The year 2023 has spoiled us with many top-notch games, earning us a place among the best in the history of the gaming industry. True, the long-awaited unification of reality and virtuality failed again. We saw a lot of “simply beautiful” games with excellent graphics, good animation, and high detail. It's time to list the brightest releases of the past year - both for consoles and for PCs!
Atomic Heart
The easiest way to understand what level graphics have reached today is to play Atomic Heart. It is built on Unreal Engine 4, so you don’t have to worry about the quality of textures, surface detail, particle system, and lighting model with a realistic play of light and shadow. All this is at a high level. If you wish, you can turn on ray tracing and see the delights of new technologies. The feeling of a living and dynamic world is given by the vast semi-open spaces filled with good (though not ideal) vegetation that the player can explore. As for the disadvantages, we would include very simple NPC models and dull animation. If you've seen the trailers and screenshots of Atomic Heart, you might think that this is the bare minimum in terms of graphics among the 2023 projects. But this is a rare case when the beauty of a game does not depend only on the technologies used, but rather on the visual style and creative approach to design.
Dead Space Remake
A complete reimagining of the original Dead Space, using all modern graphics technologies. Most of all, the necromorphs are amazing: with their flexibility, sharpness, and highlighted animation of body parts, they are superior not only to the original but to other projects of this genre in recent years. Dead Space Remake introduces a new lighting system and boasts a realistic play of light and shadow in the complete darkness of the game world, creating an atmosphere of cosmic horror that is more believable than ever. The seamless world greatly enhances immersion: the USG Ishimura can be traversed from start to finish, lengthwise and crosswise. Moreover, the “destroyer of planets” was rebuilt in the direction of plausibility. The game was developed on the modernized Frostbite engine, which, after a couple of years of lag, showed excellent competition with newer engines in terms of visuals.
Witchfire
The indie project Witchfire impressed players with its technological splendor. This is a clear demonstration that in the right hands, Unreal Engine 4 can be an effective tool for creating colorful worlds with realistic effects. Photogrammetry is one of the technologies that made it possible to achieve this result. But not only. The lighting system adds depth and atmosphere to the game, creating colorful lighting effects and shadows. Thanks to careful development of the source code, Witchfire does without ray tracing and its image is not much inferior to games that use the notorious ray tracing. The project is still in early access, and some locations and objects may be too similar to each other. Otherwise, it’s one of the most amazing projects of the year.
Sons of the Forest
Another project in our TOP is the successor to the legendary indie survival game The Forest. And since he attracted our attention, you can understand that even on Unity projects are possible to compete with the giants. Full of forests, meadows, and streams, the world of Sons of the Forest is truly vast, and impressive with the detail of forests that cover a significant part of the territory, created using the same photogrammetry. The developers have introduced seasons with smooth transitions, as well as interactive elements such as leaf fall, first snow, icing, and even deep knee-deep snowdrifts. The game boasts a large selection of graphics settings, including anisotropic textures, draw distance, ambient occlusion, and dynamic resolution, which can significantly increase the FPS on the screen.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
A game based on the cinematic universe of the famous "Avatar" by James Cameron, worthy of the visual quality of the film! Regardless of its gameplay shortcomings, consider Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora as an impressive virtual tour of Pandora, where you can wander through its majestic forests full of gorgeous and amazing plants, interact with fantastic animals, explore picturesque open plains and breathtakingly steep mountains with floating rocks. Just like in the film, you can enjoy the world of Pandora while flying on the dragon Ikran. Many plants have been endowed with bioluminescent properties, which gives them a unique appearance at night. Ubisoft's technical team has unleashed the full potential of the Snowdrop engine, although the game requires a powerful computer to fully render.
Dead Island 2
Dead Island 2 doesn't have outstanding textures, stunning light and shadow play, or next-gen solutions for rendering vegetation. But the same epithets can be applied to the ultra-violence and cruelty in this game. Yes, yes, only in Dead Island 2 you can see in detail how a splash of blood sparkles in the sun, just knocked out of the nearest zombie, how their bodies are destroyed by blows from cold weapons, or how they fly apart from explosions. Fortunately, the action takes place in flood-lit Los Angeles, so the lighting is all right. “Ketchup” from zombies gets on hands, clothes, and walls and generally colors the space around the protagonist, increasing immersion in what is happening.
Hogwarts Legacy
A detailed environment, rich in elements and artistic solutions, attention to small details in Hogwarts is one of the most noticeable features of Hogwarts Legacy. The visual beauty of the landscapes of northern Britain, coupled with excellent effects, captivates from the first minutes (especially compared to all the previous Harry Potter games). And turning on ray tracing makes the game even more beautiful. It makes sense to stick around here and there, looking at yourself in reflections and catching notes of different lighting and light scattering. Yes, to some extent, Hogwarts Legacy is a typical console port, its graphics on medium settings are equivalent, give or take, to those on the XSX and PS5. But this also means that you can easily run it on an average PC, and if you have a more powerful system, you can take advantage of all the graphical goodies.
Fort Solis
And now a truly new generation. Built on Unreal Engine 5.2, the indie horror Fort Solis surprised with excellent animation of characters and NPCs - both general (body) and facial, which was even called one of the most realistic in the industry at the moment. Moving, correctly directed pupils, blinking eyelids, wrinkles on the forehead, and correct processing of smiles - and this is not the whole list of technologies. All light sources can create shadows and the environment looks really cool. The use of Nanite technology made it possible to display a large amount of detail without the need for objects to suddenly appear. At the same time, Fort Solis is a very demanding game that only runs reliably on the latest flagship NVIDIA video cards.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2
Powered by Insomniac's own engine, this game unlocks the potential of console graphics at the zenith of the PlayStation 5 development cycle. New York City's landscapes, modes of transportation, and character models are impressive in their magnificence. There is more geometry in buildings, greater detail in parts of the city, and a variety of textures and materials everywhere. Lighting, shadows, and reflections have been thoroughly updated, adding visual polish to the game. Large crowds of NPCs walk the streets, and the city that never sleeps is almost always stuck in traffic jams. Despite the huge world, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 loads in a matter of seconds, and moving around it at lightning speed doesn't cause any performance issues. The game provides two graphics modes, and its photo mode is rightfully considered one of the best in modern projects.
Alan Wake 2
Another project developed on its own engine, instead of the mass-produced Unreal Engine and Unity, but in no way inferior to them. And in some ways superior. We described Alan Wake 2 as a technologically advanced, highly optimized game. Here we have one of the first next-gen projects created at the intersection of advanced graphics and cinematography. The picture looks very good at minimum settings and excellent at maximum. Delivers stable 4K 30 FPS with ray tracing on PCs and consoles, easily scaling up to 120 FPS, which was previously impossible in projects of this level. The photo mod in the game is also considered one of the best in modern games.
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Ending a brilliant gaming year in 2023 is no reason to be sad. Hold on tight, soon the games will be such that you won’t have to worry about reality. Inspired by their success, the developers will raise the bar for graphical heights to the skies in the next couple of years. We are sure of this, and you? We are waiting for your opinion in the comments!
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