Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Motion blur - OFF Screenshake - OFF
Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!
AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Camera bob can go straight to hell.
Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
I’m very aware, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years removing them from photography projects.
For vignette, it accomplishes a lot of the same thing in games as it does in photography in general: it is a subtle focus shifter. For some games - like some photos - I enjoy that little bit of extra emphasis on the center of the screen.
For chromatic abberation, i generally avoid it in photography, but it can be used for effect. I feel like that’s also true to a point in games. Over the top CA feels like trying to watch something without 3d glasses. A little bit on the fringes can give a smidge of retro (and, oddly, futuristic) style for effectively no compute cost. It’s definitely overused though, and I tend to turn it off more often than not.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.
Those two features frequently make me nauseous! Being able to turn them off or at least down is a necessity for me.
my friends always want to ‘ppay the game the way it was intended’… cool, I’m still disabling all the crap that makes me not see the game properly.