If you’ve played many blockbuster video games over the past few years, you may have noticed your screen increasingly filling up with tiny glittering shapes that swirl in the wind, spray forth from enemies, and explode from materials like concrete. These are particle effects, a catch-all term for a variety of graphical techniques intended to evoke the chaos and beauty of debris suspended in, and traveling through, mid-air. One recent example is Forspoken, a game in which you play as a young New Yorker transplanted to a fantasy realm. Upon casting magical spells to attack foes, a blizzard of pixels erupts from your fingertips that dazzle in their prettiness while providing GPU-intensive feedback for your own combative actions.
These particle effects, a kind of virtual glitter scattered amid our game worlds, are now routinely commented on by critics. In Forspoken’s case, they have been considered “dazzling…[making] each and every battle feel like a spectacle” as well as annoying visual “clutter.” The fact that it’s being highlighted at all is interesting in itself. Usually, when a new console generation arrives, like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, it is greeted with gushing praise about the broader leap in graphical quality, often in reference to games pursuing a photorealistic visual style. But that hasn’t happened this time. Instead, the new consoles have mostly brought about incremental, quality-of-life upgrades: Shorter load times, 4K textures, 60 frames per second, and, of course, more intricate particle effects, arguably the most conspicuous and whiz-bang visual upgrade of this ninth console generation.
CONSOLE YOURSELF
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SFX
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