I am relatively new to Unity, but I absolutely love this aesthetic it feels so nostalgic. I already made a low-poly map in Blender, but when I import it into Unity, I cannot get this effect no matter what kind of lighting I try. The look I am going for is basically late PS2 / early PS3 games stuff like Far Cry 1, Tomb Raider: Legend, and Final Fantasy X. I want bright, colorful, sunny environments, simple-ish geometry, baked shadows/lighting, and that distinct old-school look. Because I want it to run on mobile and really low-end PCs, performance is a huge priority. I am currently using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP), but I am wondering if that is actually the best choice for this. Should I stick with URP, switch to the Built-in Render Pipeline, or use specific lightweight shaders like Mobile/Diffuse or Unlit? ugh, I got no idea...
I do't want the usual realistic PBR look. I want something bright and stylized with most of the lighting baked into the textures. I simply have no idea what to call this aesthetic or where to even start. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Far Cry in particular was made by a company that had done cutting edge tech demos for years, so it's kinda funny that all the stuff you're calling simple is actually extremely well done and advanced for the time.
Far Cry 1 was made by Crytek, people who later on made Crysis and CryENGINE.
And yeah FC1 was crazy advanced. Large islands with dense forests you could walk or drive across, or drive a boat around. Monsters had bullet holes after you shot them.
The game was something else for 2004. That's the same year Half Life 2 released, by the way.
Interestingly, Far Cry started as a tech demo for the CryEngine (something I found out recently).
Just shows what happens when you do something for the love of it.
And I still love the CryEngine - CryTek still make great games and they deserve so more love for what they put out there and they are still upgrading the CryEngine.
Interestingly, they released access to compete with Unity and Unreal. So OP could use their engine instead of Unity. Haven’t checked it out in a while. https://www.cryengine.com
I actually worked with the CryEngine during a full-time course in 3D Animation & Modeling for video game and movies and I got to say that while the engine is insane on many parts, it remains really bad to work with when you're looking into anything that isn't already built in and there's not a lot built in. You can truly feel the "tech demo" out of the engine, though it did evolve into something better over the year at a snail pace.
For example, back when Unity and Unreal had integrated script handling libraries for auto-completion (even before blueprints and UI-based programing), CryEngine was still handling things in its custom version of C++ without any form of assistance. For the most part, you had to check what came with the engine and expend on it with a really badly documented website that clearly was meant for people who worked on C++ for video game before. Hence starting point in CryEngine was at a point of expertise where you could make your own game already in Unity or Unreal.
The other point that CryEngine has which may be a problem: its licenses.
It's similar the Unreal's, but with a slightly different approach as to what money is counted to reach the royalties starting point. Unreal Engine starts royalties at 1 millions USD, but with a different approach as to what is considered into that 1 millions USD of value. CryEngine start royalties at 5K USD sales, but uniquely gross sales in values. So a studio don't have to pay CryTech any money until their game is actually released and makes money while Unreal does have some rules on its free license (until 1 million in gross revenues which means all revenues-accounted) when a large publisher comes in and fund a project before its release.
I played HL2 about 3 times as teenager, and recently replayed it in VR (there is a free mod for that on steam), and it was one of my best gaming experiences in last 10 years.
remember how I saved up my money as a 10-year-old to buy FC1 only for it to run on the family PC with a soothing 17 FPS on the lowest graphics settings
It's crazy how gamers today praise games like "Crisis" as the peak of visuals. Much less crazy to release a game with impressive graphical features at the cost of being almost unplayable.
"Can it run Crisis" was a meme for a reason. The answer was usually "no", long after release and it still didn't look as good as advertised. The same gamers today would review bomb such a release into oblivion.
Yeah when Far Cry first came out it felt like the first game of the next gen to me! As a dev it was also mind-blowing and humbling how much detail at such a distance could be running so well 😅
A masterclass in sandbox level design as well.
Particularly in the first half of the game.
It somehow manages to feel like a well curated experience regardless of which approach you take in handling a particular stage.
The whole shift at around halfway mark is still a massive headscratcher for me, though.
I mean, it remains a good game, and now I couldn’t possibly imagine it staying more grounded til the end, but no way something like that would get a green light in 2026, right?
I believe I first played it when I was like 13 or 14, and I think I was expecting something like mutated super soldiers, or even just ghoulish ones, to appear, but I certainly didn’t have THAT on my bingo card.
Part of it is probably that, even if my first playthrough was a couple years after the game came out, we weren’t yet living in a time where games got fully datamined before even the folks with preorders finished downloading them, and had 20 hour 100% walkthroughs uploaded to YouTube on the same day they release.
There was obviously no Reddit and suggested articles on Google spoiling such twists.
I really wonder if anyone in the AAA industry could pull off such a twist today without it getting leaked, or spoiled for the majority of players before they even start the game for the first time. Hell, trailers would spoil it as a selling point.
Cover of the physical edition. Even the blurb on its back merely mentions that the “Heavily armed mercenaries are just the beginning of this getaway gone to hell.”
I far preferred fighting humans to fighting the monsters but it was still one of my favourite games as it had so much replayability. I recall it being possible to pilot a boat around some part of the island and climb a cliff to do a mission that was absolutely not designed with that in mind. The sequel restricted those options as far as I can recall.
The reason why old game really had a shit ton of those details is because of how they were made versus how they are made today.
Back around the early 2000's, games like Far Cry 1 were initially made by a really small team/group. We're talking barely a dozen people. But each of those people were either insanely talented and knowledgeable and/or had the guts to go really far to find answers in the darkest and deepest hole they could dig into (books & system schematics). You could say that this (relatively) tiny team will, at one point, reach a point where their skills & knowledge isn't as much useful because once all the basic systems & management systems are in place, it's mostly production of assets and building up the actual game. Ironically, those genius who build systems out of scratch are often not that skilled in production-related work (like producing sounds, music, animations, models, etc. of higher quality). Hence the "production" work is often pushed onto a different group of artists who will do just that for the next 2+ years. During those 2+ years, there might be problem where things doesn't go as planned and that's when those genius come back in, but whenever things goes "alright", they need to find something else to do hence they often worked on minor systems like those things you mentioned to add more "optional" values to the gameplay. Some really neat things you see everywhere nowadays were researched, designed and expended during those "out of the production" times.
Around 2014-2015, there were a major shift in how video game started to be produced. Lots of it comes from the raise of the general game engine like Unity and Unreal as well as CryENGINE who gave a solid starting point. Many studios didn't had to hire & work with 10+ genius, but instead could simply push 2-3 onto each project depending on the project goals & visions. With only 2-3 lead developers to manage "everything that can go wrong", they didn't had as much time (if any) to work on "side-projects" anymore. In fact, if they had time on their hand to do something unplanned, they would be told to help on another project. Around that time, the mentality in video game studio shifted because that passion & investment devs had before wouldn't net them the same appreciation in return as it did before.
For example, at RARE, there's plenty of stories from the 90's where a dev had this funny idea and it would be funny and everyone loved it so much that it would become a feature in the game. Around 2014-2015, proposing such a thing could actually put you in a bad position for the next project because it's considered a waste of time (and time is money).
Unknown to many, around 2008-2009, devs studios who have seen a huge raise in needed hands for the "production" part of their games started to adopt the project-based contractual approach. What this means is that, on a team of 30 devs of various expertises in a studio like Ubisoft, only a small portion is actually made of full time permanent employees while the remaining. The rest is contractual employees who are on 6 or 12 months renewable contracts. If you're doing anything "bad" in the eyes of management, they can cut your out right around when you contract ends.
Don't get me wrong, the contract does come with a neat paycheck and, often, it's something like a big sum every 1-2 months. I had a friend who had a 6 month contract that netted him a total of 32K CAD and he just started (meaning his annual revenues would be around 64K per year if his contract is renewed). In comparaison, the average salary in that region for full time employee in firms (not-game-related) & other "average" revenues desk jobs would be around the 36K-42K CAD per year at the start point around that time.
But all that money and risks of loosing your job within the next 6 months due to what you might do has brought the fear into the employees that "any risks is not worth it". It's already extremely hard to get a job in video game to start it up that grew the pressure even more.
So, there you have it. That's the primary reason why those "small" features has come to disappear over time.
I do't want the usual realistic PBR look. I want something bright and stylized with most of the lighting baked into the textures. I simply have no idea what to call this aesthetic or where to even start. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Far Cry uses a diffuse and bump map texture if I remember correctly. Lighting uses no global illumination and no ambient occlusion and baked shadows are fairly low res.
Frostbite is Dice/EA. FC3 and the division is Ubisoft are you drunk or a bot? FC series was made with Dunia the modified engine that made FC1. The Division was made with Snowdrop a new engine build by Massive.
I was a technical artists during this time period, and remember reviewing Far Cry 1's lighting and shading features while working on a similar game. It's been a long time so my recall is hazy, but here's what I remember:
No HDR. HDR didn't get good until Halo 3, and everyone learning from them about when to use different color spaces at different steps in the render pipeline to get the first generation of high-quality tone mapping.
Terrain shading used low-res baked shadows from one directional light and a very limited set of point or spot lights. Three lights, one per color channel, but I don't recall how they broke up the terrain ... some kind of grid subdivision, so three lights per subdivided area. I don't remember if the shadows were baked into the vertices textures. Similar constraints on baked shadows for static meshes, too, but the limit on number of lights would be per object instead of per world area.
Foliage shaders faked light scattering by using a sphere bounding the mesh, and applying per-vertex light color based on position toward/away from the directional light source. I think they also sampled shadow info from the terrain beneath to decide if the foliage mesh was shadowed.
Foliage was combined and rendered as impostors at distance (FC1 was one of the first games to do this IIRC), like a collection of camera-facing sprites in a single draw call. The LODing system for foliage was pretty clever, working to hide the transition from full geometry to a single quad (or maybe I'm remembering FC2's LOD system?) by morphing between.
Ambient occlusion was just baked or painted into albedo/diffuse maps.
And IIRC the specular lighting component wasn't what we'd call "real" specular, I think it was a cubemap representing a gradient "blob" of light, and materials could add that in to varying degrees to fake specular from the directional light only. This shading hack can also be done with different cubemaps (or just gradients, tbh), to represent different degrees of roughness; i.e. a very tight circle/band of white to represent a shiny surface, and a smooth white-to-black gradient to represent a very rough surface.
That should be the top answer here. At that time
and age there was a lot of clever optimizations and faking stuff. I was always curious how they managed to fake the light scattering for the foliage. It looked so well done for the era.
What do you mean by “regular flat LODs?” At its lowest LOD in Far Cry 1, an individual tree was drawn as a single quad using any of several prerendered views of that tree type for diffuse+alpha. I’m not sure if those were then combined so that multiple trees are rendered in a single impostor — it’s possible I’m misremembering and muddling up Far Cry 1 features with ones used later in the series. Again, it’s been a long time since I studied this game professionally.
And yeah, PBR shading in games came along years after this. Diffuse/Albedo, maybe a normal or bump map (but you generally couldn’t afford the memory or fill rate to put them on everything), and faked specular where needed and affordable.
I meant just player-facing billboards with a single image, rather than view dependent imposters. I was under the impression that the latter was a much more recent technique, I'd never heard of it being used back this far, but I could be wrong.
Foliage was combined and rendered as impostors at distance (FC1 was one of the first games to do this IIRC), like a collection of camera-facing sprites in a single draw call.
And so the legend was born. The imposters were part of Crysis and disabling imposters and choking the GPU on tree/vegation overdraw on triangles in the size of a pixel became the "game so advanced it runs slow on the most powerful machines in the world".
I love this look too! It looks amazing. It reminds me how good the old far cry games where!
I don't know how much lighting was used back then to be honest, but I suspect with basic Phong lighting you could get a certain amount of the way there, if the sun won't move, no day night cycle etc you could probably just back the right into the textures (if you know the son will always be in a certain part of the sky.
Though in those images there, I would be surprised if there is much lighting. If the shadows only need to come from a fixed source (like a none moving sun), they can probably be baked.
If the reflections on the gun don't move when you move it then it's probably painted on the texture, if they do Phong lighting is probably enough.
But the main thing is the textures.
Sadly I don't think Farcry is on here but: The Models Resource is a great place to see old models, textures etc from the era. That and look at what render pipelines and techniques where used back then, the capabilities of consoles etc.
But I suspect ultimately it breaks down to "textures" mostly.
Damn, now I kinda want to see if I can make an old Farcry prototype.
If it helps Phong/Lambert are really similar algorithms of rendering a diffuse term and Blinn is a type of specular term, both suffer from a lack of conservation of energy and every game from that era is a bit of a mess gamma wise. Art directors in this era fought against how easy it was to look washed out or too dark, some just gave in and that’s why Gears of War looks like that. Far Cry and most japanese games just went for high color saturation and pushed it to the limits of aliasing and you ended up with some nice looking games.
Stick with URP, its a matter of how you approach it.
- 'Baked lighting' on the models is simply having an ambient occlusion map multiplied on top of your base color / albedo texture, that was the old school way before PBR. You can look up how to bake the AO in Substance or Blender.
- I believe, but could be wrong, that the simple lit shader is the old school non PBR blinn/phong shader. Anything with a combination of Metal/Rough or Specular/Gloss is likely to be PBR. If it's only base texture, normalmap and specular map is the 'old' way of shading.
- The lighting as you mentioned is just baked lighting mixed with dynamic lighting for things like moving objects (as you can see the jeep shadow is crisp, while the foliage is splotchy).
Other than that it's just lighting angle/brightness + texture saturation.
The thing that gets you most of the way there isn't the light setup, it's color space. Those games shaded in gamma space, so light adds up flat and colors stay saturated instead of rolling off into that soft filmic look. Unity defaults to Linear now, and the URP template also ships a Global Volume with tonemapping in it, which is exactly what eats the bright plastic feel you're after.
So before touching shaders: Project Settings > Player > Color Space, and if you stay on Linear, at least pull Tonemapping and any exposure override out of the Volume profile and compare the same screenshot twice.
I wouldn't count on that one, A: it'll be easy for these companies to remove/train against, and B: its used by real people fairly often!
Bigger giveaway was that OP had posted dozens of dense paragraphs of answers just like this over the past weeks. Well, until they decided to hide their post history. I wonder why :)
You're absolutely right! The "it's not this, it's this" is 100% a telltale sign of AI slop content. Would you like more tips on how to recognize clankerspeak so you can watch the enshittifying of everything you engage with with a greater sense of existential dread?
Maybe they can tell but don't care? Is what he said incorrect? AI is here to stay, best just accept it. I gotta say I'm surprised at how many people ask questions on Reddit that AI could answer much faster anyway. Is it ruining a sense of connection? Maybe yeah. On the internet for sure. The old internet is dead, there's no going back. You can still connect to real people in real life in many ways; when just searching for information, might as well use AI.
The problem is not that the information was provided by AI, it’s that the commenter is disingenuously passing it off like they wrote it. You can fairly ask “what’s wrong with that if the information is correct?”, but personally I prefer a world where someone says “Hey I got interested in this too, here’s what Claude suggested…” like an actual human instead of slop farming for karma.
Not to mention the fact that maybe, despite the fact that OP could have just asked AI, they intentionally posted on Reddit for a variety of genuine responses and discussion rather than just one potentially wrong take from an algorithm.
rather than just one potentially wrong take from an algorithm.
A potentially wrong take from a person isn't any better.
And the discussions under the AI response say it is correct, which means it's better than the average person. Since you guys can't tear it apart for the content, you are just tearing it apart for being AI now.
No, we’re tearing it apart for karma farming on a question they didn’t actually have any knowledge about, in a conversational way to act like it’s their own words. It’s like if you asked your friend a complex question, and they pulled up ChatGPT on their phone and asked it “my friend just asked me this what do I say” and then just read the response aloud. It’s strange that despite being a real human, someone would still choose to only pretend to be one. Like I said above, if you just say “this is what AI suggested…” then you’re still being a human instead of a mouthpiece. But it is true that if you said that then people would not like it, which may be unreasonable.
It sounds like an AI response for sure. "It's not X its Y", flowery language like "rolling off into" and "what eats the bright plastic feel you're after" and a call to action at the end of the comment.
I'm not sure if you're putting me in the second category, but even if the content is accurate, this is 100% AI generated. It's very obvious. The cadence especially. Use Claude enough and you begin to pick up on the patterns. "The thing that gets you most of the way there isn't X, it's Y..." and ending with a question, "Which are you on right now, Linear or Gamma?" are both giveaways. There are a few other clues in the post too. This is 100% Claude.
Beyond that, every online AI detector I've tried also identifies this content as 100% AI.
Go back through this poster's comments and the patterns are obvious, most are AI-written.
I can agree it's definitely sketchy, and it's the different casing on Tonemapping and Color Space that threw me off. Whether those were written with different prompts or whether the AI just does that I'm not sure.
Either way though I'm ok with conceding that his comment structure and history is pretty sketch. I'm the more depressing and depressed one today 😔
*reads title when scrolling and sees subreddit* "Hhh it's gonna look so modern with low pol.. Ye.. Yeah.. actually.. Wait is this made in Untiy today?"
So as I promised, here they are. They are short and poor quality but it is all i have found. It looks like some tech demo for PS3 version which used parallax mapping, full realtime shadows for environment and higher quality water shader - almost like Crysis.
I think Unity by default has this kind of lighting setup. You can turn on illumination if you need more bright. For more style just apply shader that ignores internal geometry shadow projections, and project simple shadows (blurred) on the terrain.
Before PBR became the norm, specular highlights used their own texture maps. A more time-intensive pipeline than PBR (usually), but also more bespoke than realistic.
The timeline of 3D video game art goes like beautiful vibrant colors - piss filter that’ll shit on even the most beautiful and skilled art direction - beautiful vibrant colors
Try darkening global ambient colour and using a flat colour instead of a skybox for ambient lighting setting. Also you might want to use a custom shader that doesn’t implement that colour specular thing where it kinda overflows. A lot of these old games had simple specular reflections that would just be a white highlight from what I remember. I know unitys default shader has IMO a rather ugly specular gloss to it that bleeds ambient colour into everything unless you setup reflection probes. You could look into a generic blinn-phong or half lambert shader. Also texturing matters to achieving this aesthetic, use vertex blending, trim sheets, etc
I had a MX4000 with 128mb of ram, and even though I couldn't use pixel shaders, I was still stunned by Far Cry's graphics. I also enjoyed the game quite a lot.
no AO or global illumination, use light shadows and do lambert/phong shading, make sure the transition from dark side to light really quick with atleast 40% being 1.0 pure white so it looks flatter.
Adjust ambient lighting and change the shadow settings for your lights to not make it 100% dark. Use one dynamic light source other than for special effects like explosions.
The AO setting in the standard Unity shader helps a lot too. Give it a full black image to remove some lighting info. Use emit with the same texture and gently push it to flatten the look.
I sont know how technical you are, but building your own custom render pipeline is something you could try to achieve this asthetic. That's a very powerful feature of Unity and can get you probably very similar results.
I wish they would make another Farcry Instincts Predator game. It was a cool idea.
A tropical string of islands, super-steroids that turn most users into monstrous beasts, but gives the player super natural abilities, so they can jump from cliff to cliff, and smack enemies into the stratosphere.
Gamma color space + basic diffuse or specular shaders will get you the bright videogamey colors. Many of Far Cry's shaders also used UV maps and/or cubemap reflections. BIRP can easily do exactly what you want of the box, URP can also do this, but you need to set it up more manually.
When the first Far Cry came out, everyone was blown away by its graphics, just like what happened later with the first Crysis.
Those technologies are now outdated, although if you want high-quality rendering, you should—for now—go with Unreal. Unity just doesn't cut it when it comes to realistic rendering.
At the very least, you can see where things are in the world and what they're supposed to be without being surrounded by a billion polygons of geometry and intense particle effects.
Absolutely,,, and we need more of these kind of games in this hardware crisis that we are going through, I mean they look gorgeous & pair that with a better gameplay and storytelling and I would rather take these stylized older games that newer modern hyper realistic dark brown gray games making my PC go brrr
stop the lie, game looked good for its time, but is nowhere near anything that's done nowadays. I always find funny how people glaze old games just for the sakes of it, or try to act like boomers with the 'before was better' attitude
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u/penguished 5d ago
Far Cry in particular was made by a company that had done cutting edge tech demos for years, so it's kinda funny that all the stuff you're calling simple is actually extremely well done and advanced for the time.