These kinds of AAA FPS games looks so over-darkened to me, as if there wasn't enough ambient light. It doesn't look realisitic, instead I can1t really see what's going on. Okay, maybe there are settings for that, but why are demos made this dark?

Obviously stupid questions, the last AAA FPS I played was CoD 2, and it looked quite right in that regard. But these demos, not something that I can enjoy looking at.

Yeah it's pretty easy to have that problem once you start introducing things like filimic tonemapping and color grading, which are often used to boost contrast (which boosts perceived "colorfulness") at the expense of losing some of your visible range for a particular exposure value. It can be difficult to get the exposure and lighting right in a game, since you can't tweak the camera settings and lighting for each shot you can with movies.

if i remember correctly, crisis 2 looked amazing in demo's, and had photo-realistic looks as well, but then the game hit shelves, and it was severely handicapped to the trailers(although i could be remembering wrong.)

if i remember correctly, crisis 2 looked amazing in demo's, and had photo-realistic looks as well, but then the game hit shelves, and it was severely handicapped to the trailers(although i could be remembering wrong.)

The console version (and low-detail PC version) would've definitely been severely handicapped compared to the trailers.

On many of the games that I've worked on, we've had a "screenshot mode" rendering setting, which sets everything to maximum detail, and also increases the resolution by 8x (e.g. 1280x720 -> 10240x5760), which when downsampled back to the standard resolution is basically 64x super-sampling. You can achieve such large resolutions by splitting your view frustum up into a grid of smaller frustra, rendering, say a 1280x720 cell of the final image at a time, then stitching them all together.

This is used for sending out screenshots to magazines and for rendering out trailers, but is anything but real-time (real-time gameplay footage can use this mode by recording gameplay with a replay system, then playing it back in "screenshot mode").

I suppose I am one of the few who found the Crysis and Far Cry games actually quite fun to play. I'm still on Far Cry 3 right now but playing through the game with just a bow has made for quite a challenge to maintain stealth. I've actually been more disappointed by a lot of the other mega-budget AAA blockbusters by comparison (like the Modern Warfare games.. ugh). Though I am more of a casual gamer who hops on single player to get my mind off of work.

I agree with this, I liked Crysis (haven't played 2 a lot). It was pretty, fun, and had enough originality for me, anyway. The part where you go into the alien ship was one of the most interesting segments in an FPS I can remember...