Power of the Lens - Rise of the Photo Mode

Written By Oliver Giles

In-game photos captured by Oliver Giles & Ilia the Wanderer

Being a student of the photographic arts and aspiring photographer myself, I believe that almost all forms of photography have merit. Be it full color or black and wite, shot on a DSLR or a mobile phone, as long as you achieve the desired result you’re methods and equipment are valid.

When you combine my love of photography with my love of video games, you may start to see why I am overjoyed to see more and more games starting to include propper photo modes, specifically in the last five years or so.

And I’m not talking about moving the camera around for simple screenshots here. No, this article will focus on several games from 2015 onward that have made attempts at creating an immersive, seamless, in-game photography experience.

But which series succeed and which fail harder than the Dodgers in the playoffs? That’s what we’re here to dive into today.

Near Perfection

Forza Motorsport/Forza Horizon

Forza Horizon 5

When it comes to truly stand-out photography experiences in video games, particularly in recent years, Forza Motorsport, as well as it’s spin-off series Forza Horizon, immediately come to mind as some of the best around. And for good reason.

With a wide range of real-camera features to choose from, you have nearly complete control over how your photo turns out, leading to photos so beautiful you might think they were real at first glance, as well as some brilliantly artistic endeavors. The only limit is your own capabilities. 

Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Standing firmly beside Forza when it comes to photographic greatness is the long running Assassin's Creed franchise, specifically the games that followed the soft-reboot that began with Assassin's Creed Origins in 2017. While perhaps not quite as in-depth as that featured in the previously mentioned Forza titles, there are still plenty of great options and styles to make use of in these games, particularly in Odyssey and Valhalla.

With Valhalla in particular, the game’s stunning and robust lighting engine can be used to create many different events depending on your style and preference, from basic lens-flares to beautiful beams of sunlight streaming through the trees.

Add to that the fact that the controls are slightly more simplistic than Forza’s when it comes to camera operation and you have the perfect recipe for one of the best photo modes to ever grace the monitors of the gaming world.

An honorable mention goes to Immortals: Fenyx Rising, another game developed by Ubisoft in a similar style to that of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with a more anime-inspired/cell-shaded graphics style. Being heavily based on AC Oddyssey when it comes to the game’s controls, it would make sense that it retains many of the same photo elements, with a few tweaks here and there such as the ability to alter and create fog around certain points of a photo for a more cinematic feel.

The Middle Ground

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

This one was actually pretty difficult to rank.

On one hand, Fallen Order’s photo mode does provide games with a decent suite of features to use in order to get their photo just the way they like it. While not as impressive as the catalog of features and filters available in the Forza or Assassin’s Creed games, it will more than get the job done. There’s even a feature that no other game on this list has, a spotlight you can use to illuminate any part of the photo as if it were taking place on a theater stage.

There are several downsides however, the first being the controls used in photo mode.

Clunky doesn’t even come close to describing them. The default buttons/key bindings for actions in photo mode feel incredibly awkward, especially if you’ve just come from playing Forza or something similar. The camera control is both overly sensitive and somehow not sensitive enough at the same time, often leading to it taking far longer than necessary to set up basic shots.

Secondly, you may have noticed that most of the photos used here that depict Cal are taken from the back or an off-set angle, and there’s a very good reason for that. For whatever reason, even on Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and high-end PCs, his face looks blurry and smudged most of the time, making many shots involving his face incredibly weird.

Overall, while you can get some cool shots with this one, Fallen Order’s in-game photo mode camera is just far too clunky to make it to the top tier, even if the weird face glitch was nonexistent.

Cyberpunk 2077

In a rather similar vain to that of Fallen Order, we have Cyberpunk 2077’s photo mode. 

Honestly, you could easily go through the entire game from start to finish without even realizing the game has a photo mode as it isn’t exactly complex.

Somewhat clunky controls, particularly on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles and lower-end PCs, and some graphical issues, often involving film grain, here and there keep it from being anything special or noteworthy. It gets the job done, oftentimes awkwardly, and that’s about it.

Grand Theft Auto V/Grand Theft Auto Online

Taking a rather different approach to many of the other games on this lis, the photo mode used in both Grand Theft Auto V and its online multiplayer counterpart makes use of the player’s in-game smartphone cameras for it’s photos.

Even in the offline story mode, there’s no choice to pause the game’s action when setting up and taking a photo, making the clunk-factor of this setup pretty high.

It may be amusing at first, but after a while it will become rather annoying when the slightest bump from a pedestrian causes your character to close the phone, even while the photo is processing.

There are some filters and borders you can equip but that's about it, not much else in the way of photo options or in-game editing tools.

Other open world games, notably 2016’s Watch Dogs 2, would go on to use a similar method for their in-game photo modes, although many of these games have improved the functionality of the phone camera quite a bit compared to Rockstar’s offering.

Far Cry 6

Coming in at the bottom of the mid-tear category is the most recent entry in Ubisoft’s long running Far Cry series, 2021’s Far Cry 6.

Far Cry 6 is actually the only game on this list to offer two distinct photo-modes, a rather underwhelming live photo mode via in-game phone similar to that seen in Grand Theft Auto V, and a more traditional style photo mode that actually pauses the action and allows for a more proper style of photography.

And while you can get some good shots with this second mode if you kn ow what you are doing, it is far from ideal.

Camera controls aren’t all that responsive and there aren't a whole lot of camera features, aside from the basic ones you’d expect in any photo mode, to make use of.

Models will oftentimes not line up properly in photo mode either, sou you could be looking down the scope of a sniper rifle while playing the game, just to find out that, in photo mode, the scope is really just pressing into the center of your character’s forehead.

Even though Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed are handled for the most part by different branches of Ubisoft, it’s bizarre just how large the gap in quality between Far Cry 6’s photo mode and the one in the newer AC games really is.

On the bright side, at least it’s better than the old photo mode from Far Cry 5. Speaking of which…

The Failures

Far Cry 5/Far Cry New Dawn

As awkward and unpolished as the photo mode of Far Cry 6 is, it looks absolutely godlike when compared to the abomination that is the Far Cry 5/Far Cry New Dawn photo engine.

Almost everything looks like it was an eight year-old’s first PhotoShop attempt if it had been rendered on a dying PlayStation2.

Assets constantly faze in and out of one another, character’s randomly decide to float above the ground, and the models almost never align properly. Player and NPC movements such as crouching often won't even register, making most photos look like a scene straight out of Gary’s Mod.

On top of that the camera controls feel like attempting to pilot a remote-control submarine through a vat of maple syrup.

An absolute clusterfuck of a setup that quite honestly should have been cut from the game entirely.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition

With all the HD remasters of classic or nostalgic titles these days, it takes a lot for one to stand out as a worthy purchase compared to the original version. Thankfully, Mass Effect Legendary Edition did just that, compiling all three of the original Mass Effect titles, along with most of their DLC, into a beautiful 4K/120 FPS package.

And alongside the refined controls and hidden new content, the development team also decided to add a photo mode.

Really everything I said about the Far Cry 5 and New Dawn photo modes can go here as well. Clunky beyond belief, terrible renders and even worse model alignment, to call this attempt at a photo mode a complete travesty would be an understatement. 

It’s painfully clear that the dev team just threw this mode together and slapped it onto the game without much thought whatsoever. And while they have patched it up since then to the point where it’s slightly better, they took a really long time to do it.

So there you have it. Fails and successes in the rise of photo mode. Hopefully companies will learn from the mistakes of serieses such as Far Cry and put more effort into these great modes in the future. Only time will tell.