'Open world games are more demanding, therefore they're expected to look worse'

[Amentallica]

In the wake of the Fallout 4 video leaks and discussions concerning open world games, I've seen the statement in the title paraphrased and tossed around quite a bit as an excuse for why Fallout 4 looks the way it does; and Witcher 3, although open world, does not feature as much interactivity as the Fallout series.

What I and many others like myself would like to know is, how valid is this? Are open world games truly incapable of looking as good as more linear games due to their breadth? Games like Just Cause, Far Cry and Witcher would say otherwise, but with Fallout 4 practically here, I feel like we've regressed and started to make excuses for its visuals.

I'd like to hear from people with experience in video game development.

One user in a Fallout 4 thread said the following, which is what made me think about this topic.

I get a little tired about this 'it's a game with a massive scale so it can't be compared to any other game' nonsense. It's as if loading a page from Wikipedia is allowed to take a lot of time because the archive is massive. The scale of the game is massive, but that has nothing to do with whether a texture on a wall is looking like wallpaper or that there are no shadows where there should be etc. If you think they have every little object the player can interact with in memory at any given time, you're mistaken. The player is at a given point in the world space and the elements in that close area are loaded, like in any other open world game. The player points the cursor on an element in world space, the engine detects an interactable container and looks up what it is in its in-memory 'database' (not really a database, but you get the idea). if there are 1000 or 1million, that's not important. If that slows down your game engine that much that there's no frame budget anymore to use a couple more shaders or push a bit more polygons, you have bigger problems.

Avalanche created a massive open world with Just Cause 2 that felt alive and you could go anywhere and not only using 2D plane movement like in Bethesda's games but also through the air. It ran flawlessly on a PS3 with 512MB ram, the same amount of ram as the iPad 2.

Please accept that the Bethesda teams are great in designing a game that allows you to make your own story, and that they are good at giving you a sandbox in which you can play that story in any order you wish using whatever moronic outfit and hairstyle you can think of, and at the same time they ship that in a vehicle made by programmers who e.g. can't figure out how to write a proper state machine so quests bug all over the place.

That the games are vast has nothing to do with the shoddyness of their programming.


I don't think people base their judgment solely on a couple of screenshots, they also take into account Bethesda's trackrecord from previous games, especially their last ones. FO4 costs 59.95 EURO here on Steam. I could perhaps get a cheaper key through a shady key seller, but do the devs get any money from that route? Doubtful. So if I want to legitimately want to buy the game using the official channels I'm paying a premium price. That's OK, it's just that I then compare it with the games that also demand that premium price. If I go to the store and pick up a PS4 copy, it's cheaper. That's with the console tax included.

My point with that is that if you ask the highest price for your wares, the quality of the product must therefore be stellar. I don't have to remind you about Bethesda's latest game's quality at launch? Looking at these screenshots I have my doubts their quality bar is extremely higher this time around. Skyrim shipped on PC with the 360 assets.

THAT's the point here. Stop making excuses, they're a business that tries to milk as much money from their customers as they possibly can (remember their paid mod plan?). Nothing wrong with that, we all have bills to pay, but as a customer on my part I want to get as much as possible for my money. With Bethesda's stuff that's always a mixed bag and this time it won't be different. It will be highly enjoyable for sure, but not without the help of countless volunteers (modders) who make the game look and feel the way we all expect it to be.

 

[Pankratous]

Dunno why we even have people saying Fallout 4 looks bad. It looks great. Love the style.

But generally I think the sentiment is true.

 

[Comrade Crunch]

Open world games, when put under scrutiny, do look worse than linear games, that doesn't mean they're expected to look bad, just not as good.

 

[Spider_Jerusalem]

I've just seen the launch trailer and that thing is a beauty.

 

[Afrodium]

While I don't quite agree that breadth is entirely the reason that Fallout 4 looks a bit rough around the edges, it's certainly true that the best looking linear game will look better than the best looking open world game. You won't see an open world game that looks like Uncharted 4 or The Order this generation.

 

[Synless]

Dunno why we even have people saying Fallout 4 looks bad. It looks great. Love the style.

But generally I think the sentiment is true.

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

 

[Platy]

Draw distance takes power that is usually used for more detailed models and enviroments

 

[SomedayTheFire]

Just Cause, Far Cry and The Witcher don't look as good as great looking linear games though. Their breadth of visuals is more impressive however.

 

[DJIzana]

I personally think they look better. That's just me though.

 

[Pankratous]

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

Looks significantly better than the Fallout 3 I remember.

 

[notaskwid]

More than the graphics, bad animation is still a real issue I have with this games. Just compare Fallout 4 animation with Final Fantasy XV.

 

[Black Mantis]

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

Now that's some hyperbole right there, F4 easily looks better.

 

[baudelinog]

Amazing news.

 

[Lunar15]

I'm perfectly fine with a developer prioritizing something else over graphics. But yes, it stands to reason that if you have a finite budget, some elements of a game come at the cost of another.

Fallout 4 looks fine. People need to stop flipping out about it. It's not shattering any benchmarks, but it looks technically stable and it's gonna have all that open world PoI stuff y'all love and adore.

 

[Skellig Gra]

It's all about resource prioritization. You can't expect an open world game to look on par with a much smaller linear experience or else the budget will be astronomical and the game will take forever to be developed.

 

[patapuf]

Physics, draw distance, objects on screen, interactive systems and simulations all take up processing power.

Open world games usually have significantly more of all that than linear games, thus there is less processing power available for pretty graphical effects.

It's the same reason say, the uncharted MP looks significantly worse than the SP campaign. The more stuff is going on the worse a game will look.


linear SP shooter campaigns are really simple in terms of systems and interaction, and out of the ordinary stuff is usually scripted.

 

[AtomicShroom]

GTA V proved this to be completely wrong. It's one of the most gorgeous games last gen.

 

[Mahonay]

It's all about resource prioritization. You can't expect an open world game to look on par with a much smaller linear experience or else the budget will be astronomical and the game will take forever to be developed.

This is your answer. The sheer number of assets you have to manage for an open world game inherently limits you with visuals in most cases. Unless you're Ubisoft and have a 500 person team.

 

[CGwizz]

Dunno why we even have people saying Fallout 4 looks bad. It looks great. Love the style.

But generally I think the sentiment is true.

Yep , i dont know why people thinks fallout 4 looks bad also, just look at this :

How can people say fallout 4 looks bad ?????

 

[SkeptiMism]

GTA V proved this to be completely wrong. It's one of the most gorgeous games last gen.

How does that prove anything wrong? The game had one of the biggest budgets in the industry ever. If not the biggest.

 

[Mahonay]

GTA V proved this to be completely wrong. It's one of the most gorgeous games last gen.

Rockstar spends way more time and money making a game than most other teams do. They also got to give GTAV a huge second visual pass with the remaster. With that said, I don't think there's a dev out there that could pull off what Rockstar does in open worlds.

 

[Coll1der]

This is true to a degree. You see, all open world games allow compute only a tiny fraction of the world at any given moment. It means that every frame you get a localised linear game. However, the problem here is and always was the draw distance. In a controlled environment you can cheat with perspective more, creating an illusion of immense draw distance, while in an open world game - the most of the terrain you see, you're expecting to be traversable. But still even in Witcher 3 you can see a great work of artists, who cheat with scale of trees and rivers a bit, to make mountains seem bigger and the drawing distance much greater.

So in short - the more traversable terrain your game has, the more time does it take to render each frame.

There is this and then there's persistency.

You can make a linear game that remembers the position of every bullet hole, every object tipped and every bullet casing position. Then you can have a lot of smart AI enemies coordinating their forces and calculating their field of view based on tipped objects and taking cover behind them, you can also add a few friendly AIs who do the same thing.

If you've done all that, the frame times will take much more than games with relatively simple mechanics a-la CoD, thus the time allocated for the actual rendering will be less or the same as a potential Open-World CoD.

Bottom-line - there is no reason to expect that having an open world inherently restricts graphics. Every game should be judged based upon it's mechanics and even the most linear games can look crappy if they do something interesting in the background.

 

[Napalm_Frank]

 

[EatChildren]

Open world games are required to render large draw distances of interactive play space. This alone is more demanding than an equally large draw distance in a linear game when the draw distance is static and non interactive. Many open world games make full use of a dynamic global lighting system, which can be a nightmare for stimulating complex lighting, especially in dark indoor areas, where linear games with a global light system have the advantage.

Numerous assets and algorithms related to physics, game systems, AI, and so on need to be calculated and tracked in this large playspace with full accommodation for the variations within. Unlike a linear game you can't just dispose of data when you drop into the next room or a door locks behind you.

Open world games are simply massively demanding on draw calls and memory. A lot of interactive data over a huge interactive and dynamic playspace needs to be simulated and tracked.

 

[Man]

Fallout 4 is a bad looking game period.
GTA5, MGSV and Witcher 3 have significantly better visuals and tech.

 

[Jacksinthe]

Dunno why we even have people saying Fallout 4 looks bad. It looks great. Love the style.

But generally I think the sentiment is true.

I think the bigger issue with Bethesda games isn't the graphics, its how jank everything else is. The animations, how their games "feel" when playing, etc.

I can let a LOT go visually but their quality of other game systems feels straight up early 3D era.

 

[RPGamer92]

Bad argument imo. Skyrim was huge and looked great on 360.

 

[Amentallica]

I added this to the OP.

I get a little tired about this 'it's a game with a massive scale so it can't be compared to any other game' nonsense. It's as if loading a page from Wikipedia is allowed to take a lot of time because the archive is massive. The scale of the game is massive, but that has nothing to do with whether a texture on a wall is looking like wallpaper or that there are no shadows where there should be etc. If you think they have every little object the player can interact with in memory at any given time, you're mistaken. The player is at a given point in the world space and the elements in that close area are loaded, like in any other open world game. The player points the cursor on an element in world space, the engine detects an interactable container and looks up what it is in its in-memory 'database' (not really a database, but you get the idea). if there are 1000 or 1million, that's not important. If that slows down your game engine that much that there's no frame budget anymore to use a couple more shaders or push a bit more polygons, you have bigger problems.

Avalanche created a massive open world with Just Cause 2 that felt alive and you could go anywhere and not only using 2D plane movement like in Bethesda's games but also through the air. It ran flawlessly on a PS3 with 512MB ram, the same amount of ram as the iPad 2.

Please accept that the Bethesda teams are great in designing a game that allows you to make your own story, and that they are good at giving you a sandbox in which you can play that story in any order you wish using whatever moronic outfit and hairstyle you can think of, and at the same time they ship that in a vehicle made by programmers who e.g. can't figure out how to write a proper state machine so quests bug all over the place.

That the games are vast has nothing to do with the shoddyness of their programming.


I don't think people base their judgment solely on a couple of screenshots, they also take into account Bethesda's trackrecord from previous games, especially their last ones. FO4 costs 59.95 EURO here on Steam. I could perhaps get a cheaper key through a shady key seller, but do the devs get any money from that route? Doubtful. So if I want to legitimately want to buy the game using the official channels I'm paying a premium price. That's OK, it's just that I then compare it with the games that also demand that premium price. If I go to the store and pick up a PS4 copy, it's cheaper. That's with the console tax included.

My point with that is that if you ask the highest price for your wares, the quality of the product must therefore be stellar. I don't have to remind you about Bethesda's latest game's quality at launch? Looking at these screenshots I have my doubts their quality bar is extremely higher this time around. Skyrim shipped on PC with the 360 assets.

THAT's the point here. Stop making excuses, they're a business that tries to milk as much money from their customers as they possibly can (remember their paid mod plan?). Nothing wrong with that, we all have bills to pay, but as a customer on my part I want to get as much as possible for my money. With Bethesda's stuff that's always a mixed bag and this time it won't be different. It will be highly enjoyable for sure, but not without the help of countless volunteers (modders) who make the game look and feel the way we all expect it to be.

 

[darkinstinct]

GTA V proved this to be completely wrong. It's one of the most gorgeous games last gen.

Pretty much. With enough time and effort open world can look as good as linear worlds. Or at least have decent animations and characters.

 

[Einchy]

I think this stopped being the case by the end of last gen and it's really no longer the case this gen. Some of the best looking games this gen so far have been open world.

It's an excuse people like to throw around a lot to dismiss the graphical shortcomings of some games but I don't think it really has much merit when games like Witcher 3, Unity and Arkham Knight exist.

Fallout 4 has okay or sometimes bad graphics not because it's an open world game but because Bethesda made it.

 

[Tigress]

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

Some one has forgotten what vanilla fallout looks like. Hell, everytime I see comparison shots, even to console shots of Fallout 4, some one is obviously using PC shots. Cause Fallout 3 does not look near as good on the PS3 (nor did New Vegas look as good on the 360) as the comparison shots I see used for fallout 3.

 

[IAmRandom31]

I wouldn't mind zones myself. Quick load screen for much better looking open world games.

 

[Klart]

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

You clearly haven't played Fallout 3 recently. Whether or not you think the graphics are good, they are a lot better than those of FO3.

 

[Sheroking]

Bad argument imo. Skyrim was huge and looked great on 360.

Well, it's pretty factual that open world games do look poorer than the best looking linear games. The reasoning is that they have to limit the detail to get the game to function properly when there's much more on screen.

Skyrim may have looked good on the 360 relative to some other games, but there was never a chance for it to match Halo 4, for example. Just like there's no way Fallout 4 could match Uncharted 4 on the PS4 in terms of the detail work.

 

[patapuf]

I think this stopped being the case by the end of last gen and it's really no longer the case this gen. Some of the best looking games this gen so far have been open world.

It's an excuse people like to throw around a lot to dismiss the graphical shortcomings of some games but I don't think it really has much merit when games like Witcher 3, Unity and Arkham Knight exist.

The witcher 3 and unity had big performance problems. As did most open world games last gen.

Scope eats a lot of performance, that's just how it is.

If the budget is equal a linear game will look better than it's open world counterpart.

 

[Trup1aya]

It's foolhearty to expect an open world game to match the detail and fidelity of a linear game...

There is so much more to be rendered at any given time...

BUT open world game can certainly still be as beautiful, especially when the scale of the scenes contributes to its appealling visuals.

Sure, Unity, Witcher 3, and Dark Knight look good in there own right. But the character models, textures, and effects can't hold a candle to something like Uncharted. .

 

[Sanke__]

Looks significantly better than the Fallout 3 I remember.

Seriously

It easily looks a full generation ahead of fallout 3 to me

 

[SolidSnakex]

I think this stopped being the case by the end of last gen and it's really no longer the case this gen. Some of the best looking games this gen so far have been open world.

It's an excuse people like to throw around a lot to dismiss the graphical shortcomings of some games but I don't think it really has much merit when games like Witcher 3, Unity and Arkham Knight exist.

Fallout 4 has okay or sometimes bad graphics not because it's an open world game but because Bethesda made it.

Yeah, this is really more of a Bethesda issue than an open world issue. I just watched the launch trailer and was shocked when this model popped up

That looks downright terrible, but that's a model that Bethesda featured in a launch trailer. This comes down to modeling an art more than an open world setting.

 

[Eusis]

It's all about resource prioritization. You can't expect an open world game to look on par with a much smaller linear experience or else the budget will be astronomical and the game will take forever to be developed.

This can be applied to hardware resources too, if not more so: RAM has to be used for a larger world rather than used just for a small area, you may have to keep track of way more characters running around in said larger space which is demanding on the CPU and GPU too, and even if you were to make it look about as good you have to compromise SOMEWHERE as MGSV shows with more spartan environments than, say, GTAV . Plus you can pull tricks to make a game look nicer such as skyboxes that can crumple easily in an open world game where we may be able to actually go to the spot drawn in the skybox.

 

[Vital Tundra]

I don't care what Fallout 4 does in terms of interactivity. Its absolutely pathetic how the game is looking and especially how the characters look and animate; its college level looking animations. Bethesda isn't some middle-tier developer, they can do better. Saying the game looks good or that its okay because Bethesda focused on other things baffles the hell out of me. Its passable at best.

 

[reKon]

Witcher 3 tho..

 

[Krappadizzle]

Witcher 3 raised the bar of my expectations across the board for many reasons and graphics are one of them. Fallout 4 looks like shit compared to all its competition and it's a shame.

 

[TyrantII]

Fallout 4 looks rough because its using a piecemeal, 15 year old Gamebryo engine plugged and modded to hell. Not because its open world


Until they get something new, or design something from the ground up, its not going to be the be all technical masterpiece that the gfx crowd wants.

That said, the time and money they saved are resources they put to use elsewhere in their development. Take your pick, the ice man does.

 

[Klart]

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

Really?

 

[Tal Shiar Agent]

If every game doesn't look as good as Uncharted 4 then the devs are lazy bastards not taking advantage of the hardware properly.

Spoiler

What some people think.

Speaking strictly about the graphical aesthetics.... It looks barely better than Fallout 3.

Christ, enough with this kind of shit posting.

 

[Sheroking]

What people mean when they say "it barely looks better than Fallout 4" is "this is not as big of a jump as I wanted or expected". Same reason Halo 5 is being criticized.

Other franchises, like Dragons Age for example, have had much bigger leaps.

 

[His Majesty]

Fallout 4 looks rough because its using a piecemeal, 15 year old Gamebryo engine plugged and modded to hell. Not because its open world


Until they get something new, or design something from the ground up, its not going to be the be all technical masterpiece that the gfx crowd wants.

That said, the time and money they saved are resources they put to use elsewhere in their development. Take your pick, the ice man does.

Really weird Bethesda still hasn't moved on from Gamebryo.

 

[Josh378]

MGS5 and Final Fantasy XV says "Hi".

Put effort into your engine and you will reap the rewards.

 

[GRIMREEFZ]

In a game like Fallout - everything takes place in the same world there are no fragmented areas when you enter a building or something. This makes it a technical marvel. But also give you big problems - like if u leave a random door open in one place hours later the game could break - or the famous cowboy hat glitch in new vegas. I think this is completely valid (at least for bethesda games.)

 

[Einchy]

The witcher 3 and unity had big performance problems. As did most open world games last gen.

Scope eats a lot of performance, that's just how it is.

If the budget is equal a linear game will look better than it's open world counterpart.

The WItcher 3's performance problems seem to have been fixed now. I haven't played syndicate yet and I now it looks slightly less impressive than Unity but from what I hear it has a rock solid 30 frames per second.

Of course the scope of a game will mean that if they put the same amount of time into a game it might look less impressive but I don't think they look much worse this gem. I'd say Arkham Knight and Second Son are probably in the top ten best looking games in this gen and they had no performance issues.

Like I said in my edit, I think it really has to do more with the developer than the scope of a game now. Bethesda's games will always look subpar compared to other games not because of their scopes but because of the people making it.