/v/ - Video Games

Stop stealing my shitty aggydaggy ideas over ESP please. Jokes aside, roguelikes do that often, tends to go well with their extreme amount of detail to have the game write a new story every time. Text-based games fall under this as well I guess.

As for why games don't tend to do it, it's difficult to pull it off well and pushing the hardware to its limit is kind of ingrained in gamedev culture. Though arguably nowadays it's less about pulling out the best of the hardware and more wasting resources so you buy new hardware every few years.

I guess this is in good part because all that muh billions of particles and unnecessary visual detail (which isn't even that appealing) is a good way to sell people shit, so it's no surprise that games and consoles are sold on the premise of higher resolution, more polygons, more effects and unnecessary detail, instead of being sold on the point of having fun or good games. Normalfags eat all of that marketing and think that higher detail = good, or they make some strange association between new technology and quality and/or status, so you have people calling you names for playing games that look like they come from the PS1 or even the NES era.

Also, to actually make something look good with rudimentary models/technology is quite difficult, it requires talent and a lot of commitment to making something that isn't shit, both things that modern nu-devs lack and managers aren't really interested in.

As a side note, I myself tried to make low-poly models for a mock-up game project I had, but the final result looked like shit shovelware you would find on Steam, and since first-impressions do matter it would have been relegated to the trash had I actually gone and developed the game completely.

This isn't the nineties anymore. The average video game player isn't intelligent enough to abstract information from simplistic iconography and symbols. I imagine that would be the reason why things like Cubivore tended to be diamonds in the rough. Most people lack the intelligence to have a strong imagination. This is most evident in other works of fiction, in which characters are completely unrealistic and one-dimensional. It takes a powerful imagination and a lot of interpersonal experience to be able to composite whole personalities and histories for fictional characters, and have them be more than a bunch of labels. You know, like the identity politicians that have taken over games and comics themselves.

>>16918404

>This isn't the nineties anymore. The average video game player isn't intelligent enough to abstract information from simplistic iconography and symbols.

This, once i saw one of those shitty kids react videos where they were trying to play contra, the dumb fucks kept falling into holds because they couldnt unerstand that a black pit = death.

>>16918404

>>16918409

>>16918401

Trying to use google to find information, give me this old 1944 psychology experiment.

It uses simple shapes moving around, and the interesting part is that most people found some story inside of it.

Autists were unable to find meaning on this video.

Because pixelshit and indieshit cubeshit only works in shitty walking sims and/or platformers. That's not even 5% of the console/PC market. People want impressive visuals, not pixelshit.

>>16918419

Its not that the human mind cant pull it off anon, its that young people have been exposed to so much visual stimulation and "HD GRAFIX" so they cant deal with abstract information.

>>16918428

I think the biggest issue is that we all fall to marketing and social media picture the AAA industry obviously try to sell.

Console companies want to sell you again more expensive hardware, game companies want to impress with better graphics (realism).

Which is not bad, but it causes to make them to spend so much money on media that makes people think that's what the average gamer want.

I don't think people really are dumber, they are clearly fall to fads and fashion, but there are biological needs humans have.

Abstract art has a certain appeal to people, as well as colors and stories.

There's plenty of evidence of low budget films or games that BTFO more complex pieces of art made by AAA companies.

Like the witch blair, which made 250 millions.

Or thomas was alone, that sold more than a million copies.

Don't believe that all humans want the shinny thing that the industry want to market as what most people want.

>>16918382

>pushing the hardware to its limit

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

The best way to combat dated realism limited by hardware is artistic style. It's really up to the developer or publisher if they want to invest tons of money into realistic graphics or not. I don't really care since they all turn into games in the end.

>>16918419

>married couple come home and find a bear in their house.webm

>>16918504

There is a sentence after that you nigger.

>>16918372

A problem with simplicity of design is it often belies a lack of care and complexity in gameplay/development which makes for entirely shitty games, it's only counterbalanced where someone has actually made the effort on the meat of the game like Dorf Fort. I'm not a huge graffix whore at all, I like old isometric dungeon crawlers over all else but I'm beginning to hate the sight of fake retro x-bit 'low-poly' shit as it smacks of trashy indie laziness which all too often shows up in other elements of the games with that look.

If you're not going to make a beautiful game at least let your players make something beautiful within it.

>>16918419

Stressful shit. That's some low poly done well.

>>16918576

>White girl brings home black boyfriend

>Abusive father gets into fight with the his daughter

>locks the door and attempts to kill the nigger

>girl saves the nigger

>Farther gets pissed off and destroys the family house

>>16918602

>>16918419

>pannenkoek beats a Hotline Miami level with zero left clicks

>>16918372

>>16918428

90s stuff is good because it's made by professionals who worked within the limitations of their medium.

It's kind of funny to see people bashing AAA devs for making stuff realistic. If you've looked at any article, tutorial, or piece from AAA devs in artstation, then you'll notice that creators of realistic assets have a better sense of design and storytelling than the OP example. They just make it look easy. The reason why it's AAA in the first is because it takes a lot of effort and time to work on that subject matter.

One thing I think doesn't get talked about enough is how games used to be able to trick you into thinking things looked different than they actually looked. One of my favorite examples is Mario 64, where some of the paintings are images of enemies, like Goombas, or Scuttlebugs. The Scuttlebug on the painting is obviously much more detailed than the ones that are actually rendered in-game, but since you see this giant painting of a detailed Scuttlebug right as you enter the level, your brain remembers that, and when you see the much less detailed, different looking model of a Scuttlebug in the actual level, the two kind of get merged in your mind. If you were to take a kid really into Mario 64 back then and ask them to draw that type of enemy, I guarantee their drawing would be of the fancy version in the painting, rather than the simple model in the level.

Mario 64 does it particularly well because it uses the paintings as a core part of the game, but it extends to anything that shows things from the game in a more detailed fashion. Box art, manual art, the sides of an arcade cabinet. To just keep going with the Mario 64 examples, when people think of Mario from Mario 64, they probably picture the image from the front of the box/cart, not the actual model in the game. That's why every so often we have threads talking about how cool that era of rendered artwork was. It sticks in your mind as you play the game, and changes your perspective on the game. But now, they think the in-game assets are good enough to just slap on the cover and use everywhere else, maybe with some minor touch ups. They're wrong.

>>16920649

That's a really interesting point, I can definitely see that. Do you think the decline of manuals is related to this as well? From what I remember, these typically had illustrations of various in-game things and I used to spend hours reading them from back to back as a kid.

>>16920660

I'd say the decline of manuals is a factor. Perhaps manuals gave more of a reason to have better artwork that wasn't just the actual game assets. But I think the most direct thing is just the fact that now most promotional materials, including things like covers, are just regular game assets, maybe slightly touched up in photoshop or whatever. But then with all these idiots falling for the digital-jew, a lot of people don't even see covers anymore. A lot of games don't even have covers anymore. So that's a factor too. Where else is this kind of art going to be if manuals and even box arts are going away? I used Mario 64 as an example, but I'm not about to expect other games to also revolve around highly detailed renders used as in-game paintings or whatever.

Lemmings do not have the capacity for imagination.

>>16918404

Sucks for strategy and tactic games that they all have to dumb themselves down so the average dumb gamer can feel like a tactical genius.

I hate that there has been a general trend away from visual clarity. I remember Miyamoto once saying he designed everything in Mario so you instantly know at a glance what it does. The Goomba looks soft, so it's a fair bet you can jump on it and kill it, but the Koopa has a shell, so just jumping on it wont kill it straight away. Anything with spikes should be avoided, and so on.

It doesn't have to just be very basic minimalist or retro styles. Vanilla TF2 is a great example of visual clarity in an art style. A game that offers you hyper realistic character models with fancy lighting effects on everything might look "good", but it doesn't supply you with that instantaneous communication of an idea.

creating realism is easy as long as you have enough money.

there are countless asset libraries available for purchase used for CGI; making them from scratch doesn't make sense because a realistic asset will blend into any realistic environment.

you can 3d scan a human mesh, auto-rig it, then use motion/face capture much quicker than having a pipeline of concept artists, 3d artists, animators, etc.

the tools are so easy to use you can get a sheboon from community college to design characters like you'd make characters in The Sims.

aesthetics/themes are ripped from on hollywood cliches as ordered by executives thinking in terms of marketability.

everything is outsourced, using endless middleware, team sizes are huge, salaries are low and nobody is loyal to one another.

there is no true collective spirit or passion.

>>16920813

I remember when Counterstrike was in one of its earlier betas that there was only one character skin for each side. I don't know if it was just me, but I had a hell of a time telling the two apart quickly except for the Ts having short sleeves. I'm not saying that it was intentional or that everyone had as hard of a time as I did, but when reality happens in a video game considerations that might well be important for gameplay sometimes go to the wall. TF2 is a pretty good example of plot and theming giving way to gameplay–but of course with something relatively reality-free like TF2 there's not even a handwavey reason for gameplay not to come first. That really is one of the major dangers of games hewing to close to reality: the devs might well not even consider how a thing impacts the gameplay just because they intend for reality to come first.

>>16920428

What examples are you referring to? I'd understand if you're talking about the "Mario 64 remade in UE4" stuff, but a lot of AAA level art has design in mind.

>>16920860

Are you baiting or something? It sounds like that you have no clue what you're talking about.

>>16921930

>Are you baiting or something? It sounds like that you have no clue what you're talking about.

He was talking about modern game development being full of bottom-of-the-barrel shitters propped up by premade assets fitting into any semi-realistic game project without much editing required, and how divershitty hires with a 70 IQ can shit out a character design that can be slapped together with those existing assets in minutes, rather than having a team of talented people model, skin, and rig a character from nothing.

>>16922172

Oh, you're talking about the Russian UE4 scam games instead of the AAA games.

>>16922197

Making a game "realistic" is relatively easier than a fantastical design. You have countless examples of real things to draw upon, versus whatever more unique fantastical setting you want, because reality (allegedly) exists. So most AAA games go for "realistic graphics". It is still expensive as fuck.

>>16920135

>big triangle is in the house (like it lives there)

>small triangle comes along with small circle

>big triangle attacks small triangle

>small circle bystands and creeps into the house

I actually thought the triangle were "males" and the circle was female.

>>16918419

>Autists were unable to find meaning on this video.

That's retarded, I'm autistic and I could tell it's about two Asteroids ships fighting with the guy from Adventure

People say that kids these days can't comprehend simple visuals, but the popularity of Minecraft says otherwise. Doom looked more realistic and detailed than Minecraft does.

>>16922244 (checked)

I was under the impression the circle was a child and the smaller triangle was a female given its submissive actions, of course, the researcher's intent were to give shapes human interactions and see if people would see it as such.

>>16922492

>>16922244

There's a psychological effect where squares means strong dwarf masculine guy, while triangles means dangerous assholes and circles means feminine women.

It's a trick that's used when character designers design the characters.

Usually bob gives the image of a smooth squishy circle while kiki gives the image of some spiny enemy.

It's a psychological effect.

>>16918372

>>16920324

There's a difference between minimalism, what appears to be in your OP image, and art from older games. Minimalism is an artistic motivation. The artist seeks to use as little detail as possible to convey information. I'm generally not a fan because I don't think it takes a lot of imagination or effort from the artist.

Artists for primitive games did the absolute best with the extremely strict constraints that they were given. Much of the time, the programmers needed to create obtuse hacks to get things to work, even on machines that were designed for games. Many DOS games required you to essentially hack your OS to reclaim memory that would otherwise be used by the OS just so you could play video games. In light of these extremely limited resources, the art produced was admirable, and in some cases even good on its own merits. At this point in history, nobody really tried to make minimalistic games because nobody thought it was creative or interesting. Now that we have the ability to represent photorealistic art in games, some people seem to arbitrarily think that minimalism is interesting, for reasons that I cannot understand. I'd like to see a dev team try to make a game by imposing imaginary hardware restrictions on themselves. For example, "We are going to make our game to specification for a PC with a Pentium II and no more than 96 MB of RAM." Limitations like these may allow creativity to emerge where it is seemingly lacking.

>>16920863

A funny thing that happens these days is you see devs augmenting their bland art styles with things like highlights and onscreen markers, so you always understand what you're supposed to be doing. But a game with a well considered style doesn't need those things. If you place a big red obvious button in a game, the player knows they have to press it, and then you don't need the highlights at all.

>>16923587

It kinda' pains me to see bigass yellow or green markers, sparkles, or outlines on everything in games indicating interactivity, but as I mentioned earlier, most of the massive game-playing market is fucking stupid, and would run around in circles for hours and then give up and scream on Plebbit about it, rather than trying to climb over some crates or blow a hole through a weak-looking wall. Everyone knows about the Half Life 2 episode whatever tester. Game development is sadly packed with tales of such retardery.

>>16923594

The thing is, is that the "stupid" part of the audience didn't exist before games became mainstream. That is how the audience got so much bigger: games were made for retards to draw them in. For games to be truly good, it's almost a necessity that you make them for a smaller audience. The only possible exception are games like Nintendo games which somehow manage to capture a large audience while (mostly) obeying good design philosophy but even they are losing their touch.

>>16923624

Oh, I'm fully aware of how it all started to turn to shit. I remember when 10,000 sales for a game was a mind-blowing success. They keep scraping the bottom of the barrel, and it's been several years since they had dug through the barrel and into the ground under the barrel. It legitimately surprises me when I see instances of people giving a shit when I play through a newer game.

>>16923644

Oh, I know better.

>>16923640

Sales of 1 million are still considered successful in Japan because Japanese developers still have niche developers, a "AA" market if you will. I don't understand the "all or nothing" mindset of Western, particularly American developers. You can find some niche devs in Europe, but you're either indie or the fattest fucking cat corporate suit in America, there's nothing in between.