Why Do I Think Max Payne 3 Has Bad Graphics, You Ask

eggbug asked…

Honest question (as in I'm not just asking this to rile you up).... why do you think Max Payne 3 has bad graphics? Like, there's a lot to not like about "the Housers present: knockoff Man on Fire starring Max Payne for some reason" but I genuinely dig it's PS360 era grime. like sure, it's not turn of the century photosource texturing but what is?

Well, it’s not interestingly art directed, for one thing; look how ugly it is just artistically. I think it would look bad in any era of tech. But!

I also think it’s the worst of the late-pre-pbr-era of “We are very much trying to do a Photo Realistic Style, but fundamentally Can’t”. They don’t trust photos to look good enough to lean on, but the diff/norm/spec pipeline fundamentally is something besides photorealistic, and it feels like they aren’t compromising enough to get a decent result.

There was an era where it became a faux pas to have lighting baked into your textures, but nothing had yet filled in those gaps on the rendering side, plus texture memory was still enough of an issue that not everything got a normal map, so in things like Max Payne 3 you end up with this weird situation where everything is either extremely flat or extremely bumpy - Max’s face is especially rough for this, his every shallow wrinkle casting a hard black shadow, while the panelled wall next to him has no idea where it’s lit from.

There are other games from this era that do a much better job - Splinter Cell Blacklist was from around the same time and looks great today, and while you’d think of it, probably, as being Realistic in style, it’s certainly not attempting to be Photorealistic, it’s highly stylised and doesn’t wish its lighting was physically correct. This is, I reckon, one of those visual styles that takes 15 years to be recognised as a visual style because it was near enough to the apex of photorealism at the time to be written off as part of whatever wave of attempts at that were happening then, but it’s much more intentional than what Rockstar were doing and has aged as well as any of the well-art-directed indie or retro games people praise for aging well.

This isn’t to say Rockstar don’t have incredible art teams or anything, but it feels to me as though until RDR2 they were more or less waiting for tech to catch up with what they were trying to render, the result always falling short, rather than compromising with the tech to produce something that really looked good right then. It’s always surprising to me that Rockstar never remaster an older game of theirs; it seems like they would be served by that more than most.