I'm spending my evening work break playing around with the Tekken 8 demo and it's really hammering home an issue that I feel like has been brewing for ages and is now finally tangibly worse than ever.
This game looks absolutely positively incredible actually running on my ps5 at 4K resolution. It has a level of detail that straight up looks impossible to pull off on previous consoles. Unbelievably crisp textures, razor sharp character models and environments. Very much a "Ah yes this why I bought a Play Stationed Five" experience. However, as I was marveling at this, it did make me think about how I did not really feel this way when I was watching all of the character reveal trailers they've been slow dripping out all year. The main reason for this is that a lot of the advancement in graphical tech for the last few years feels at odds with a lot of the viewing experience of said tech. Mainly that higher resolutions and far more detailed textures etc are absolutely mangled when the main way to see them is through youtube videos or twitch streams etc. I think it's very easy to see a compressed to shit video of Horizon Forbidden West, Spiderman 2, or Tekken 8 and be like "well that looks just like the last one" because there really is that much detail being lost in the viewing format compared to having it running natively. Another good example of this is how fantastic games are right now at filling the screen with beautiful swirling particle effects which seem purpose built to completely chunk up into a giant artifacting mess on even the fattest bitrate streams.
Anyway I just think it's kind of funny how at odds the current tech is with the way that basically everyone consumes footage of said tech.
TL:DR Tekken 8 has some god damn Textures in it. Definitely download that demo and look at it raw on your TV or monitor if you can, especially at 4K.
