I’ve been playing GTA 5 recently. It looks great because they painstakingly built an incredible, immersive world. Sorry but it’s pretty important to me how a game looks, I wouldn’t play something like this.
Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
191–200 of 552 posts
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#192Oh man. This thread is really something else. Like...for miles in every direction, all I can see are pitchforks, and here I am standing alone on a small hill thinking to myself "Holy shit. That's the Spiderweb software guy. I've played every single one of his games, EVERY SINGLE ONE, and loved all of them." The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be to make wonderful story-driven RPGs.
I suspect he knew exactly what the reaction would be when he wrote the article.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#193ITT: lots of people missing the point that he doesn't actually believe his games look like crap, he's just made a conscious (and profitable) decision to go retro. He likes his games' visual style and values the freelancers who produce the art. I didn't think this is a difficult point but apparently it is.
I don't think people are missing the point. There's 2 aspects to this: style (retro) and execution (the actual graphics). Gamers generally like the style. The Venn diagram of his target audience and people who like retro game visuals is likely near a perfect circle. What makes the games look unpleasing is the execution. It's just all over the place, to the point where it looks like a mashup of free assets collected f…
I think it's unfair to claim that addressing the problem doesn't require more man hours, though. If you were (or maybe you are, I don't know) unable to program, how would you solve a programming need?
Either by hiring someone to do it for you, obviosuly adding man hours, or by changing your own skill set and the distribution of your focus which either takes time outright (which translates to man hours, as you learn new skills) or changes the distribution of hours, taking effort away from other areas of the game, such as writing.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#194I grew up playing the Exile series on shareware, then I migrated to Avernum. I have yet to find any series of games that I can get more value out of. The sheer depth in the games Spiderweb software puts out is why I'll buy pretty much everything they make. If I had to pick a gaming hill to die on this developer would be it. The graphics do their job. Could they be flashier? Sure, whatever. Aside from the Elder Scrolls series I can't think of a game that even comes close in time to finish and the sheer amount of replayability. Nothing in the game is a grind. There's always something do do while you're collecting gear, etc.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#195Can anyone recommend books/blogs/courses about how to make game (or any complicated piece of software actually) look good?
As a software developer and entrepreneur, I understand concept of ergonomics very well - things should be easy to read, hard to misinterpret, responsive, familiar, easy to click. But I struggle with aesthetics all the time - something feels off, but I can't pinpoint why and how to fix it.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#196This article was very good for me. It made me fully understand why I never liked Minecraft and why I will never like it. I would rather replay Gothic series for 11th time then start playing Minecraft. My kids play Minecraft on daily basis, when free time is allowed of course, the only game I never played with them.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#197> People who grew up with Nintendo and Sega really like pixel art. As one of those people, I really don't like pixel art at all. Today's pixel art looks nothing like games did back in the day. The simple reason is that those Nintendo and Sega games weren't played on 27" 4k LCD monitors or 65" OLED TV's but on on the barely 14" CRT in my bedroom. We didn't have huge pixely sprites, they were small and blurry. It had a…
Good pixel artists aim for the peaks of mid-90s arcade, the Saturn, PS1, and GBA. With a proper monitor/TV and cables (or just the GBA), you were looking at sharp pixels and vivid colors.
Most (not all) people going for NES-inspired graphics are just amateur artists who try passing off their lack of skill for “retro style”. And frankly, it can work. Amateur artists can make good low res art.
The real problem is people who just draw on a small canvas and call it pixel art. They lack the fine details.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#198Oh man. This thread is really something else. Like...for miles in every direction, all I can see are pitchforks, and here I am standing alone on a small hill thinking to myself "Holy shit. That's the Spiderweb software guy. I've played every single one of his games, EVERY SINGLE ONE, and loved all of them." The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be to make wonderful story-driven RPGs.
It has been a long time since I played his games but I always really enjoyed the original exile games. I haven't gotten into the newer Avalon remakes as much, but that is mostly a time constraint issue as there are many games and so little time. My memories as a kid are that they were great games if you liked rpgs.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the past decade have been really successful He makes indie games for 25 years. They feed him and his family. That sounds very successful to me.
I'm not saying he's not successful. He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics. But they're not the only two choices, and that's proven - there are successful games without AAA graphics that also don't look bad. If he's feeding his family on his games, changing his attitude to their appearance could expand his audience significantly for relatively minor effort.
> He's implying you either have shoddy graphics, or spend big money on AAA graphics.
He really is not. The article goes into the details of the nuance of where his games are graphically.
Not to mention he specifically addresses what you're talking about.
The next step up in art quality is to add one person to his permanent team, which roughly doubles each game's budget and roughly doubles the sales needed to support that budget. That's a big step and he's not willing to take that risk. Not sure who would be in a better position than him and his wife to assess the risk for that, so it's very hard to argue with that judgement.
Re: Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> https://www.resetera.com/threads/animation-excellence-a-eulo... > > Current technology isn't even close to being enough to replicate this with real-time physics. The claim on that page, that those detailed cloth animations were superior and somehow lost in the transition to 3D games, is bunk though. Modern games are very detailed, e.g. https://youtu.be/ot_sYoqe_2w?t=2355
That claim is subjective, and detail != style. A couple floppy rags are not comparable to the big flowing pants on a gi.
The claim that current technology is insufficient to replicate it isn't subjective.
Perhaps the point should be that we lost sense for a particular aesthetic during the transition to 3d graphics techniques.