Searching for a game to be identical to reality is something that has been attempted by many studios for almost 30 years, when the CD format arrived and it was already possible to store large amounts of information, including long video sequences that we could play on. They were called games full motion video (FMV). Now in another way unrecorded try the same.
too real to be funny
In the last hours we have all seen a tweet in which someone showed us a clip of a gameplay of a game called Unrecord. A title that is in development for PC, which will also be released for VR and which is characterized by a graphic aspect made with Unreal Engine 5 that is practically a carbon copy of reality. It’s hard to tell if the character moving on the screen is real or just a computer graphic.
Well, this title that you already have to add to your Steam wish list has raised a huge stir because it has sparked the old debate of whether playing with reality is fun or not. And in our case, we must say that we do not think so. When the fictional veneer on the appearance of a video game disappears, we quickly begin to have a feeling of unease, of discomfort, as if what we are seeing is part of the real world.
Let’s see, we will not be radical in this and it is completely normal for someone to think otherwise, which is very respectable, but who subscribes he also never liked the so-called FMV that became fashionable a few years ago. And it wasn’t so much about the best or worst of its development or gameplay mechanics as the appearance itself. What enters your eyes and what it transmits to you.
In between, a haunting valley
There is a very widespread theory that is that of the “uncanny valley”, which comes to mean something like that human beings feel discomfort or rejection when looking at realistic, accurate anthropomorphic representations and exact before us, either in the virtual world thanks to computer generated graphics, or in the real world where robots, mobile sculptures, etc. can be manufactured.
That is to say, that in a title like unrecorded, where realism is everything, how might we feel about attacking a character who looks indistinguishable from a person with a first and last name? And be careful, here we have fought hard battles within Medal of Honor or many Call of Duty, Battlefield and any other name where the bullets fly from a first person perspective. We have not had qualms about ending those dolls that told us they were the bad guys but when everything becomes hyper-realistic… things change.
go ahead than unrecorded It looks extraordinary, which in virtual reality has to be already the quintessence of a shooter in first person but we want to see it when it comes out to confirm if so much realism, without so much resemblance to reality, is good for a video game. Maybe you have to stop, take a step back and re-design worlds that do not exist, are imperfect and in which make it clear that we are still in a video game.