A YouTuber has taken EA's first-person shooter, Battlefield 1, and given it a makeover courtesy of a custom graphics mod that adds ray tracing and improves color grading, tessellation, and ambient lighting to give the game a high-tech makeover worthy of any professional current-gen console port.
Battlefield 1 wasn't exactly a slouch in the graphics department when it was released in 2016 for previous-gen consoles as the fifteenth installment in developer EA DICE's longstanding Battlefield series. The game was particularly noteworthy for taking place during World War 1, which most combat-central shooter games tend to shy away from. It was praised in particular for its environments and design. By current standards, its graphical integrity still holds up quite well, especially in 4k, although details like ambient lighting and ray tracing are becoming more commonplace in current titles and therefore more noticeable when they're missing from previous-gen titles like this.
YouTuber AD Massicuro, however, sought to fix that by applying a custom Reshade Ray Tracing graphics mod, created by Pascal “Marty McFly” Gilcher, to spruce up Battlefield 1's graphics and bring them into the current generation. As DSOG reports, the mod improved the game's tessellation, which resulted in better textured surfaces, ray tracing for realistic reflections and contrast, and global illumination for greater depth of field. AD Massicuro also implemented the RT Beta Shader and a custom tonemap that they designed, for better color and fog effects. The result is sharper textures, softer light, deeper contrasts, and an overall more photorealistic appearance, which AD Massicuro shows off in the demonstration video below:
The overall effect is pretty extraordinary, even if Battlefield 1 didn't particularly need a graphical overhaul as much as some older games do. But the video does serve as a compelling technical exercise and a demonstration of the incredible power of independent modders and developers. They've made some pretty epic graphics mods over the years that have taken older games and remastered them in ways that are often superior to what the studios themselves put out when they actually choose to. This is an important service to the gaming community, as it can potentially attract younger players to older games that they may have originally shied away from due to their outdated look, and reignite the fanbases that may have fizzled out over the years.
More powerful consoles mean greater creative expression, higher graphical fidelity, and the power to run notoriously processing-heavy features like ray tracing smoothly and steadily without sacrificing too much framerate or gameplay. But as the consoles are getting better, so are graphics modders like AD Massicuro and Gilcher, and it'll be interesting to see where they take the current generation once it becomes the previous one.
Source: YouTube/AD Massicuro, DSOGaming