I am so mad right now. Naughty Dog are idiots, complete and utter idiots. Uncharted 3 has now been ruined. Well done Naughty Dog, you collection of morons..
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This is not a satirical post, this is me explaining my hatred for motion blur.
Let me tell you a story about Uncharted 2. When I first started playing it I thought my new HD TV was broken, and was ready to take it back to the store for a replacement. There was some terrible smudging of the visuals whenever anything moved. I had this problem with the PSP, which was the fault of the old screen being crap, but none of my PS3 games so far had really had this problem. There was some slight colour smudge, but fiddling with the settings eventually made it go away on most games.
But with UC2 there was terrible, horrible smudging when you moved, making everything fuzzier than an acid trip at Woodstock. I had been to bachelor parties which were clearer and more focused than this crap. And no fiddling with settings could make it go away. Obviously my TV must have been ****ed. So I ask on NTSC-uk’s technical forum, and eventually it transpires that this Vaseline vision, this smudged greasy look which obscured my clarity, was called “motion blur” and was intentional.
I was forced to suffer it.
Then I discover that UC3 lacked this. Huzzah! I thought. Naughty Dog had seen sense to bless me with pure clarity. A few pissants on forums bitched about it, but **** em I thought, I wanted clarity. I needed clarity. Any way, long story short, ND also screwed with the aiming and so have now released a patch to correct this:
http://www.naughtydog.com/site/post/uncharted_3_patch_102_notes/#
Except as they also put it:
* Fixed the missing Motion Blur effects
It’s not fixing it, you imbeciles, it’s ****ing with it. I DON’T WANT SMUDGING!
Well done, idiots. The best thing about UC3 over its predecessor has now been removed, forcing me to play it either unpatched with broken controls, or patched so that it controls, but looks like absolute ass. And let me emphasise this – if UC3 lacked Vaseline vision before, that means it wasn’t now implemented for technical reasons. The game ran just fine without it. It should be OPTIONAL. It was implemented because ND are a bunch of cretins.
So I am forced to play without the patch, I am forced to play offline, I am forced to use broken controls. ARGH!!!
If I wanted anything less than absolute pure 100% crystal SHARP visuals, I’d use my SD TV and an RF cable, instead of the $1000 HD TV and HDMI cable I bought.
If I wanted blurring, I’d play without my corrective spectacles. Or better yet, for all those myopic whiners on ND’s forum, why don’t YOU just remove YOUR glasses?
If wanted blurring, I’d get drunk.
If wanted blurring, I’d smoke marijuana.
If I wanted blurring, I’d punch myself in the face until I saw stars.
If I wanted blurring, I’d go to a redneck bar, hand out baseball bats, then call ever man in there a panty-wearing sissy.
If I wanted blurring, I would buy some Vaseline and swab it over my eyes and my TV and then put MORE Vaseline on my eyes.
Some people have tried to persuade me that motion blurring is anything other than absolutely ****ing terrible, by showing videos of PC games with and without motion blurring. And you know what?In every single example motion blurring still sucks. It will always suck.
Anything which is a step away from absolute 100% fidelity sucks.
I hate motion blurring! I didn't buy a PS3, buy an HD TV and then pay £40 for a game with the visual clarity of an Atari 2600 game FFS!
not to sound rude but pretty much every 'hd' game has been doing this for years now. annoyingly alot of hd tvs have this bluring on movement feature built in which ruins the point in an hd tv really. sonme newer hd tvs remove this and actually work very well but for the most point if your watching something in 'hd' expect bluryness whenever the slightest movement happens.
ReplyDeleteand thats why i still use my 20 year old tv with my megadrive, crystal clear pixely beauty.
It's mostly used as a way to cover up screen tearing as well when the camera is moved quickly. Got to agree that it looks like absolute ass. Shadow of the Colossus had motion blurring but it was very subtle. Today motion blurring is over the top and looks terrible.
ReplyDeleteIt's like a new graphical fad that all developers are using. We used to have lens flare in every game but it was distracting and too noticable before it was dialled back.
We also had coloured lighting when 3D cards first entered the PC scene. Games like Quake 2 had coloured light sources lighting everything up in neon blue, green and red colours. It was technically impressive but looked like absolute ass. Then Half-Life came along with it's subtle use of lighting and realistic locations and showed how wrong everyone else got it by using technology for technologies sake.
Jarring use of motion blur is hear to stay until a developer comes up with a subtle solution to it that looks great (I'd say SotC was that subtle solution years ago and only used it for sweeping camera movements) and it will be copied by other developers. For now we have to put up with garish use of texture shaders, HDR and motion blur.
@anon:
ReplyDeleteYes, there's a blurring option in my TV's settings, which I of course switched off. Changing the colour settings, especially for black, helps a lot with stopping blur on games. Plus sharpness enhance works pretty nicely too on my set (some Samsung model).
You're a crazy person. Not that I necessarily disagree with you about motion blur, but the level of vitriol on display here is the kind that should be reserved only for, y'know, actual problems affecting your life.
ReplyDelete"not to sound rude"
ReplyDeleteNo, you wouldn't want to offend the belligerent author or anything.
A valid point, but you assume that I'm the opposite in real life, when in fact I am constantly in a foul mood, annoyed with everything around me. Just ask my last flat mate, I probably drove him mad for those 6 months.
ReplyDeleteMy internet vitriol is actually mild-mannered and humorous in comparison. I write letters, make complaints, berate people in public, was almost arrested at Moscow airport, and so on in my constant struggle against the stupidity of the real world.
I'm like a younger version of Victor Meldrew.
We're already in the more subtle phase for motion blur. You wanna see sick motion blur? Try playing Shenmue 2 on Xbox!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that's just one of the many things where it's completely asinine not to have a setting for in the options menu, along with seperate volume for effects/music/voices and difficulty.
Console games could really do with having graphics settings that players can adjust, both for effects they don't care for, and also to boost framerates if they don't care about certain things. Would do a wonder for many games.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best things about the console ports of Bioshock was the ability to disable vsync. Sure, there was tons of screen tearing, but I value a high frame rate over graphical quality, so I preferred it.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people seem to really dig the motion blur, but there's no reason it couldn't have been an option like the new aiming scheme.
the lego games had that 'vsync' on/off option too. i think alot of pc games had the option to turn on/off the motion blur (gta 3 was one methinks).
ReplyDeletewasn't there also a ps1 game that let you have the option of turning a graphical feature on and of to improve framerate?
Some people get headaches with games that don't have any motion blur. This is not a proven fact though, I have concluded it myself. I have a friend who couldn't bare playing FPS games for more than 20 minutes. I once asked him to play one with motion blur and he didn't have any problems playing it for over 2 hours. But I guess too much of anything is... well, too much.
ReplyDelete@Sketcz: Are you serious? I used to be like that, but I grown tired of it. "Ignorance is bliss", they say.
@Discoalucard: If you have an nvidia VGA, you can force the v-sync on and off for any game using nvidia control panel. As a matter of fact, you can choose the exe file and force any 3D option you fancy on it. It will override the game setting (if it has one). It's good for games that don't have an options menu.
The same can be done on ATI cards, but afaik doing so is not so easy since they don't have a GUI for it. You need to manually edit text files (I think).
God bless the PC.
@Gezegond, was specifically referring to the console versions. PC games are usually pretty good about offering in-game graphical options, or at least have outside ways to futz with them.
ReplyDeleteIt's not like this is unheard of. Mass Effect on Xbox 360 had switches both for the motion blur and film grain effects. In Mass Effect 2 the motion blur option is gone, but I can't even tell if it has motion blur or just a crappy framerate.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with motion blur is that it looks terrible at low framerates. Of course, it doesn't help when the reason they add motion blur in the first place is to cover up the framerate.
ReplyDeleteIf anything, you should be angry with the developers for targeting 30 frames-per-second instead of sixty.
oh, sorry for the mistake.
ReplyDelete@ano - G-police was this PSX game
ReplyDelete