I’d add Denuvo to that list. Easily a 10-20% impact.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Depth of field and chromatic aberration are pretty cool if done right.
Depth of field is a really important framing tool for photography and film. The same applies to games in that sense. If you have cinematics/cutscenes in your games, they prob utilize depth of field in some sense. Action and dialogue scenes usually emphasize the characters, in which a narrow depth of field can be used to put focus towards just the characters. Meanwhile things like discovering a new region puts emphasis on the landscape, meaning they can use a large depth of field (no background blur essentially)
Chromatic aberration is cool if done right. It makes a little bit of an out of place feel to things, which makes sense in certain games and not so much in others. Signalis and dredge are a few games which chromatic aberration adds to the artstyle imo. Though obviously if it hurts your eyes then it still plays just as fine without it on.
I feel like depth of field and motion blur have their place, yeah. I worked on a horror game one time, and we used a dynamic depth of field- anything you were looking at was in focus, but things nearer/farther than that were slightly blurred out, and when you moved where you were looking, it would take a moment (less than half a second) to 'refocus' if it was a different distance from the previous thing. Combined with light motion blur, it created a very subtle effect that ratcheted up anxiety when poking around. When combined with objects in the game being capable of casting non-euclidean shadows for things you aren't looking at, it created a very pervasive unsettling feeling.
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And film grain. Get that fake static out of here
Most "film grain" is just additive noise akin to digital camera noise. I've modded a bunch of games for HDR (RenoDX creator) and I strip it from almost every game because it's unbearable. I have a custom film grain that mimic real film and at low levels it's imperceptible and acts as a dithering tool to improve gradients (remove banding). For some games that emulate a film look sometimes the (proper) film grain lends to the the look.
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These settings can be good, but are often overdone. See bloom in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
Also the ubiquitous "realistic" brown filter a la Far Cry 2 and GTA IV. Which was often combined with excessive bloom to absolutely destroy the player's eyes.
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I don't mind a bit of lens flare, and I like depth of field in dialog interactions. But motion blur and chromatic aberration can fuck right off.
I mind lens flare a lot because I am not playing as a camera and real eyes don't get lens flares.
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Don't forget TAA!
Worst fucking AA ever created and it blows my mind when it's the default in a game.
Shadows: Off
Polygons: Low
Idle Animation: Off
Draw distance: Low
Billboards instead of models for scenery items: On
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Hating on hair quality is a new one for me. I can understand turning off Ray Tracing if you can have a low-end GPU, but hair quality? It's been at least a decade since I've last heard people complaining that their GPU couldn't handle Hairworks. Does any game even still use it?
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PS3-> everything is sepia filtered and bloomed until nearly unplayable.
I will say that a well executed motion blur is just a chef's kiss type deal, but it's hard to get right and easy to fuck up
Personally I use motion blur in every racing game I can but nothing else. It helps with the sense of speed and smoothness.
PS3-> everything is sepia filtered and bloomed until nearly unplayable.
That's just games from that period. It's not excluse to PS3.
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I always turn that shit off. Especially bad when it's a first-person game, as if your eyes were a camera.
Chromatic aberration and Motion blur are the absolute most important to turn off right away for me, but DoF is a close second. I don't mind the other stuff.