ask: non-retro retro graphics. non-physical realism

Eric asked:

In that post you shared in your retro graphics blog, you mention that the sweet spot for you was the 2010s AAA graphics. You often post about how great Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Max Payne look but those were technically a previous-gen. So what’s the element of 2010s that you enjoyed so much, compared to the PS2-era that you (rightly) enjoy?

I think I expressed this pretty well in this post about Max Payne 3, but what I’m basically talking about is games that were “going for realism” in the sense of what that meant at the time, but were not reaching for photographic realism, which wasn’t a reasonable target in the way it is now. Splinter Cell Blacklist, though a stylish game, had what appeared to be a pretty straightforward commitment to realism for the most part, but they were doing a lot of “non-physically-correct” things to hit it. I reckon it’s aged into a really cool style of its own. Conviction before it was even more stylised, but again, not to the degree that that word usually suggests in games; people would have still called this a Gritty And Realistic Style.

And it still looks fucking great, is the point – like it doesn’t even look like it’s aged; you could do this on purpose today and not be anyone’s idea of “bad graphics”; the ways that this isn’t Real are only deficiencies if you literally wanted it to look like a photo, and you didn’t, probably. Meanwhile, Max Payne 3, which came out around the same time, had a more literal commitment to photorealism but its reach exceeds its grasp; now that it doesn’t look impressive, it looks bad.