront (despite being 900p) and DriveClub, just to name a few games on my PS4.

When they added the photo mode update, you could remove the noise filter which helped tremendously to sharpen it up. Unsure if others could be removed as well.

 

[Dictator93]

Well deserved. I hope Sony don't let it die, I had fun playing it, and I thought they did a very good job with the weapon and how the game play.

I was also very interested into the lore and the world depicted in the game. Hopefully it gets a second chance.

They were hiring for a "console title" at some point. But... it will probably be something else I imagine after the first's sales and reception.

 

[GIANKRATOS]

100% deserved.

 

[Ryouji Gunblade]

Glad the game got at least one award. Can we get a sequel? Maybe one with a horde-like multiplayer?

 

[Javin98]

When they added the photo mode update, you could remove the noise filter which helped tremendously to sharpen it up. Unsure if others could be removed as well.

Dude, look at my post above. I remove film grain and vignette every time I play the game. I even informed others of this before playing the game.

However, it is still a bit too much for me. Removing those two effects do sharpen it significantly, but I wouldn't say "tremendously". Nowhere near that IMO. I'm really glad Uncharted 4 is not going for a post processing heavy look.

 

[Whompa02]

Most movie based games are terrible, so nice to finally see one winning something.

 

[ethomaz]

Deserved.

Amazing graphics.

It is sad that everything else are mediocre.

 

[Psychoward]

First off, I doubt that any representative surveys on the matter have been conducted so you being in the majority is also a matter of perception (based on a relatively small, non-representative sample, I would imagine), not fact (if you're talking about general critical reception, of course, that may be a different story, but that's not what you're talking about). Secondly, a majority of people agreeing on something does not necessarily make it right or more valid. There are countless examples in history of things that were generally regarded as fact by most people at the time which later turned out to be utterly wrong. Of course, in this case there is no such thing as right or wrong because, while there are certain rules and guidelines which can be used to craft a story which could generally be said to be a good story with regards to most people's learned expectations and notions of what constitutes a good story, there is no way of empirically measuing or determining the quality of a story (or of fictional characters) and you cannot objectively call a story good or bad, no matter how many people may agree on either. And that is my point entirely. Your opinion is no more valid or "right" than that of anyone who did like the story and did like the characters and it doesn't matter whether the majority is "on your side" or not, that doesn't make it more or less valid.

That's cool. So why'd you like the characters then?

 

[RoboPlato]

Well deserved. It really is the game all others will be judged against visually this gen.

Cutting edge tech combined with fantastic art and impressive consistency with rock solid performance. It's been a year and Battlefront is the only other game even close to being in its league.

 

[zma1013]

- Great materials rendering. Cloth, wood, iron, glass, concrete, everything in the game has a texture and reflective quality you'd expect in real life.

Funny enough though, the mirrors don't. Reflect that is. It was quite jarring seeing a simple mirror on the wall not have a real time reflection when everything else in the game looks so stellar.

 

[Dictator93]

Funny enough though, the mirrors don't. Reflect that is. It was quite jarring seeing a simple mirror on the wall not have a real time reflection when everything else in the game looks so stellar.

There is almost nothing that can be done about that in most modern rendering engines though. Hard to hold it against the game when almost no other modern game could achieve that at playable framerates on consoles as well.

 

[Percy]

Seems fair enough. Game wasn't exactly short on failings, but it is probably still the best looking game currently on consoles on a purely visual level

Spoiler

(Though probably not the most technically impressive on the whole)

. Can't take that away from it really.

Funny enough though, the mirrors don't. Reflect that is. It was quite jarring seeing a simple mirror on the wall not have a real time reflection when everything else in the game looks so stellar.

Oh shit yeah, forgot about this. The mirrors were really terribly done in the game.

 

[zma1013]

There is almost nothing that can be done about that in most modern rendering engines though. Hard to hold it against the game when almost no other modern game could achieve that at playable framerates on consoles as well.

I understand the limits of games with real time reflections but a mirror on a wall in a small hallway with nothing happening but my character slowly walking through it? Are there really no mirrors that work in games nowadays?

I mean, obviously they would have if they could, but maybe just don't put a mirror there if you can't make it look right.

 

[Dictator93]

I understand the limits of games with real time reflections but a mirror on a wall in a small hallway with nothing happening but my character slowly walking through it? Are there really no mirrors that work in games nowadays?

The last game that I played that had the old-school way of doing planar reflections like that was Alien Isolation. Even then, I do not think it reflected the player model (no reason why it should not be able to IMO). So it is definitely a possibility, but it amps up the cost of a scene by quite a bit since you basically are doing it twice over: maybe it would have been too expensive? Before that there was stuff like Doom 3, Serious Sam 3 or... DNF (yikes!) which all also did that.

I mean, obviously they would have if they could, but maybe just don't put a mirror there if you can't make it look right.

Yeah, it is best to avoid the art and content situations that show off the limits of your tech. So I can agree with that.

 

[Falchion]

I'm in the middle of my playthrough now and I can confirm it's incredibly beautiful. I don't even mind how little gameplay there is because it's such a treat to see it in motion.

 

[Ivan Amiibo]

Hey, everyone's got at least one special thing they're good at.

 

[giancarlo123x]

Until Dawn blows the Order away graphically,

And its also a decent game to boot.

No it doesn't, the order also runs smooth 99.9% of the time.

UD is the superior game but I hope the order gets a second chance.

 

[LiveFromKyoto]

For some reason this game always brings the GAF hyperbolists out in full force. It was an average game with decent shooting, a bordeline nonsensical plot, incredible audio and voice acting, and the best graphics ever. I had a good enough time with it to platinum it (granted, it's a pretty easy platinum).

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

Well deserved win of course.

Some things are not my cup of tea regarding the technical make up of the game in some ways (baked lighting, low AF, and CA make me sad), but it is just so darn consistent visually. Really awesome asset quality and materials.

This is my stance to a tee. The consistency in this game is a big win in my opinion. The specific blend of shaders, materials, and processing give this game a very cohesive look, that's bizarrely unique.

 

[jaypah]

That game was almost unbelieveable at times so they certainly deserved to get credit for their tech accomplishments. I've spoken elsewhere about my feelings on the game portion so I'll just let RAD have their moment. I hope they get decent funding for their next project too.

 

[BraXzy]

I have a feeling the nominations were based on the advertising for Halo 5 and Destiny, not the games themselves. The category isn't games, it's real-time projects. There's no way it's based on the games themselves, Halo is smooth as silk but it ain't jaw dropping in the visual department outside of some campaign spaces.

Maybe they're taking into account stuff like the live-action trailers?

For example.

 

[c0de]

From this thread:


From Ryse trailer thread:


Seems like the same didn't apply here.

The comparison is off because people now actually know the bland gameplay of the order which they could only guess from the e3 trailer. Of course both feature sub optimal gameplay, though.

 

[Melchiah]

The comparison is off because people now actually know the bland gameplay of the order which they could only guess from the e3 trailer. Of course both feature sub optimal gameplay, though.

Nevertheless, you seemed to be more willing to sway this thread into that direction, eventhough it's about winning a prize for graphics, not gameplay.

 

[LegendofDragoonLives]

Congrats on its first and last award

This man has absolutely no chill.

This is the most impressive looking game. I've said this before, but the Order is the first game I've ever played that I felt that I was playing through CGI cutscenes. I hope they make a sequel and make several improvements even though it seems unlikely.