Its amazing, looking at load of games in this modern day, everything in them from the lighting to the environments look great.
Many games such as Dead Space, Doom 3 and of course Gears of War all show a brilliant use of lighting to effectively convey emotions or the locale, where other games such as Mario Bros and Crysis have blisteringly crisp audio.
But of late I have been playing Grand Theft Auto IV again, I still havent completed it because Its the PC version and so my temprement for it went out of the window.
Anyway, playing through it some more recently seriously shocked me at how real this game looks in terms of environment modelling and lighting.
These two elements put together create something that is so full of emotion and depth I actually feel Im there sometimes. Its true. Looking at the audio direction, its clearly aparrent that rockstar have gone above and beyond creating audio based immersion also.
Simple touches such as cars braking sound realistic and the NPC dialogue actually makes sence. You actually have the feeling it could be audio from a big city, right now, live! Needless to say rockstar acheived with this game a level of detail and feel of scale that is, as far as I can see... unparalelled.
Last year I did a complete analytical look at the game and what can I say, the end result concluded that the environment and lighting were some of the best parts of the game.
Of course, with the inclusion of rear real graphics, its far too easy to fall into the uncanny valley, and this is easily visable with the characters who look formed, but as usual the eyes give the game away.
Saying that though, it ishard in this day and age to effectively acheive what you want from a game. Its good to get the story, narrative, audio and most visuals down, but to create emotion and realism on the same scale that Rockstar did, now thats art in its own right.
Playing previous iterations of the GTA series such as GTA 3 and San Andreas (needless to say I have them all), none have the same atmosphere as this game. Interestingly even games such as Gran Tourismo dont even look this good.
Dont get me wrong, games like GT look shockingly good, but what rockstar did with environment modelling and the lighting remains, as far as I can see, unbeaten, as these werent just for eye candy, they set the tone and ultimately, feel, of the game from the get go.
Sadly, I cant see the PC version at full settings, but from what I can render on screen (and thats actually pretty close to the full XBOX-like quality) I can see that this is one stunning game and one that will remain the fore-runner of realistic in-game lighting for a long time.
In my opinion at least.