Game Developer editors discuss their favorite photo modes

For Photography Week, Game Developer is showcasing new interviews, essays, and insights that demonstrate the creative and technical process behind photography games and photo modes. In this group blog, join us as our editors mull over the photos and photo modes they love, and explore their evolution and value within the medium.

It's so funny how it doesn't matter if you're a traditional photographer or if you just like taking a lot of screenshots in video games, it's always so humbling to look back at your early work. I remember taking these photos (including the header of this article) in Fallout: New Vegas and I was proud of them. So proud, in fact, that I held onto them for years. They actually weren't that hard to find, just an external storage device deep in my PC, 14 years and at least four hard drives later.

The Western Sky mod for Fallout: New Vegas dramatically altered the day-night cycle, making certain hours of the day completely dark, both a strategic and photographic opportunity.

I remember taking pictures in Fallout: New Vegas it was as much about enjoying the scenery as spending more time in the game. I actually didn't like it New Las Vegas at the beginning; it wasn't as dark as Fallout 3 and I didn't like the way its cool greens and grays were replaced by the bright orange palette of the Mojave. A Nexus mod, Western Sky, changed my mind, adding dynamic lighting and weather effects that made the environment hostile but also strangely beautiful, with pitch-black nights and deep blue skies and sweeping storms that would slam the Courier into the sand. The mod had the effect of not only making the game more interesting strategically, but also visually.

It was Bethesda's early Fallout games that really gave me the training wheels to get into “real” photography; back then, you'd use console controls to quickly detach the camera and remove clipping, thereby capturing moments of the game from more dynamic angles. While it's not quite as sophisticated as today's photo modes, or heck, even the Bethesda photo mode today, it's an experience I remember fondly for how much it taught me about the basics. Take away the ability to consider fundamental things like depth of field and you have no choice but to live in the moment and capture every detail within a tiny field of vision that occupies that microscopic sliver of time. Just because it's in a video game doesn't make it any less of an exercise in observation.

That process of observation can offer a lot of solitude and contemplation. It requires rumination and self-reflection even as it commands you to be present to the exclusion of everything else. Perhaps that is why taking pictures in Fallout: New Vegas It made me feel so good. Documenting the Courier's journey as they walked through so much desert and encountered so much uncertainty, decay, and emptiness became a mirror not only of their loneliness and isolation, but of my own.

These days I still take the occasional photo in Fallout. Fall 76 has a dedicated photo mode that combines traditional camera and photo editing functions, allowing you to control depth of field, field of view, and lighting, and add player poses or frames. Unlike New Las Vegas OR Fallout 3It's also easy to get more variety in your shots, such as 76 It is made up of regional environments with significantly different enemies, plants, weather conditions, and lighting.

But the improvements didn’t lead me to take more photos, even though it would have been easy to create my own scene with the game’s workshop tools. Maybe it’s just harder to find a moment of contemplation in a crowded live service game with so many random people looking over your shoulder.

Still, it's nice to remember how mods and console commands for PC paved the way. —Holly Green

I've recently fallen completely into a Dredge-shaped Abyss. While I've been excited for the game since its launch last year, I hadn't really put much time into it until the last couple of weeks, and knowing that Photo Week was approaching gave me the perfect excuse to dive right in.

I love the game: its engrossing cycle of fishing, exploring, building your boat to get better at all of the above (seasoned with dodging unfathomable horrors), its slow-paced Eldritch horror story, and impeccably salty vibes. It’s also often a strangely beautiful game despite its subject matter and increasingly horrific marine life. There’s a poignant loneliness to the player’s journey that’s constantly pierced by the (unmutated) environmental creatures splashing around: sea turtles that shimmer in pairs, dolphins that playfully leap, whales that briefly surface, subjecting you to a little touch of majesty every now and then.

It works in conjunction with the sky, the sea, the little rough pieces or architecture that people have carved out of this nightmare world. Your little boat, always a little cartoonish and never quite up to anything that lurks in the depths, but you keep going anyway. And every once in a while, you're treated to a view like this.

Everything seems to say sure, you are just a tiny speck in this terrifying and unknowable ocean. And beyond the indifference of nature, there are creatures in the depths waiting to get to you, because you hold some of that forbidden knowledge that humans should never have. But at least you are not alone out there in the infinite. Some beauty still remains. —Danielle Riendeau

Photography is a beautiful lie. Every photo you've ever seen is not a snapshot of reality, it's light funneled through a lens, slapped onto a sensor or a strip of film, and processed before becoming the image you see in the real world. That image is shaped by the aperture of the lens, the speed at which the shutter is released, and the “material” of the medium that the light lands on.

I love that lie. The in-game photography tools make playing the game so easy and introduce players to the little lies that make games possible. When you block out the world and fiddle with artificial camera settings, you capture things the developers don’t want you to see. But instead of killing the fantasy, it invites you to play with the lie yourself, especially when posing a character. I love fiddling with the controls before hitting the “photo mode” button to move a character into just the right pose, using an in-between frame to turn a simple transitional motion into a bit of storytelling that captures the “feel” of the game.

I call it a “lie,” as if it were a bad thing, but everyone knows that games are full of lies. Photo modes involve players in the lie and remind us that these lies aren’t meant to hurt us, but to help us speak in a language beyond words. And I think that’s pretty cute. —Bryant Francis