The best-looking video game ever made is DICE's original Mirror's Edge released in 2008.
It featured highly photorealistic light calculations, yet was still able to achieve an extremely beautiful stylized look.
The ray-traced lighting was pregenerated with middleware called Beast Lighting, which allowed them to tune the reflection and color intensity of the light.
Never let anyone from NVidia tell you that raytracing HAS to look bad.
Modern graphics cannot reach this fidelity because of a lack of Art Direction, not because you need a more powerful GPU.

Unfortunately, the creator Illuminate Labs was acquired by Autodesk in 2010 and Beast Lighting hasn't been utilized to the same degree since. What happened to DICE is common knowledge.

@WandererUber Ah yes, the game which had at most two colors at the same time.

@Jens_Rasmussen Jens my friend you have gone too far this time

@WandererUber I've completed the game two or three times, this time I actually know what I am talking about (although it was many years ago).

@Jens_Rasmussen As have I.
it's one of my all time favorite games and somewhat of an exception to my autistic rule that "games should have gameplay at their core"
The story missions are a bit linear and easy but I suppose they cranked the challenge in the trial missions from the DLC. It's been a while but every time I think about it, I want to replay it. Huge influence on my aesthetic sense.

@WandererUber The game was inventive for its time, because first person parkour was pretty much unexplored. Combined with a unique aesthetic look of the levels, the "two color" style that all the levels have, the significant marketing and decent production quality it is quite memorable.

I would still say that it is not that good of a game though, looking back.

@Jens_Rasmussen As I've said, the gameplay isn't as exceptional as the rest. But the parkour was a nice vessel for the "walking while audio plays" style that millions of games since have tried to ape unsuccesfully. It was so prescient and inventive it's insane to me.
Because in this game, there was gameplay that FIT listening to audio (your guy talking in your earpiece) instead of "audio playing while you wait for gameplay" like in walking simulators these days or escort missions etc. You're just in the zone, a fast runner, and that's why you have time to listen. Not how modern games do it!

@WandererUber "Nice game you have there. You wouldn't mind implementing our vendor locked proprietary physics engine into your game, would you? Don't worry. It's not like we'll drop support for it in a future generation of our GPUs and fallback to an intentionally crippled CPU implementation that'll kill your framerate."

@trogdor Please tell me this is not going to be a problem

@WandererUber It already is. Remember, the more GPUs you buy, the more you save! Better get you old dusty GTX 580 from the closet if you want to get your money's worth of performance.

@WandererUber using raytracing in production and translating it to baked lighting in retail is so self-evidently logical, you really see how these companies will destroy everything good in the world to make a profit and use you as beta-testers for inferior realtime RT.
If your game has static environments, you produce using RT and ship with baked lighting ONLY, no exception!

@WandererUber @Jens_Rasmussen wasn't the DLC console-only? I played Mirror's Edge (liked it alot but it is admittedly somewhat easy) but never got around to playing the trial missions because Steam didn't have them

@dagda baked lighting has it's limits. I think it was WYSIWYG and disk/download size issues that triggered the shift away from it. Who knows. I think Source Engine still bakes.
At the same time, you could probably hook up something like blender cycles and just bake at load. Would probably take 20 seconds and you could buffer it to disk if the user has the space.

@WandererUber Such a fun and unique game, i loved it. Great for speedruns too https://youtu.be/LMaabZMEHwc

@Fash-E if Blouie sees this he might have a new addiction

@WandererUber @Fash-E I like watching mirrors edge speedruns

@Blouie @Fash-E >he already knew

@WandererUber @Blouie @Fash-E Tried it a few years back forced into VR with no motion mitigation.. got a bit ill, and pretty bad vertigo..

@HonkHonkBoom @Blouie @Fash-E I can only imagine
just play it on a monitor

@dagda @Jens_Rasmussen @WandererUber you could get the dlc hacked into the PC version

@WandererUber still annoyed about how bland and nothing the sequel was. How tf do you make architecture and environments that are simultaneously over-designed and absolutely forgettable

@Flanker I ask myself that every time I look at modern architecture irl

@WandererUber How do you feel about Dying Light games, if you've played them?

@Jens_Rasmussen in some highly specific autistic sense, this looks like an anti Mirror's Edge.
It was the perfect storm for my autistic ass so I doubt these will scratch that same itch.
The jews say fetishes are discovered instead of acquired, and I tell you what Mirror's Edge definitely awakened my fetish for clean cities with striking colors. And the politics explored in it were spot on what I was interested in back then.

Did you play them yourself and do you recommend them? If so, I'll start the download right now.

@WandererUber I've played the first Dying Light, and the 2nd game has been on my wishlist for a long time despite me telling myself that I'd buy it when it got below 20 Euros.

In terms of art direction, at least the first game, has the opposite of Mirror's Edge's supremely clean look, as you say. It also takes place in a fictional middle eastern country that is somewhat westernized (Turkey inspired?), so there are a lot of brown people featured as well, but it is a setting where it makes sense, so I am not upset about it.

I am asking if you know the games because it is the game series other than Mirror's Edge, as far as I know, that does first person rooftop parkour the best, it also has segments where someone talks with you in your ear, while you do the running. It's open world though, unlike Mirror's Edge.

The setting is a zombie apocalypse, so if that's a no for you because it's not about anarchists fighting the big man by being couriers then I guess you can skip the series.

The only big complaint that I have with the Dying Light series is that weapons have levels, because the developers (mistakenly) thought some RPG elements would be good, and you need to make use of fancy and sometimes silly weapons by the mid- to late-game. The early parts of the game where any plain low-level pipe, wrench and hammer that you can find is a valid weapon for smashing zombie skulls has a real survival charm to it that the game loses as you progress.

The first game is on a big discount right now, so you can try it out for cheap (Or just pirate it, whatever) and it won't be a big loss if it's not for you.

@Jens_Rasmussen >it's not about anarchists fighting the big man by being couriers
this was so fucking innocent-european-mind kino it's insane

I've watched the good old "gameplay no commentary" for a bit and what astonished me is that it takes ten and a half minutes until you're allowed to start playing. In Mirror's Edge, they give you a skippable lore intro and you're out the door, on the roof, wallrunning in 90 seconds.

Anyways, if the game comes Rasmussen-approved, I'll be sure to give it a try. I'm sure there must be something interesting there if you like it old bean