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[Orthogonal]

Easily #1 the most impressive.

This is a Wii game? Holy shit. I need to dust that thing off and then get ripped off at Gamestop to play this one now.

 

[mace999]

I tried 2 times to play Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii and couldn't get past the blurred graphics, but I'm currently playing it on Dolphin on my computer and damn how they made this game to run on the Wii is unbelievable ...... Please try to play it on Dolphin, I use a 360 controller too and it works a charm

 

[luka]

Rage's virtual textures were astonishing, like concept art come to life and feels like a peek at the future of game development more than anything else I can think of in the last few years. Having such a huge world filled with a limitless variety of unique texturework and brushes and not a single repeated tile is insane. Sadly the technology and storage limitations aren't quite up to the job yet, which led to some nasty compression issues.

Also, people need to stop confusing the game's lack of physics interactions and dynamic lighting as a limitation of the engine - Rage needed to be 60fps so things had to be scaled back, it has nothing to do with virtual texturing.

 

[Timu]

That's a tricky issue. Even as someone who really likes Halo 3's technical design (and art design and basically everything aside from a few aspects of feedback), I have to admit that it doesn't look like a very efficient use of the hardware by comparison with Halo 4.

Bungie has historically often sat very far on the "engine provides for the needs of the game" side of the spectrum. For instance, despite running on console with horrible GPU I/O performance, Halo 1 plays extremely fast and loose with large alpha-blended effects.

It depends on what you value, I guess. I find many of Halo 3's choices extremely interesting, and great for the final product, but it's entirely understandable that a lot of people look at it like a technical trainwreck. Because it is sparse in detail in some respects, and it does run at 1152x640 with no AA .

As my pics showed the game didn't age well at all, barely anything holds up now(lighting, water). It's a mess in every other area.

 

[tasch]

As my pics showed the game didn't age well at all, barely anything holds up now(lighting, water). It's a mess in every other area.

the question is how are we defining a technical achievement. Halo 3/odst still has the best implementation of HDR lighting... ever, because it's actually HDR lighting in that it produces two separate frame buffers and combines them.

Adding in things like the way brute armor works in that you can knock of specific pieces, and the number of gibs produced from explosions, the amount of guns etc, that can remain on the map, all of these are massively reduced in halo 4 to the point that I feel it's game breaking within the franchise.

Also, i think that Alan Wake might deserve a nod, massive levels, amazing lighting, great weather and effects, good textures.

 

[stilgar]

This is a Wii game? Holy shit. I need to dust that thing off .

The "dust" thing is still on?

 

[filopilo]

you should wait for the PS4 remaster

Play the game at 1080p and 60 FPS

Slight correction

 

[Timu]

the question is how are we defining a technical achievement. Halo 3/odst still has the best implementation of HDR lighting... ever, because it's actually HDR lighting in that it produces two separate frame buffers and combines them.

Adding in things like the way brute armor works in that you can knock of specific pieces, and the number of gibs produced from explosions, the amount of guns etc, that can remain on the map, all of these are massively reduced in halo 4 to the point that I feel it's game breaking within the franchise.

Also, i think that Alan Wake might deserve a nod, massive levels, amazing lighting, great weather and effects.

Yeah I'm aware of what Halo 3 did at the time with all that on a big scale but of course nearly everything from character models to textures took a huge hit graphically so while it was impressive for what it did running all that at once it sure was far from the best looking and having best technical graphics. It basically used a lighting system that was demanding on the console and it shows too. It was ditched in future Halo games to make them look better everywhere else and get close to(Halo Reach) and being in actual HD(Halo 4).

 

[tasch]

Yeah I'm aware of what Halo 3 did at the time with all that on a big scale but of course nearly everything from character models to textures took a huge hit graphically so while it was impressive for what it did running all that at once it sure was far from the best looking and having best technical graphics. It basically used a lighting system that was demanding on the console and it shows too. It was ditched in future Halo games to make them look better everywhere else and get close to(Halo Reach) and being in actual HD(Halo 4).

But is resolution alone worth the hit the game took in other aspects?

 

[Timu]

But is resolution alone worth the hit the game took in other aspects?

Nah, it would help but I'll say other graphical features matter a lot as well.

 

[HTupolev]

As my pics showed the game didn't age well at all, barely anything holds up now(lighting, water). It's a mess in every other area.

There's no need to educate my poor nostalgic brain on what Halo 3 looks like, I played The Ark and a couple games of Social Slayer earlier today. I'm reasonably aware of what Halo 3 is good at and what it's bad at. This isn't an issue of aging; Halo 3 was accused of being "a mess" in 2007 in exactly the same ways you're accusing it of today.

I acknowledged that Halo 4 tends to feel like it's getting "more" out of the system than Halo 3 is, and implied that this might suggest that it's more "technically impressive" (depending on our definition of "technically impressive," of course). Beyond that (and to some extent maybe even getting to that point), we're discussing value propositions on various decisions, which implies some degree of subjectivity. I value the things that Halo 3 does well, on top of actually liking its overall crisp visual design with a high-quality lighting model, even if it's got some spatial sampling issues.

 

[Coffeeling]

GTA V. Other games might surpass it in terms of raw visuals, such as Halo 4 or Uncharted 3, but in terms of sheer technical might, nothing comes close to GTA V in my books. Open world games aren't supposed to look and sound this good, with so much going on, at 720p on eight year old hardware. I suspect a large portion of the near-$300m budget was on purchasing babies to sacrifice to Lucifer in exchange for tech support, because there ain't no way other way to do it.

If doing that on PS360 needs sacrificing babies to Lucifer I don't want to know what Monolith did with Xenoblade. All told, there's probably one hell of a party in hell atm.

 

[Shin-Ra]

I think Ridge Racer 7 deserves special mention for hitting 1080p60 and being gorgeous in motion at PS3 launch.

 

[Tricky I Shadow]

GTA V. Other games might surpass it in terms of raw visuals, such as Halo 4 or Uncharted 3, but in terms of sheer technical might, nothing comes close to GTA V in my books. Open world games aren't supposed to look and sound this good, with so much going on, at 720p on eight year old hardware. I suspect a large portion of the near-$300m budget was on purchasing babies to sacrifice to Lucifer in exchange for tech support, because there ain't no way other way to do it.

Dat lighting. Talk about witch-craft!

 

[injurai]

Pics stolen from Nib:

GG are wizards. This game almost looks 'too good'.

[/QUOTE]

my god I can't disagree more. When seeing it in action it was one of the most blatant baked fudgery to make the game look good. Most of it was fine if you weren't focusing on the peripheral or where moving around. But look down your site and stare at anything and you began to see just how poor the graphics were. Hell even in motion I thought it looked really poor.

 

[Shin-Ra]

In terms of visual spectacle, at framerates often well above 30fps it's got to be God of War III. I think it also has the richest textures and some of the best motion blur of any 7G console game. With improved 1080p60 SMAA image quality, it'd easily hold up as a current gen game. SMS also did a great job optimising shadow resolution scene by scene, they're most often surprisingly clean looking.

The only standout negatives are some motion judder and late-loading textures.

 

[RoKKeR]

Uncharted 3 - Was consistently blown away by this game at every turn. Fantastic set pieces, detail, effects, really great stuff.

TLoU - Art, environmental details, and character models were all top notch here.

Halo 4 - Great art style and environments, with fantastic IQ to. Probably the best looking game on last ten, gives me high hopes for Halo 5.

God of War III - Those set pieces, boss fights, sense of scale, so good.

 

[synchronicity]

Beyond: Two Souls

I was looking at this thinking how amazed I was as a kid with the graphics (or the fact that I was 'controlling my tv' in some way in the first place, lol) in some 2600 games. If my little kid self saw this then and been informed that this was an actual video game, his head would have exploded.

(Although, for me there's a lot to be said for lower fidelity graphics where your imagination has to do a lot of the work, as well.)

Edit: To answer the question, GOW 3 was the most impressive game technically for me of the gen, but from an artistic standpoint, it has to be the Souls games.