Okay, apparently I'm "retarded," but games like Nier: Automata and BotW look really fucking washed out to me...

Okay, apparently I'm "retarded," but games like Nier: Automata and BotW look really fucking washed out to me, and they always have shitty amounts of fog in the background. I haven't played either IRL, but WHY THE FUCK IS THIS THE ART STYLE? What is the advantage?

because muh fog makes everything mysterious

>I haven't played either IRL
stop reading here.

>I haven't played either IRL

How else do you play them?

gameplay vids

Fog exists solely to cover up bad draw distance and pop-in

Be happy it's there because the game would look worse without it,

If you want perfectly fog-less games with infinite draw and render distance travel about 20-30 years into the future

that's not playing them. Not in any capacity.

because nier
nips like it

But games like Twilight Princess and Wind Waker didn't have shitty fog obscuring everything. You could look up the FUCKING MOUNTAIN and see something awesome.
Was it because it was all low-poly? in that case, less fucking polygons please

Nier: Automata and BotW are both set in a post-semi-apocalypse wasteland, so they may have very washed out environments, but both games frequently subvert that with lush areas of greenery and special effects that are colorful or flashy, which pop out against the drab backgrounds. It's easy to focus on the action when the action-critical elements differentiate themselves from the background, but reducing the beauty of the backgrounds is certainly not the best way to go about this.
I personally think both of those games have just the right amount of "washed out" environments for their settings, but I completely understand your argument.
By fog, I assume you mean depth of field? Or do you mean fog that obscures the draw distance? I've not seen anything that fits that particular description, but depth of field is just a thing that happens to real life cameras and eyes, focusing on certain things and blurring others. It's mostly used for a cinematic effect, but I find it has no use in gameplay.
I think games could do without depth of field, unless it's used to good effect in a cutscene.

If you aren't satisfied with my answers, could you please provide me with examples of these being used in-game? Perhaps a screenshot?

Huh? In botw you can see landmarks across the whole map, there is no fog obscuring them.

Man, you weren't kidding about being retarded.
By the way if you're talking about that particular screenshot, reducing the value contrast in the background and lowering overall value in the foreground is a composition necessity. There's other ways to solve it, but this is a basic solution for not having a shitty picture.

I'd assume it's to cover up draw distance, but at least in Zelda the weird washed-out "foggy" look only happens some of the time. There was plenty of times playing it where I could look out and clearly see the features of mountains on the horizon, instead of just their general shape. Maybe it's supposed to be a visual thing but it just kinda makes the game look shittier.

>botw.
> fog.

????

That's because those games had the visual fidelity of a NES game

Even when an explosion happens in the foreground, the fucking grass in BotW still tries to overpower the scene.
The fucking rocks in BotW look like they're from Halo 1. Don't give me that shit.

delete this
fog in botw makes it better

Taro just likes that aesthetic. It also allows Automata to not shit the bed in performance.

Regarding BotW - the Wii U does not output full RGB, but limited RGB, so unless you/the player is re-calibrating the monitor every time you sit down to play Zelda specifically, it will be washed out.

The PS4/Xbone don't do this. Don't know if Switch has the same issue.

This, there's all sorts of little performance tricks being implemented in Automata. Fog is just one of them.

Holy shit, they could try a bit harder than that. Wind Waker has better explosions than that. That just looks like a blimp exploded in pre-patch Battlefield 1.
Yeah, the grass is overpowering, isn't it? The framerate on Switch drops when you go into patches of tall grass, I've seen. I wonder if grass rendering is just on the top priority of their engine at all times?
Also, I saw a goddamn rock golem come out of the ground recently... I thought it was a goddamn glitch, like a bunch of rolling stones were spawned underground and they were shunting themselves out. The quality of the animation and the low polygon count on the rocks were just not indicative of it being a mini-boss.

what fog?

took this myself btw

>what fog
>the blue in the sky isn't even fucking visible
you're really memeing me right now, right?

...

>implying the blue in the sky irl doesn't fade out the farther you can see

>washed out
Play them on a wide gamut monitor, now they look normal again :^)

>Fewer meme shaders + a good art style, good draw distance and good performance makes for a better game than “cinematic” games that can't even consistently hit 30 and struggle to render past 50m
Wow, who knew? More news at 11

fogging does the same thing depth of field does, it's designed to reduce the user noticing low quality textures at far distances. for Nier the fog is apparently shittily programmed graphic piss-filter, though, and lowering the value has granted untold frames to many users.

It's also made to speed up the performance so you can hit your 60 fps target or 4K or whatever.

Reducing the FoV and reducing the draw distance both massively (quadratically) reduce the amount of scene complexity, so you get a lot of performance for free out of just making the FoV and draw distance as low as possible.

Blame shitty game devs trying to push “““cinematic””” graphics on consoles. Another game that did this was Horizon. They had that stupid 4K 30 Hz target and they made every sacrifice to hit it.