H . R . 2
Member
I agree and get what you are trying to sayit's not about clean looking visuals, it's the fact that it's very easy to hide visual shortcomings by just shaking the camera a bunch and making everything fuzzy.
the same happend when that one dev uploaded a video of their concept for a shooter where you have the view of a body cam. people literally thought it was fake and not a real game because it looked too good... in reality it had zero special sauce beyond that shaky camera and lens effects hiding all the mediocre visuals it otherwise had.
it didn't even have proper lighting in some places and obvious missing shadows and ambient occlusion on objects.
that kind of visuals is impressive for people who wanna watch movies and don't want to play games I guess.
Batman Arkham Knight doesn't hide anything. the game had insane visuals for its time, especially for a UE3 game. with ridiculously good looking and well authored shaders, especially the water looked amazing.
meanwhile that gif there shows, like... nothing interesting... or especially good looking. just some blurry rocks and a shaky cam.
but one of the primary functions of post-processing effects, as you yourself said it, is not only the fact that it helps hide flaws BUT ALSO helps emulate certain looks [cams, found footage, cinematic footage, etc. ]
I don't think they are using the wobbly camera to hide any shortcomings because the footage and the visuals seemed solid.
we always had the wobble in the Resident Evil series, Outlast and Gears of War even God of War 2018. they weren't trying to hide any flaws, per se. most gamers have had no problem with it, if anything, they like it
it emulates that handheld cam footage sort of look that some games need.
even Unrecord, the body cam game you mentioned, was amazing-looking and was called out merely because of how impressive the post-processing effects were
and how much they added to the fidelity of the graphics and immersion of gunfight in that genre to the point that it looked like a fake vertical slice
so I think what you're referring to is not that post-processing is bad, it is because the effects [CA, motion blur, etc.] are sometimes implemented poorly.
DC and the Order 1886 and AK used post-processing to create amazing atmospheres and visuals.
Being last-gen games, on a large screen they all look equally weak today.
that was because of the technical limitations of the time.
not because post-processing is not effective
look at ILL. or HB2. these are current-gen examples of PP effects done right
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