They're possible now, but you also need expensive hardware to run them. This is meant to run on the oculus quest. Give it a few more years (and probably a few more) and portable ultrarealism will get here eventually.
You don't need expensive hardware to do better than glossy pastels, at least for desktop gaming. I don't know what the requirements are for VR, but even turning modern games down to low/medium settings can still look pretty stunning if you haven't gamed in a while.
This reminds me of higher-res Mii's from the Wii, which was dated tech even at the time.
That said, the most important thing people should be asking is: is it fun? Because if you aren't gonna go super realistic then you had better nail the gameplay (Nintendo or Blizzard style).
What if it's targeted at kids/teens/young people and is lightweight "casual" playing experience? Wouldn't this look be preferred?
Sometimes ultra-realism takes the fun nature out of things.
Simpsons and South Park could easily use high tech graphics but the simple nature of it all is what makes it appealing . Same with Minecraft or even Zelda.
It's also easy to build expansive worlds with breakable objects that don't require tons of physics and special effects to make something like a box exploding look realistic.
The Nintendo Switch is by no means powerful hardware. But Breath of the Wild looks beautiful on it because of the art style.
I really don't think VR needs to wait half a decade for hardware to catch up. Existing systems can create beautiful experiences with the right artistic decisions
I 100% agree. I'd say Breath of the Wild looks incomparably better than this artstyle though. Something about this artstyle feels so... sterile? Maybe I'm just out of touch with what kids are playing these days, although as another commentator said, VR is counter-indicated for children.
A technology like Google Stadia will probably solve this. Nobody will need a expensive hardware to run it. The graphics will be generated in cloud computing and streamed to the VR. Keep creating hardwares to run better graphics is a dead end.
The speed of light says no. “The cloud” will always have too much latency to do acceptable vr. To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.
> “The cloud” will always have too much latency to do acceptable vr.
Perhaps but you haven't established that.
> To meet your deadline for a 120hz video frame, your signal can travel at most 1500 miles in a vacuum, closer to 1000 miles in copper/fiber.
Edge computing is a feature of some modern clouds, and certainly is intended to have much lower round trip distance than that to at least major markets, specifically to reduce latency.
Admittedly, public cloud offerings don't tend currently to have compute resource suitable for hosting VR in their edge offerings, but it's certainly something a major cloud player supporting their own gaming/VR offering could do, and for that matter a feature that it is easy enough for public cloud vendors to offer if there was sufficient demand.
Edge computing is a thing, but it really doesn’t help that much: That 1000 miles has to include the signal path inside your gpu to generate the frame and assumes no data loss in transit.
If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.
> If it takes 4ms to generate a frame you’re down to < 500 miles from the data center. If you need to pad for packet loss you’re down even further.
As I understand, edge computing locations tend to be in most major cities in the regions covered, providing tens-of-miles distance to most people in
major markets.
This reminds me of higher-res Mii's from the Wii, which was dated tech even at the time.
That said, the most important thing people should be asking is: is it fun? Because if you aren't gonna go super realistic then you had better nail the gameplay (Nintendo or Blizzard style).