Yep. I still hate it.... (Destiny)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 21:56 (675 days ago) @ Anna Komnene
edited by INSANEdrive, Tuesday, January 17, 2023, 22:01

... It still looks like sub-par work to me, at a distance, compared to what we've seen from Bungie. Dreaming City? Elf like "Lord of the Rings" for days. Europa? F'n nailed it. And while folks may not have been all ooh'en and ahh'en about Savathûn's land-oh-happy fun time, you certainly know where you are where you are.

But this?

Some gosh darn Kirkland Signature "cyberpunk", I swear! Or... WHATEVER it's supposed to be. In fact, my apologies to Kirklands Signature, as at least it brings home the value. oh snap. As it stands, at a distance, I think there are two explainable reasons for my distaste;

• It's too clean. This is a 3d Art 101 point. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING is ever as clean as computers can make something be. The angles on whatever desk, table, chair, bed, couch you're sitting at right now... there are no perfect 90 degree angles where surfaces meet point to point. And even when they are clean, there are some imperfections. Smears, dents, scratches, or on the softer stuff, often in games it the obvious stuff such as wrinkles or aggressive textures.
  
  Ever wonder why the rugs in Destiny are always kicked up? Boom. That's why. Or at least a reason for it. Because otherwise... it just LOOKS wrong. Instinctively. Since Bungie probably isn't using a parallax shader trick to fake the depth of it, because that would be expensive, they just moved the geo to give it some folds, and you brain does the rest of the work to say... oh hey carpet.
  
  The best parts of this trailer are when they show some points that look like they have been through something, and then things look less clean and then it doesn't look as "wrong" to me.
  
  
• Lighting artists dropped the ball. Those words may be too harsh, especially from someone who has only seen a narrated glimpse of the whole package. And I also grant that it may be my "knowledgeable" self that has changed the bar from which I interpret from. An age where the once impossible real-time Ray Tracing and Global Illumination grows in root. I don't think this knowledge of lighting tech has effected my ability to be impartial against a game whose engine, while updated, is still(?) at least a decade-ish(?) give or take old.
  
  That all said, the lighting feels... flat to me. Like they took a bunch of gels and pointed the lights every which way, or splattered water color all over the lens. The colors used are so saturated that it looks like, at a distance, like ANY texture work which MIGHT be there, is lost. Bungie might as well of gray-boxed this shit, slapped some emissive textures "cuz cyberpunk", and let the lighting be the "diffuse" of the space. Like, shit... turn down on the Tone Mapping post processing or... something!
  
  It's overbearing and my eye doesn't know where to look. And... I hate it. It's awful. It's ruddy awful.

One more thing.

Some of the lighting or... "looks", do in fact remind me of my much declared favorite environmental space, Titan. Why does Titan get the highest of praise from me, while this cyber-puke palette wasteland gets such momentary destine?

Don't know. I'll probably figure it out eventually though.

(Also, holy crap... I mean I knew it was coming, but I did not expect this to drop so soon. Geeze alive.)

Edit: OH!... You know what the look of this "Brand New" Expansion reminds me of?

(...it appears Wu broke the function to embed with a timestamp... soooo...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFhy-FWD4VI&t=725s

Hence when I speak of "identity" up top, well, I bet this isn't helping either. The geo is different, yet the LOOK? IT'S THE SAME THING! AAAAA.