Devs explain why a "bodycam FPS" looks too real
Last week on YouTube: Cop game looks Unreal. The Crab Rave universe expands. The Morning Zoo Crew returns.
The big video this week was a trailer for Unrecord, a “bodycam shooter” that approaches photorealism. It sparked discussions on YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch about the authenticity of the trailer and whether violence in games is about to cross a new threshold.
The striking footage stays in the chest-high perspective of a cheap wearable camera as the protagonist enters an abandoned building, chases after its inhabitants, and guns them down. Blown highlights, constant motion blur, and the unsteady movement of the cameraman’s handgun add to the verisimilitude. The trailer was instant reaction bait for big YouTubers and Twitch streamers — the line many went with was “too real.”
See for yourself:
Sorry, that’s a magazine cover from 1997. My mistake. Here’s what I’m talking about:
Many people thought this was fake (a mix of real video and game assets). It turns out that it’s real (an Unreal Engine 5 creation that fakes the look of real recordings). Though it might still be fake in the E3 trailer sense of looking vastly better than the real game that someday comes out.
The most illuminating takes on this footage came not from YouTube’s biggest gaming personalities but from game development channels. The Cherno, a programmer whose most-viewed videos are mostly C++ tutorials, starts out by digging into the game’s clever use of overexposure and motion blur, then winds up sounding underwhelmed by its reliance on photogrammetry: “it’s kind of like taking a photo of something, slapping it onto a texture in Unity, then being like ‘that’s photorealistic’...yes, it’s a photo.”
Artist JSFILMZ seems more impressed, though he picks out similar details in his own video: “you can always tell by the ground if something is photo-scanned or NeRFed…you don’t really get a lot of fine detail in them. Once you start adding photorealistic assets they will stick out. The floors are really giving it away.” (Some of the stuff he’s talking about seems to come from a $90 asset pack identified on Twitter.)
So, while Unrecord looks hyper-real and insane to the internet at large, the underlying tech is “I’ve been saying this” territory for channels like The Cherno and JSFILMZ. (The latter speculates you could make Unrecord “in Fortnite Creative.”) Why does it look so good? Expert mimicry of the low shutter speed of real bodycams, UE5 features like Nanite that make high-quality photo-scanned assets more workable, and some old-fashioned trailer trickery where the camera quickly passes by the worst-looking stuff (the characters).
I think this all means a lot of people are about to mistake scuffed-up clips from the coming wave of UE5 games for real footage. Even more people than have already been fooled repeatedly by Ride 4, Digital Combat Simulator, and ARMA 3.
What is this thing?
Every day on YouTube, thousands of channels play new and baffling video games. These are some of them.
Who’s Your Daddy?! (2015) is a chaotic asymmetrical multiplayer game that’s become a “party game channel” staple. Most players become babies who crawl toward hazardous objects; the Daddy player(s) try to keep them alive. But usually everyone just screws around and makes weird physics interactions happen. The game has been back in rotation for channels like Smii7y and Vanoss since its January update. (The force of the laughter in these videos will sound familiar to commuters; yes, this is the Gen Z Morning Zoo Crew.)
A potential “Call of Duty killer” called XDefiant (upcoming) is gaining traction among Call of Duty YouTubers. Ubisoft’s FPS is promising a return to the snappier pace of Duties past and ticking off items on streamer wish lists like the removal of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM pits the best players against each other, which they don’t like.)1 The community does seem truly exhausted with the last CoD’s slow pace and recycled ideas. They need to get this guy back on the job.
Demonologist (March 2023) is a new Phasmophobia clone with shiny UE5 graphics and an emphasis on scripted jump scares.
Crab Champions (April 2023) is a crab-centric roguelike from Noisestorm, the maker of the “Crab Rave” song and video. He worked on it for five years and everyone seems to like it (98% on Steam, ~7K reviews).
Garten of Banban is a poorly-reviewed kids’ horror game (“mascot horror”) that came out in January. It’s still around. The developers released Garten of Banban 2 in March and are threatening to release Garten of Banban 3 soon. Pretending to like these games is a task that separates the kids-channel men from the kids-channel boys; only truly dedicated souls can sell it. Recently, a college student with no game dev experience remade the first game in one week to make a point.
Videos and trends
A recent “persistence” update to the long-delayed MMO Star Citizen might be filling its world with trash. If you pitched me a game that was just “a persistent galaxy of abandoned space junk,” I would play it.
One enduring genre of Roblox videos is a kind of aspirational whale experience where you watch a YouTuber spend Robux to win. Millennial core gamers are demonstratively hostile to pay-to-win games (see the furious coverage of Diablo Immortal), but I’m curious whether Roblox has normalized them for a younger crowd.
The modder Orelstealth made a roguelite in CS:GO. The 250K views on this (+170K on the Russian original) show how far YouTube can extend the reach of this style of mod beyond an insular modding community.
I didn’t get these “one hour of silence broken by X” videos until I saw the pinned comment here. I sort of get using these to jumpscare yourself/destroy your own concentration, but they make so much more sense as something you open on a friend’s computer and hide among the tabs.
Here’s a moving 3D recreation of the opening scene from Cliffhanger (via r/deepintoyoutube).
Thanks for reading
That’s it for this week. Keep watching the ground — that’s how you tell if you’re inside a video game.
The argument is more reasonable than it sounds — CoD matches better players against each other in Casual, but doesn’t give them visible Elo ratings or a ladder system to climb, so they feel like they’re playing harder games for no reward. There’s a broader complaint about the way the game invisibly rates players and manipulates their experience to maximize engagement, which grates on hardcore players but goes unnoticed by casuals.