Why are so many games today go so crazy with lighting effects? Tone it down, people!

Why are so many games today go so crazy with lighting effects? Tone it down, people!

To cover how little the polygon count has improved since Half-Life 2.

They do it because they realise nobody gives a shit about three more polygons when you have over sixty gorillion of them already so in order to compete they use reflections and lighting along with particle effects. That is why a lot of games make their characters look greasy as fuck, it lets them show off how cool their lighting is.

Well, with graphics finally slamming head first into the impenetrable wall that is photorealism (in other words, there's no where else to go once you can make graphics so good you can't tell them apart from a movie), devs are desperately scrambling to find something to improve. Lighting effects is a cost effective area to try for. This is why it feels like the only difference between this console gen and the last is lighting effects.

Same reason action aneemeas do it.
Bright, flashy colors entertain people with low attention span and impress people who care about graphics over gameplay/plot.

Is the picture on the left from a game or real life?

Photorealism is not an impenetrable wall you can slam into, it's an asymptote. Games are full of tiny, odd, uncanny-valley-ish details that make it possible to tell them apart from real footage.
But you point stands basically correct - as they are nearing the wall, the effort needed to achieve the next magnitude of realism increases exponentially. Lighting effects are the easy way of making something look better without "too much" effort

coming soon (tm)

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You do know that fantasy involving magic doesn't necessarily need to be epilepsy-inducing, right?

Makes graphics card manufacturers look good, doesn't require much implementation or thought for the core of a game's development, and it can be used to cover up pop-in or similar bullshit. The new Shadow Warrior is a prime example of this.

now that's kino

There is a difference between "over the top, flashy combat" and "raise the contrast up to 11, and then set the bloom to 13"
Also
Everything is done fully unironically there

Because cancerous streams and Let's Plays need to be eye catching, and fuck readability when actually playing.

Yes, user, that is the name of the publisher.

I said games are already there with mechanical things like cars.
I loved Infinity Blade graphically and uncanny valley only hit when he took the helmet off and saw my character's face..

All I've got to say about that is Padre, yagavocce!

Gotta sell those new graphics cards somehow

Allow for better animation then

I'll take bright colorful things over the brown/grey shit that seems to make up the palette in most modern western games.

Sometimes lighting is used to good effect

i bet 100 years ago you would ask why all these moving pictures feature senseless violence and explosions

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