Unity partnered with Passion Pictures to show the realtime rendering capabilities in The Butterfly Effect. It is a little bit amazing. There’s a butterfly involved, as well as some hijinks.
The trailer has everything the modern game needs in terms of graphics: dust particles, wrinkles on human beings, and realistic fabric textures. As someone who grew up with gaming, it looks like a lot has changed in terms of the graphics and realism achieved in gaming. I mean, I played a lot of Pokemon and Spyro, and the stuff we can do now is nothing short of astonishing. Improving the look of games on a console/hardware level seems to be the next order of business in the industry, with the Wii U making an appearance this holiday and news of the super secret PS4 and Xbox 720 or whatever always trickling out.
The worst part about having a Xbox 360 is knowing it can render beautiful, detailed, and realistic things and that rarely ever happening. The color of this generation was a combination of beige/brown/gray, because nothing says, “I’m a medium going through an angsty adolescent phase with a constant focus on death and war so take me seriously” like that color palette.
Unity and Passion Pictures worked together to show gamers what their tools can do, but it also shows how short the industry has fallen in terms using a lot of these tools to their full potential. Consoles don’t really need the ability to render great graphics if developers choose to make games that look like they came out of a 90’s preteen fantasy. We’ve heard that games need to achieve photorealism in order to add meaning to games and create new genres, but it doesn’t ring true to me. But that’s probably because I’ve played Minecraft, Journey, and Okami.
