Here's Why Bioshock Infinite's Stylized Texturing May Be the Key to its Beauty

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Bioshock Infinite is the game everyone wants to talk about this week, and with good reason. It's exciting, it's clever, it's tragic, and it's also drop-dead gorgeous. It's arguably the most beautiful game released so far this year. But why is that? What exactly is Bioshock Infinite doing differently?

I'm no expert, but I think I have a pretty solid theory: It's all about the textures.

When you look at screenshots from Infinite (or even play it yourself) the world feels almost like a digital painting, and a very large part of that has to do with the texturing. This is not a game where the artists have photosourced every surface and moved on to the next; while most of the textures in this game do have photosourced elements (meaning details taken from photographic resources) there also seems to be a great deal of artistry and care taken to paint over these textures as well. These painterly touches of soft, high-contrast shading contribute tremendously to Infinite's overall visual style, making the world very bold and bright and avoiding the relative flatness you can sometimes see in environments and models textured with purely photosourced material.

Of course there's a lot more to it than that. This game also has amazing lighting effects, and it would be a huge mistake to say that they don't also play an incredibly important role in the distinct and stylized look of Infinite's world.

There's depth of field and post-processing filters to consider as well... But I'd still say that the texturing makes the biggest difference. Even on low settings (where most of the features I just mentioned would be off or scaled back significantly) the environment still looks pretty damn good. That's because they aren't relying on any one effect entirely.

One of the significant benefits of this "painted" technique is that almost every texture has a degree of shading right on it, so higher-quality light and shadow settings are just gravy on top. This shading also often emphasizes and enhances details that are modeled into objects in the world, so it can help take the edge off if you're playing with a lower object detail setting as well.

Another benefit of this painted look on lower settings is that with its bolder contrasting elements and smooth gradients, the texturing generally translates very well to a lower resolution. No, it absolutely won't look as good up close because you are still losing the crispness and the fine details you would expect to see, but from a distance it does the job very well.

Now, take everything I've said here with a grain of salt. I am at best an armchair texture critic so I bet Infinite's designers could school me on what's really making these environments pop, but this is a stylistic element I've also noticed in one of 2012's most visually stunning games -- Dishonored. High contrast, painterly, ultra-stylized texturing made the layered spaces of Dunwall sing under almost any graphics settings, for much the same reasons that they do in Infinite.

I'm sure there are people out there who would prefer to live and die by photo-realism in their video games, but for me games like these that blend high detail with high art are the best of both worlds. The assumption that photo-realism is always the best use of a game's graphics is a frustrating one, but sometimes you just need to worry less about what looks realistic and more about what looks fucking amazing. Better still, time is much more forgiving on games with strong visual style, so hopefully in 10 years we'll be able to revisit this powerful game without cringing.

... Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a utopia to destroy.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Damien Fate]

Aesthetics over graphics - always. I always find them more visually appealing, and as you said they age much better.

[joker]

Pixar vs Dreamworks...

Watch Shrek , then watch Cars.

Art Directors worth anything have known this about CGI "realism" for a decade or so.