All These Games Look the Same
2023-04-16
A video titled Unreal is Ruining Video Games was published recently (it didn’t come across my feed, the Asmon reaction one did). It mostly blames Unreal for making several recent games look the same, and laments that asset packs and the general "outsourcing" of asset creation away from individual titles has caused recent games to lose their character.
I have no professional insider information on this, so i’m here to offer my educated opinion.
TL;DR
games that aim for the same artistic end goal will probably look the same.
as soon as you abandon realism as an artistic vision, you end up with visually interesting games
Longer
Games that try to look realistic will always trend towards looking the same, because they’re all trying to do the same look. Any game that pushes the limits of character fidelity, shading/lighting, physics and other effects will only get more "samey" with time, because they can get closer to what reality looks like. It’s also not as "hard" anymore to make realistic assets that fit in those sorts of titles; tools like Substance (designer, painter, and sampler) or Unreal’s material system have made it "easier" (not easy, but much easier than ten years ago) to create detailed assets in short time spans. Everything is built to support this look.
And this has always been true; if you take a handful of titles from any era, they tend to look pretty samey; it’s just easier to forget that they came out the same time because they came out 20 years ago (or whatever) and had different limitations. If you were forced to only play games from 1998, you’d complain they looked the same too. Everyone is playing in the same court with the same tools, of course the results are going to look alike.
This is why art direction makes such a difference; as soon as you abandon realism as an artistic vision, you end up with visually interesting games. Borderlands 3, Hi-fi Rush, Sifu, and Dragonball FighterZ also use Unreal, but they look nothing alike, and often like nothing else.
Maybe an even better example is Fortnite; the flagship and first integrator for new Unreal engine features. When a new animation technique or lighting mode is introduced, FN is the first to get it. Certainly we can’t accuse FN of looking "the same" as, say, Callisto Protocol. We can say others ape the art style of FN, but there again we’re at the same junction - games that aim for the same artistic end goal will probably look the same.
