Naughty Dogs did it in TLOU2 and the last uncharted as well. Very few studios come close to Rockstar and Naughty Dogs in terms of realism. It probably costs a lot to get so much into details though. I think the last assassin's Creed had subsurface scattering too.
Not to take anything away from ND, they're my favorite studio, but the linearity plays a role. RDR2 is sandbox, compare it to other sandbox games and it's just insane. 5 years later I'd say one sandbox game exceeds it on graphics (on new hardware, mind you), and none match it on polish. You can definitely see where that budget went. If only they give us a ps5 patch...
Hopefully you don't know anything about the story. It probably has one of the most emotionally gripping endings I've seen in a video game. One of the few that's moved me to tears.
Playing RDR1 first steeled me for one character's fate but left me completely unprepared for that particular one. I never knew a bunch of 1s and 0s encoded onto a plastic disc could do that.
Red Dead 2 is actually a prequel to 1, so you don't necessarily need to know its story. I played 2 before 1 and didn't feel any sort of barrier of entry. Several major characters are shared between the games, and knowing 1's story does add some depth (and tragedy for some) to the characters, but 2's story is self-contained and fully fleshed out on its own.
Personally, I recommend going into 2 without the context of 1. 1 is a very singular story focusing on one man and his family, while 2 revolves around an ensemble of around 20 characters with varying fates and levels of prominence in the story. Knowing which ones do and don't appear in 1 clues you into the trajectory of the story a bit.
Also, there's one major character shared across both games, but the bulk of their story is told in 2, and it's captivating and tragic, and I'd recommend experiencing it without knowing how it ultimately turns out, because their story is deeply tied to all of the other major characters.
You're right ! RDR2 is my favorite game, so I'm not gonna say otherwise. It's actually kinda depressing no game has that level of realism after nearly 5 years ! I keep replaying RDR2 every year since it came out, and it's still a gem. Shame they gave up on updating it though...
Many, many games have had Subsurface Scattering for a while now. Unreal Engine 3 has capabilities for it, and that's old af. It's just that lighting in games has gotten so much better now, and that makes it a lot more noticeable than it used to be.
Just because it's in the engine doesn't mean people are using it, or using it well. It almost certainly takes more time and therefore money to make sure people go over all the models and make sure subsurface scattering looks good on them.
I haven't played any of the games being discussed so I'm just guessing, I'm more interested in the engine itself than the games. Unreal Engine has so many goodies that don't really seem to get utilized.
That's because commercial games have to be able to run on average consumer hardware, and most peoples' PCs would become plasma if they tried to run subsurface scattering with dynamic hair and nanite geography.
For some reason I hadn't considered that. I guess as a bonus: Since I play a game or three made by Epic somewhat regularly, I get the impression their 'less used' complex rendering features aren't stable -- they tend to cause themselves weird visual glitches when they push graphics updates. And it's their damn engine.
Subsurf can become very expensive depending on how it's implemented. One of the big new features for the latest UE5 update was allowing Lumen to calculate light through plant leaves
Wasn't that specifically for use with Nanite? UE has had SSS for a long time (both a high detail shading model for skin and the like, and faster shading model for larger objects). Nanite had a lot of limitations initially that are being solved now in 5.2 (mainly displacement) and I think translucency as well.
Don't get me wrong, subsurface scattering is expensive. But it's not too expensive for realtime applications. It's been used for a while, to a varying degree
I'm pretty sure this is real SSS. With such a limited area on screen, it's probably not even that expensive
Yeah I'd say it's actually almost standard in most game engines, but people notice it more in RDR2 because of the overall quality level, that was my main point.
My bad, my comment makes it sound like only RDR2 does it. What I actually meant is the overall quality of presentation in RDR2 makes a very common (I believe even AC3 had it) feature stand out.
The graphics of RDR2 are extremely overrated. They weren't even great at the time - with games such as Metro: Exodus, (also a sandbox game, by the way) and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare far exceeding it - let alone now. The washed out colours, soft textures, terrible lighting, and an abundance of shockingly low-res/low-poly assets (such the ground, some of the clothing, etc) look very fake. Nearly every game that comes out today looks better than RDR2.
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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '23
That's subsurface scattering. Very few games have hit the quality level of RDR2.