Screenshots vs reality

[Jamie]

Anyone else finding that 360 games dont seem to look like the screenshots we see of them in the press? I mean this has always been the case with videogames, pictures make things look better when they're that small, but it just seems to be a bigger issue on the 360.

Its like for example The Outfit. The review in OAXM made the game look unbelievable. They even wrote something like "Incredibly, this is in actual gameplay" underneath one, which admittadly did look awesome. Now I've downloaded the demo, and it looks nothing like it, more like a slightly more detailed HD version of Star Wars Battlefronts on the Xbox.

Same with the new Saints Row demo, which seemed to look a shitload better in the screenshots. And all the sports games which look amazing in magazines then look nothing like it in actual gameplay.

I know this isnt always the case because some games live up to the screenshots or even surpass them (Oblivion, PGR). But has anyone else felt this way or is it just me? And it isnt my TV, I have a big HD TV.

[Baz]

Do you have a HD TV, cos thats what they have and i no I'm missing out :(

[Jamie]

You were too quick for me :) Yep I just added that I have a HD TV.

I actually thought having a HD TV would make the games look like they do in screenshots, but no, the games look the same, just heaps sharper.

[Baz]

Hmm, well OAXM is baised and screenshots normally show of a visual peak for games. From what I've noticed developers are happy to show of cut scenes and more viually impressive pre renders than what the games final form shows. I know its annoying considering reviews from magazines and sites like IGN are to some what biased but you have to ask around, forums are a good place to find out if the game looks, feels and plays as well as reviews claim.

XBW reviews can somewhat be misleading but not by biased-ness but because the reviewer can also have different tastes. OAXM normally uses screens su7pplied by the develeper so the game will always look way better than what the final version does

(NOTE: Spelling errors are due to lack of soberness)

[devil.03]

There was a thread like this a while ago. Had shots from soccer games, and how they use camera angles to make the game look much better than the in-game views (or something along those lines)

[Jamie]

Yeah, Fifa is one of the main offenders. It looks amazing in screenshots, and when you start a match and the players run out on the feild and it all looks great, before zooming out for the actual gameplay and it looks like Fifa on the mega drive, just a lot better.

[Baz]

Yer, the cut scene kinda stuff on FIFA makes the game look great

[Jizzlobber]

I hate 'target renders', we see them all the time and they are as bad/misleading ad pre-rendered videos.

here's when EA released shortly after the impressive first NBA 2k6 screensshots wowed us.
http://img384.imageshack.us/img384/9762/nbalive0626ys.jpg

and madden
http://img382.imageshack.us/img382/289/nfl0646oa.jpg

[RF v Gunslinger]

Well the graphics on my 360/TV setup look shit-hot, so you won't find me complaining anytime soon! :D

[Baz]

Give me your TV and ill see for myself ;)

[Kruesader]

Well the graphics on my 360/TV setup look shit-hot, so you won't find me complaining anytime soon! :D


agreed.

[Shane]

OAXM normally uses screens su7pplied by the develeper so the game will always look way better than what the final version does

where else would they get screenshots? we're all at the mercy of what publishers decide to hand out :(

when you're given press cd's though, its easy to tell which aren't real. in the past some publishers have even supplied 'screenshots' on the cd in photoshop layered format complete with parts of the screenshot having artificial blurring and extra stuff like smoke etc put in...

FYI i don't upload those shots and in 4 years, i've only seen it a handful of times.

Sure also in regards to FIFA, that's always the way for sports games, they show the pics from 'tv' style angles etc, not what you actually play it from. it is frustrating and when you ask for new, exclusive, or actual 'in-game' pics, you rarely get your requests honored.

but so far with the 360, games such as GRAW, Prey, MotoGP06, Table Tennis and plenty others have all looked very close to the screens released. Yep, the angles may be different, but many times its to show off detail.

[Paranoid666au]

The best way is to download videos of in game footage. That's the only time I realy let myself get excited about a game as I can see exactly what it's like. I was very sceptical about Dead Rising, untill I saw the in game High Def videos, wow!

[Baz]

where else would they get screenshots? we're all at the mercy of what publishers decide to hand out :(

when you're given press cd's though, its easy to tell which aren't real. in the past some publishers have even supplied 'screenshots' on the cd in photoshop layered format complete with parts of the screenshot having artificial blurring and extra stuff like smoke etc put in...

FYI i don't upload those shots and in 4 years, i've only seen it a handful of times.

Sure also in regards to FIFA, that's always the way for sports games, they show the pics from 'tv' style angles etc, not what you actually play it from. it is frustrating and when you ask for new, exclusive, or actual 'in-game' pics, you rarely get your requests honored.

but so far with the 360, games such as GRAW, Prey, MotoGP06, Table Tennis and plenty others have all looked very close to the screens released. Yep, the angles may be different, but many times its to show off detail.
Yer ture but still, they could take screen pics if they hook up to media centre I'm sure they could get their own. Anyways, i find now a days reviews are becoming more biased, Gamespot will be next to go no doubt

[guttermouth]

I disagree, the games on my HD Toshiba CRT running at 720p looks amazing. What sort of HDTV do you have? There are alot of Dodgy HDTVs around, what connections are you using??

[Droll]

Sometimes I've been disappointed but more often than not the screenies portray accuarately what you can see in the game.

[=Maverick=]

It goes both ways, take Oblivion for example.

The screenshots and even the gameplay videos did absolutely no justice, ingame Oblivion is "shit-hot" :thumbsup: .

[Shakey-Lo]

all the pre-release shots for oblivion had the bloom cranked to 11, they looked crap

[Jamie]

I disagree, the games on my HD Toshiba CRT running at 720p looks amazing. What sort of HDTV do you have? There are alot of Dodgy HDTVs around, what connections are you using??
Its not the TV. I have a 81cm LCD Philips Crystal Clear that I run in 1080i.

[mick1681]

Oblivion is still the game that has impressed me most.

When i loaded up Saints Row, the graphics looked ok but not great....until i played for half an hour and really looked at them. Now i think they look fantastic.

Ii think people forget that the Xbox1 graphics are still awesome.With each new generation you will less impressed by the graphics. But seeing things a cop cars lights reflecting off my car like it did in Saints Row was amazing....never could have been done before.

Its the AI,physics (like in Saints Row) and high res textures that sets this generation apart. Take a last gen game and make all textures high res. When i stopped and just stared at Saints Row i thought it looked incredible.The people looked great, the buildings beautiful,animation good and when a blew up a car and it flew in the air (heat haze included) and then slammed back to the ground, all in an open world game.....that is next gen.

Oh and when PS3 comes out people will see it and think ;this looks the same as 360...im disappointed'. If thats the case then your expectations are way to high. The 360 looks great and the PS3 will to.

[Dominus]

Also bear in mind none of the magazines are printing screenshots in the actual resolution of the game, they're usually shrunk down quite substantially so it's harder to make out the fine details. That, and they're obviously photoshopped in some capacity before being put in the magazine...they won't just use MS Paint to reduce the size, they'll use a professional program. And if you're using a professional program, why not just use some of those other cool professional features to make it look a bit cleaner....? I don't agree with it myself but really, they're trying to sell two products, the game and their magazine. They're obviously going to try and make both look as good as they can.

But really, the age of the screenshot is slowly coming to an end methinks. I've yet to find a 360 game that was done justice with a screenshot...until you see these games in motion - and by motion I don't mean some uber-compressed thumbnail video - you really just can't tell how good the finished product will look.

Take Lost Planet for example...who would've thought a game mainly comprised of snow and all things snowy would look so stunning in motion? That E3 demo that dropped on the marketplace did more for my anticipation of the game than any amount of screenies or low res videos.

[Shane]

yer Lost Planet is a good example. the screens look fine, but the game in motion with the blur, explosions, wind and weather effects looks amazing... screens don't do it justice.

[PersianWarrior]

i always and still do think screenshots on game sites, magazines look pretty bad compared to the real thing...

[nicken]

Yeh i agree about the Lost Planet shit, The screenies looked pretty average. I was bored downloaded the demo and it's sweet as!

[killer1500]

Anyone else finding that 360 games dont seem to look like the screenshots we see of them in the press? I mean this has always been the case with videogames, pictures make things look better when they're that small, but it just seems to be a bigger issue on the 360.

Its like for example The Outfit. The review in OAXM made the game look unbelievable. They even wrote something like "Incredibly, this is in actual gameplay" underneath one, which admittadly did look awesome. Now I've downloaded the demo, and it looks nothing like it, more like a slightly more detailed HD version of Star Wars Battlefronts on the Xbox.

Same with the new Saints Row demo, which seemed to look a shitload better in the screenshots. And all the sports games which look amazing in magazines then look nothing like it in actual gameplay.

I know this isnt always the case because some games live up to the screenshots or even surpass them (Oblivion, PGR). But has anyone else felt this way or is it just me? And it isnt my TV, I have a big HD TV.

Well games are definatly gonna look better when theyre shrunk down.

It defiantly also depents on the tv. PG3 doesnt look anywhere near as good on my 81 cd LCD, compared to those tiny retail demo unit tv's JB Hifi have, the games look amazing on those little lcd's. I remember the first time I saw PG3, it was at EB and it my first impression of the 360 was very bad because they have it hooked up to a 68cm CRT.

[Jamie]

I dont just mean quality, I mean they just look totally different in screenshots. I would have bought The Outfit simply on the strength of the screenshots, it looked terrific. But playing the demo and it looks like an Xbox game with some nice effects. As others have said, they're showing us angles that look good, but are unplayable, and cut scenes and passing them off as gameplay.

But Im mostly happy with the 360's graphics. Fight Night Round 3 and Oblivion blew me away. But whats been most disappointing so far hasnt really anything to do with the machines power but lazy game development. Take Blazing Angels for example, the planes and environments look stunning, but when you get shot down it uses the same animation every time and then when you hit the ground its just a generic looking explosion, no damage to buildings you crash in to, no debris and pieces of plane, just the sort of explosion we used to see on the PSone. I thought that with todays terchnology we'd see realistic looking crashes.

I suppose Im bitching, but I really expected a little more from a realism point of view. And Im sure the 360 is more then capable of it.

[Stas]

those screenshots from madden and nba live are what you'd see if you use replay mode. theyr'e in-game and obviously weren't 'gameplay' in that someone is controlling the characters at the time.
i actually find gameplay footage (people actually playing) to be worse in screenshots than IRL

[Paranoid666au]

Just wait a while till the better games come out. Next year we should be seeing some awsume stuff. The first gen never really pushes the hardware that much.

[funkyj]

And, defending print magazines here, but when have you ever seen a photo in a magazine that isn't photochopped?

[Jimbo Razza]

My thoughts:

* After the intial WOW of playing any next gen game your mind stops looking at the eye candy and the all important game play takes over.

* Looking at the awsome full screen graphics in FN3 proves that the above posted shots are achieveable on a next gen machine, however in many cases game play would suffer if this option was chosen. In a football or basketball game it is important to see a larger angle. How could you possably play these games if the screen was zoomed right in on the players as shown above?

* My intial expectations of the graphics were way to high and at first I was dissapointed. However I always find the backwards step to be where the proof is. (Anyone watched a VCR lately and thought wow I don' remember video being this crap). My point being, play a 360 game for an hour on a HD TV and then fire up your old XBOX on a SD TV and you'll then have a new appreciation for how good the next gen stuff really is.

[Jamie]

As an example of what I mean, this is what the The Outfit review screenies looked like:
http://www.goldeneyeforever.com/images/theoutfit/gameplay2.jpg

Too good to be true, I thought. And I was right:
http://www.ztgamedomain.com/images/screenshots/xbox360/outfit/62.jpg

I guess this is more of an issue in the current gen because its harder to distinguish between cutscenes / non playable scenes and real gameplay whereas on older systems the difference was obvious. Now its harder to tell because games look so good anyway. I mean I dont think I can recall one screenshot of Fifa in actual play, I just remember how awesome I thought it looked. Until I fired up the demo...

[Stas]

huh? did you really think the top screen would be gameplay footage. if so, that's quite funny. where's the HUD? how can you see what you're shooting at? that was from a cutscene.

[Jamie]

Well thats not the actual picture they used but it was one almost the same as it. And I thought there was no way it could be gameplay footage, I assumed it had to be a cutscene. It certainly looked like a rendered cutscene. But they had a caption underneath it which said "Believe it or not this is an actual in-game screenshot!". Which made me think 'Wow!'.

[Stas]

no they didn't say gameplay. you said in-game. this means it's a screenshot taken 'in-game', i.e. in the actual game. it's a cutscene developed using the processors (not just CG).