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The importance of Shadows, Volumetric fog and Immersion!


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There is a new XCOM inspired game out and it focuses on immersion while going strong on the shadows, volumetric fog and photorealistic graphics.

I am sharing this video with you guys because previously shadows and other immersion visual features where deemed "unnecessary" by some forum members and I had no example back then... of the importance of it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBAUJLgzwl0&feature=emb_logo

 

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Oh boy, yeah - that's a nice looking game there. Those kind of graphics usually require some pretty advanced lighting techniques that don't play nice with removing or changing bits of a map after the light has been baked, though.

Thus I strongly suspect their world supports minimal destructibility, will have the same "unseen enemies are visible in the fog" issues that XCOM does, quite possibly won't allow generation of maps in the manner required to support base assualt maps that match your base layout, and won't support night missions in the same way that that Xenonauts 1 or X-Com does. If you're cool with losing all those aspects of X1 gameplay then that's great, but not everyone will feel the same way (and those are some of the gameplay reasons we've moved away from going all-in on nice graphics). 

The other is that honestly we probably wouldn't be able to match that visual quality even if we wanted to. Unreal tends to look better than Unity anyway, and those guys are a mid-size studio backed by a well-established publisher so their art department is gonna be quite a bit bigger and more experienced than ours. I'm also going to hazard a guess that they've got a fairly lightweight strategy layer too, like most XCOM clones seem to, which means they can funnel most of their time and attention into the combat missions. Us making 10+ different combat biomes to that standard while also making all the rest of the game is a bit beyond our means.

I'm not sure about the specifics of the conversations you had on the forums in the past, but if you're immersed primarily by graphics then X2 is probably going to feel a bit lacking. But there's plenty of games that arguably focus on graphics over deep and engaging gameplay, whereas we're focusing on the reverse. Having the game look nice is a bonus but if we have to choose graphics or gameplay we'll usually come down on the side of the gameplay!

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2 hours ago, Valmont said:

There is a new XCOM inspired game out and it focuses on immersion while going strong on the shadows, volumetric fog and photorealistic graphics.

I am sharing this video with you guys because previously shadows and other immersion visual features where deemed "unnecessary" by some forum members and I had no example back then... of the importance of it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBAUJLgzwl0&feature=emb_logo

 

I looked at the game and searched it, the game is identical to the Mutant Year Zero and the development team is also same dev that made the previous game.
I think they just used some of the same resources which are from the Mutant Year Zero, maybe even re-skin from it. The good thing is, this game is only costs 10 dollars.

Sorry, a little bit off-topic.

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A game has to look functional. Pretty is somewhat subjective, and all the fancy new effects and shaders often do more harm than good.

There's a subset of gamers that I personally call "graphic whores" that only care about graphics and weather the most cutting-edge stuff is used, but those kind of people were never the core audience of X1 to begin with, so I wouldn't worry about it, Chris. Your game looks more than good enough.

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6 minutes ago, TrashMan said:

A game has to look functional. Pretty is somewhat subjective, and all the fancy new effects and shaders often do more harm than good.

There's a subset of gamers that I personally call "graphic whores" that only care about graphics and weather the most cutting-edge stuff is used, but those kind of people were never the core audience of X1 to begin with, so I wouldn't worry about it, Chris. Your game looks more than good enough.

Totally agree.

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I bought "Corruption 2029" and have played it a bit.  Like the others have said, it's Mutant Year Zero---with space marines. I wish it still had the duck and the pig, though.  :)

I love great gameplay and beautiful graphics.  The fact that some devs are working on getting the prettiest graphics out of current hardware/software and pushing the envelope is fine with me: somewhere down the line my favorite games will have those graphics, and it's nice seeing what I have to look forward to.

That said, I also really like destructible environments and more variety in maps.  Which, along with many other things, is probably why I have logged 260 hours on X2 so far, and look forward to more!

Edited by maxm222
clarification
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