A Love-Hate Relationship with Photorealism

The style that has permeated throughout the industry for the past two generations isn’t going anywhere

Games are looking better than ever as the new generation of consoles begins. New engines like Unreal Engine 5 can maximize the potential of the PS5 and Xbox X through groundbreaking features like Lumen, which allows rendering of dynamic global lighting in real-time, both large and small-scale. The team behind Unreal Engine has made it their mission statement to achieve realism on par with movie CG and real life, and the demos and games using UE5 are certainly almost there. It’s an exciting time for the industry, but for some, a slight nagging feeling arises in the back of their heads. The cover arts, the environments, the overall look of the game; visual repetition is what makes people feel like nothing new is coming out, and some might go as far as to say we are experiencing creative stagnation.

Hyperrealism, or photorealism, is a visual style with a clear objective: to look as life-like as possible. In terms of what it brings to storytelling, photorealism helps make the game incredibly accessible by removing visual abstraction from the equation. Instead of the game asking you to connect with a tiny, 64x64 sprite of what is supposed to be a boy, it asks you to connect to one…