Bodycam Proves Graphics Aren't Everything...

this game is truly one of the most realistic looking FPS experiences that I've ever played body cam throws all of the latest tech from Unreal Engine 5 into a new fisheye camera experience that looks creepily similar to police cam or combat cam footage The Experience goes from incredibly immersive to even terrifying at times that said I think there's some pretty good reasons why not all FPS games have gone down this ultra realistic body kit path and today we're going to talk about that in body Cam's actual gameplay now firstly body cam has been developed by two guys who are 17 and 20 which in itself is pretty impressive the game is currently in Early Access and the devs have been patching it like crazy they're doing what I wish I had done at their age and the fact that two people who clearly aren't industry veterans they're simply not old enough to be can create something like this with the current resources available able to them really is the best example of the future of indie game development even catching up to some of the AAA game presentations at least when it comes to the visuals and before we go deeper down this body cam Rabbit Hole first I've got a quick word from today's sponsor today's video is brought to you by the new free-to-play game Star Wars Hunters it's available right now on Android iOS and the Nintendo switch it's an awesome looking third person PVP oriented game check out Hunters using my link in in the description it brings a ton of iconic characters and locations from across the Star Wars Universe including bounty hunters Wookies even jaas if you've ever wanted to blast away on a droa but as a Jawa this game is certainly for you each character comes with unique Cosmetics animations weapon appearances so there's always something fresh to unlock and try out the weapons are pulled directly from Star Wars lore so bounty hunters get wrist mounted flamethrowers Wookies have giant melee weapons you get the idea Hunters also features multiple PVP modes that offer different mechanics and levels of competitive play matches are 4v4 with each player controlling a hero of their choice check it out using my link below or scan the QR Code season 1 Welcome to the arena is live right now and there's plenty more on the way all right back to body Cam's exceptional realism the weapon models the camera animations and the filters the maps lighting most things in this game look incredibly impressive and coh hesive I genuinely forgot a few times that it's a PVP game and I caught myself just admiring the visuals and absorbing the environments it's stunning how solid this game looks on a technical level most of the time and with AMD FSR frame generation I was getting a consistent 120 FPS or better on most settings I also didn't notice any major issues with hit registration servers are networking which again is impressive for such a small team and the sound design is also pretty cool although it does occasionally make my ears want to bleed the audio doesn't sound true to life in the sense that it simulates what you would hear with your actual ears but it is very accurate to what you would hear from say a GoPro the wind blowing into the mic when you turn and move adds this fun realistic physicality to just moving through the world that the animations don't quite convey the gunshots cause intense sound Distortion which honestly is close to how they might sound if you shoot without your hearing protection on and few games have ever gotten the ear splitting explosive power of gunfire right although I think many of them choose not to but this game is pretty much trying to go for the ultimate realism and you can decide whether or not you like that the muffled audio of the environment in enemies is also handled quite well so you still get the sense of playing through the POV of a body cam but you have just enough information to still make Intelligent Decisions based on those audio cues so in terms of its actual presentation I'd rank body cam pretty high up there it's a a genuinely immersive experience that feels groundbreaking and Innovative or at least it would if it also didn't feel incredibly derivative of the other body cam game unrec that made a huge Splash when it was first revealed body Cam's reveal trailer launched on September 13th 2023 about a year after unrecorded very first video was posted on the lead developer Twitter account in the first unrecorded video the developer demonstrated the gameplay on an Unreal Engine Marketplace map and while I can't really fully weigh in on whether or not this game is copied from unrecorded it is interesting that by simply posting that preview of unrecorded so early those devs may have opened themselves up to having their hype stolen by these devs who were able to get something to the market faster when people wonder why Studios don't announce or reveal their games until they're much closer to release this is definitely one of those reasons within days of unrecorded posting their original body cam demonstration people were posting plugins that could turn your unreal game into something that looked just like it so it's no surprise seeing a bunch of games pop up that look just like it now there are some concerning parallels between the maps and body Cam and the footage of unrecordable is the Unreal Engine Marketplace map that un reccords developer first used to Showcase their gameplay body cam makes extensive use of this exact same asset for their Russian building map now this is not to say that there's any anything wrong with two games using the same assets this is pretty much the point of having asset marketplaces so that multiple games can use those assets and change them up and use them how they want however two games that look nearly identical also using the same assets creates a well let's just say a copycat Vibe but at the end of the day it's really up to Gamers to decide how derivative games can be of one another before they take issue with it and you do have to wonder if body cam is trying to cash in on unrecorded viral success unrecorded trailer was so big that even my video covering that trailer achieved nearly 2 million views so you could see why it might make sense to create a similar looking game and try and release it before unrecorded to cash in on that hype and again I can't say that's what's happened for sure but it certainly does look that way all that said does it really matter at this point probably not what does matter is the game play and the experience now this is my first experience with any body cam Style game and while it's incredibly cool to see this game play for the first time it's also very jarring aiming and camera movement are decoupled meaning that when you aim your gun the camera isn't perfectly aligned with your mouse movement and there's a very large dead zone that you have to move the mouse out of before the camera will actually catch up when you're in a match and you're sort of set up in a location and holding an angle this isn't really a big deal but when you're traversing the map and trying to check angles it can make controlling your character feel like there's a huge amount of input lag you also can't really tell exactly where you're aiming because of all the screen Shake caused by The Recoil and how loose the weapon animations feel what previously felt like simple shots that I could land in a traditional FPS game I genuinely struggled to hit in body cam I wouldn't necessarily call it too excessive but in tandem with the other issues in the game it really does make you wonder if this game would be better off with less body cam stylization the traditional camera style for firstperson shooter games has been perfected and refined over the last 30 years so maybe there's a lot of room to improve this new type of camera but it's also possible that this is just genuinely an unpleasant experience in the long run and it might not hold up or evolve in the ways that we want it to now the lighting and realistic map design while they look really cool on the surface end up being pretty big gameplay problems for me body cam looks absolutely great in video ins still images the shadows in the game are basically pitch black and characters do not stand out in them likewise the crushed color palette an aggressive auto exposure on pretty much all the maps creates a lot of situations where enemies blend into the environment and even when they don't the visibility is bad enough that your peripheral vision feels super limited there's also pretty obvious technical issues with how the game's lighting is rendered thanks to the game's Reliance on Lumen this is Unreal Engine 5's Dynamic r racing system that sounds great on paper but can be really problematic in practice if you look at a wall next to a window and then turn your view the light spilling in on the wall from the window will gradually fade away so what was previously a lit wall will turn pitch black even though it's right next to a window similar issues can happen on an inconsistent basis in many other situations like walking through a doorway and having the lighting in the Next Room suddenly brighten up but then doing the same thing again will make the same room much darker it's very unstable looking with lots of temporal artifacts and bugs that'll result in players seeing different things when they should all be seeing the exact same thing I can't fully fault the devs for this Lumen has been heavily marketed as the new crazy awesome lighting system that Dev should be using and small devs can use it to achieve really realistic lighting quickly but to make it so it's not splotchy and buggy requires a lot more technical knoow than most all teams can achieve perhaps in a few more updates to Unreal Engine 5 this will be an easier system to implement but at the moment it's pretty janky and body cam absolutely shows the limitations when being used by a small team now to Aid with the darkness of the maps players all have a flashlight but if you're using it in the dark you're basically giving away your position like a lighthouse and while that would be great for aiding invisibility the drones that players control after they die also have the exact same looking flashlight and both teams have identical looking flashlights so when you see a flashlight in a match it could be your teammate an enemy or a drone and as you can imagine that is very confusing certainly immersive but there are certain levels of immersion that I definitely want to pull back from for the sake of gameplay again that's the age-old debate between realism and gamification but I'm usually on the side that says hey when the realism starts to detract from the game play I like to push back a little bit now most of the maps currently in the game feel like the devs took Unreal Engine Marketplace assets or maps and put them into their project made alterations to ensure players could actually Traverse the maps and then just put it into the game with very little testing or refinement they feel like Tech demonstrations of photogrammetry or simulations of Real World locations and not really levels purpose-built to facilitate a balanced competitive FPS experience Airsoft house and tumblewood in particular have lots of issues that a properly designed PvP map would avoid spawning in and being able to see the enemy spawn in is a pretty big issue I tested this by standing where I spawned at the start of a round and then getting a kill 6 seconds into the match without even having to move the map tumblewood has its own unique issues like one team spawning on top of a cliff that gives them overview of the whole map and the shading under the trees is so dark that it's pretty much impossible to see the other players and there's also only trees and terrain for cover some of these Maps feel almost like they're the demo maps for environmental asset packs and they just weren't really modified for PVP Gameplay at all and oddly one of the most competitive maps in the game is that Russian building level from the Unreal Engine Marketplace and even then it's got a ring of windows that turn the center of the map into a 360° killbox while also exposing you to the other three sides of the map at all times just because it looks good or is taken from real life assets does not mean it's going to translate well into gameplay and you could almost say that's sort of the theme of this entire game now oddly the developers were making a onetoone remake of nuke town and dust 2 however the original reveal trailer showing nuk town was actually copyright claimed by Activision over the nuke town remake and the past trailers have shown Snippets of the D 2 map neither of those maps are present in the current game or seem like they'll ever be but again copying two of the most popular maps from the biggest FPS games on Earth for inclusion in your game is uh let's just say legally gray it also kind of shows the dev's hand when it comes to their thought process behind map design they're not making maps that cater to their specific experience designed around their mechanics they're just going uh here's a popular map that works in other games let's put it in our game and that should play out fine right well that's rarely led to good gameplay in the past they also have some sort of modified takes on a bomb diffusal mode which is interesting but it also seems like it just wasn't really tested out much where you can basically plant the bomb anywhere on the map and then the whole game mode just turns into a roaming Team Deathmatch experience it really feels very Half Baked and that there was a cool idea to begin with and then they implemented it and didn't do the follow-up refining and adjusting to make sure that it played out well now when you're in a match the visuals and tone of the game feels pretty cohesive but when you you go to the menus you've got this weird copyrighted party music and an arcade look to everything you also join the lobby with all the connected player spawning in an airplane and then dropping out of the cargo bait like pubg and it's just weird where a lot of the game feels hyper realistic and then at other times it almost feels like you're looking at a Roblox experience now as a content creator I feel like it is my job to inform you guys what the state of the game is like and what the game play is like so that you can decide where you want to spend and your money and I feel really bad about diminishing what these young developers have accomplished because it's two young guys who have achieved something very impressive the level of production value on display wouldn't have been possible just a few years ago and regardless of how potentially derivative body cam might be or how rough it is in its current state it's still a big achievement for these guys heavy asset use or not making a playable game that has some really cool elements and Innovations is a technical accomplishment and it is still technically An Early Access game at the end of the day which means what we're playing right now isn't the intended final product and in the few short days since body cam launched the devs have released several updates that addressed UI issues they've added a button to automatically join matches they fix bugs added a match timer and much more body cam very much is a real attempt at making a good game despite its current flaws and I hope the devs can iterate to make the game less of a novelty and more of a genuinely competitive game in the future but I also think that body cam is ultimately going to show us whether or not this whole realistic fisheye experience is here to stay or just a fat in my opinion the mechanics will need a lot of updating and adjusting and even then I'm not sure if I would prefer this stylization over a more traditional FPS camera experience what do you guys think it certainly makes for some great YouTube clips but have you guys played it what do you think of the game f and if you guys enjoyed this video don't forget to leave me a like subscribe for more content like it and H that notification Bell to beat the YouTube algorithm with me also once again thanks to Star Wars hunters for sponsoring this video make sure you check out that game scan this QR code or check the link in the video description and up next check out this video of another highly realistic Unreal Engine 5 game using a lot of the same lighting Tech but it's set up as a competitive PVP extraction horror game and it's pretty dope check out that video here and as always guys thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time this is levelcap signing off

Channel: LevelCapGaming

Views: 225,382

Keywords: bodycam, unrecord, realistic graphics

Id: QjoL_SfZtFk

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2024