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Wadjet Eye Technobabylon: Birthright - sequel with 3D graphics

Terra

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I recommend that Technocrat consult with Whalenought. I'm given to understand they are experts on managing art style changes.

Count me among the detractors of the new style, pixel art has a certain charm and elegance to the aesthetic that 3D adventures most often fail to mimic successfully, with awkwardly animated 3D characters shambling about the environment, pivoting to align in just the right way with the selected prop, before enacting another superfluous animation. When compared with the snappy brevity of 2D animated pixel art, I often find myself waiting around for things to happen play out in these "look, I can 3D too" adventures.

I can almost feel the sterility exuding from that first screenshot. Disappointing.
 
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bddevil

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I actually prefer Technobabulon to Primordia (yes, I know - but Im a puzzle guy and puzzles in Technobabylon are way better than those in Primordia, like way better. not quite resonance, but close), and those graphcis take me back to like 2002, not in a good way.

I will play it regardless because if graphics prevent you from playing an adventure game, you're in a wrong genre.... but I think pixel art looks way better. You can have way more details with pixel art than low budget 3d with low (well, maybe not so nowadays) poly.
 

Blaine

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I will play it regardless because if graphics prevent you from playing an adventure game, you're in a wrong genre....

If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that adventure game developers purposely making their games' graphics objectively worse for (at best) questionable reasons is a fully legitimate cause for complaint.
 

bddevil

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I will play it regardless because if graphics prevent you from playing an adventure game, you're in a wrong genre....

If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that adventure game developers purposely making their games' graphics objectively worse for (at best) questionable reasons is a fully legitimate cause for complaint.
you're passing off some weird and fairly baseless assumption as some kind of fact, when it's not. and then taunting me on some 'if you don't agree, you don't have sense at all' shit. yeah, no.

developers don't make worse graphics in adventure games on purpose. they don't gather round and brainstorm how they can make the graphics worse.

they just dont consider it more important or worthy of heavy investment as much as story, dialogue, puzzles, character development, even voice acting, and so on.

unlike other genres, adventures are fairly easy to make in terms of technical coding, all you really need is a state machine that handles quest state and artists to draw backgrounds. that's a traditional p&c game in a nutshell.

you can also have an absolutely engrossing text adventure, ie a MUD. not so much in other genres. the fact is, adventure games don't require as much visual feedback as most other genres. adventure games are mostly static games that don't expect much reactivity or feedback.

hell, a game like Sunless Sea is almost a text adventure. it doesn't require visuals, really.

now for me, I dont care about graphics quality in any genre. it's a cool lil bonus if it's good quality, but really it doesn't matter. ESPECIALLY it doesn't matter in adventure games. Simon the Sorcerer 3D was objectively (as you put it) shitty looking when it was released, and now it looks 10x worse because of low poly 3d. its still a very good game that I replay every few years.
 

Blaine

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developers don't make worse graphics in adventure games on purpose. they don't gather round and brainstorm how they can make the graphics worse.

They are in this case, unless your argument is that they've switched to terrible 3D graphics by accident.

you can also have an absolutely engrossing text adventure, ie a MUD.

Lecturing me of all people about text adventure games and MUDs? Heh. Nice try, KIDDO. *teleports behind u*

The overall best adventure game I've played this century was Hadean Lands, which was all-text with parser commands and about as old-school as you can get. The puzzles are so hard they might even have stumped my late grandmother, who was a PhD mathematician and solved puzzles as a hobby for 60 years.

There's something you know-at-all developers can try your hands at to "expand your ludographies"—text parser adventure games with puzzles that are extremely challenging, yet utterly fair and logical. They won't sell any copies, but you'll be able to feel very cool and prestigious.

and

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-any-good-ones-left.70803/page-6#post-4576475

Simon the Sorcerer 3D was objectively (as you put it) shitty looking when it was released, and now it looks 10x worse because of low poly 3d. its still a very good game that I replay every few years.

That's cool and all, but it's not the mid-1990s anymore. 2D graphics were already considered "outdated" and "retro" when Wadjet Eye first started publishing adventure games like The Shivah, and this isn't the brave new frontier of 3D graphics.

What they are doing here, regardless of how you choose to characterize it, is purposely switching from the good-looking "outdated" 2D graphics seen in the first game to bad-looking, outdated (notice the lack of quotation marks) 3D graphics in the sequel. The sequel looking shittier than the original for no really good reason is actively annoying.
 

MRY

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I will play it regardless because if graphics prevent you from playing an adventure game, you're in a wrong genre....
Well, I agree with you about Primordia's puzzles (at least vis-a-vis Resonance, which has sublime puzzles; the early build of Technobabylon I played had some issues with puzzles -- not with the puzzles themselves, but the disconnect between the puzzles and the tone; I believe that the ones I flagged got removed), but I really disagree with this quoted language.

For at least a decade (say, 1988 to 1998, which is to say, the genre's golden age), adventure games were probably the most visually appealing games on the market. Since then, I would say adventure games have generally had strong visuals, too -- The Longest Journey Franchise, Daedalic, the Tell Tale games, Broken Age, Amanita, etc. They may not be as cutting edge, but they are still aesthetically quite strong.

Indie retro adventures tend to draw upon the aesthetics (and design) of the decade in which adventures were the pinnacle of graphics. It's true that some very indie adventures have rudimentary graphics, but most don't. For the past 10 years or so, WEG titles have generally had graphics that were consistent, if slightly worse than (particularly in sprite animation), the VGA-era adventure games of the golden age. They probably wouldn't be comparable to the very best (like Kyrandia 2 or Monkey Island 2 or QFGIV) but they wouldn't have stood out as bad in the era.

So it doesn't seem to me that there's anything particular about the genre of adventure games that would justify playing a game with bad graphics. It might be that bad graphics ought generally to be forgiven -- or that beggars can't be choosers -- but I actually think that this is a genre where generally speaking players might have higher-than-normal expectations, rather than lower-than-normal.

developers don't make worse graphics in adventure games on purpose. they don't gather round and brainstorm how they can make the graphics worse.

they just dont consider it more important or worthy of heavy investment as much as story, dialogue, puzzles, character development, even voice acting, and so on.
Weeeeellllll... I think this is wrong.

Obviously, it is extraordinarily rare (though not unheard of) for a developer to say, "I want to make this look less appealing." (I think it actually happens with some art-type games with minimalist graphics.) But the idea that bad graphics are always sins of omission (i.e., "We didn't think to make them better!") rather than than sins of commission (i.e., "We wanted to make them this way!") is incorrect. Very often bad graphics (by which I mean, graphics that are less appealing to some player or group of players) come from well-intentioned bad decisions -- a desire to pursue some new technology (3D, FMV, whatever), a desire to go for a different style (painterly or anime or pixelated or whatever), an ambition gone awry (say, the facial animations in ME: Andromeda), etc., etc. For instance, while there's no disputing taste, I vastly prefer RPG Maker 2000's graphics to any of the subsequent engines, even though vastly more resources have been spent in making and marketing the later ones -- it's not that the developer invested less in graphics, it just elected to have a cuter, higher resolution style that doesn't appeal to me (being a fan of the Final Fantasy III-era SNES graphics). The TTON portraits are another example -- very clearly, plenty of money and time was spent on those portraits (perhaps more money and time than on AOD's portraits?), but generally people didn't care for them.

blaine said:
The sequel looking shittier than the original for no really good reason is actively annoying.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there is a reason: while Technobabylon was jointly developed with WEG and James Dearden (specifically, with WEG's employee Ben Chandler doing the art), TB2 is being done without WEG's involvement as far as I can tell, and Ben Chandler is busy with WEG/Cobbett's vampire game and other projects. It's not really economical to hire an artist to make adventure games, and there aren't that many artists who are at Ben's level and available for collaboration.

So the choice isn't between the Technobabylon you all saw and this, but between the freeware, Dearden-pixeled TB (familiar to those who hang out on the AGS forums) and this:

02.png


I'm not sure he's wrong to go with 3D if this is the alternative; I think it would be a hard sell, and I'm fairly sure WEG wouldn't publish it.
 

DaveGilbert

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Just want to come outta lurk mode to point out that the images that James posted were very deliberately labelled as WIP. They are a loooong way from being final.
 

Blaine

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Actually, I'm pretty sure there is a reason: while Technobabylon was jointly developed with WEG and James Dearden (specifically, with WEG's employee Ben Chandler doing the art), TB2 is being done without WEG's involvement as far as I can tell, and Ben Chandler is busy with WEG/Cobbett's vampire game and other projects. It's not really economical to hire an artist to make adventure games, and there aren't that many artists who are at Ben's level and available for collaboration.

Of course there's a reason—as my wording implies, though, I strongly doubt that it's a good reason. It may be (and almost certainly is) a practical reason, but "practical" doesn't automatically equate to "good" in this context.

As for the last bit, I supposed I'll defer to your assessment, since you know a thing or two about actually developing adventure games.

So the choice isn't between the Technobabylon you all saw and this, but between the freeware, Dearden-pixeled TB (familiar to those who hang out on the AGS forums) and this:

It could always be shelved (or, ideally, not begun work on or announced at all) until a proper artist becomes available/can be located.

That said, if someone wants to sell me a downgrade, he should come clean about it immediately. That has a decent chance of getting me on board. For example, Styg (of Stygian Software/Underrail) blatantly stated (paraphrasing): "We can't afford the manpower to create crouching animations for ventilation ducts, so I have to cut them." (Not a downgrade per se, but serves as a good example.)

What I personally dislike is when someone tries to sell a downgrade by pretending it's an upgrade, or else just hoping no one notices. Am I supposed to play along for the sake of politeness? Hell, even some of the commenters on social media, who aren't grumpy Codexers, can't hide their disappointment.

Just want to come outta lurk mode to point out that the images that James posted were very deliberately labelled as WIP. They are a loooong way from being final.

I think everyone noticed that, but this is the Codex, after all. For the most part, this isn't anyone's first rodeo. WIP certainly implies room for improvement, but I've seen enough "houses" go up over the decades that I can get a sense of what the final product will look like even if the paint and roofing haven't been added yet.

People aren't wrong when they say that the graphics aren't terribly important, but Technobabylon was a beautiful, hand-crafted work of art, graphically. Reverting to 3D is a blow unless it's done really exceptionally well.
 
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bddevil

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developers don't make worse graphics in adventure games on purpose. they don't gather round and brainstorm how they can make the graphics worse.

They are in this case, unless your argument is that they've switched to terrible 3D graphics by accident.
you are now clinging to semantics. 'on purpose' clearly means different things in our interpretations then.
they might think the graphics are BETTER that way, since there is no such thing as objective taste in visual appearance. again, I don't know many people besides the pointed hair boss in Dilbert that deliberately sabotage their own product. I know I know road to hell yada yada good intentions yada yada. Still.

its kinda like how people are throwing fits in the ATOM thread about how the devs didn't other to make QoL things that weren't subjectively 'good' in fallout 1/2. if devs think its better off that way, that doesn't mean they realize that their shit is 'bad' - they think its fine and worst case scenario they don't consider it important.


Lecturing me of all people about text adventure games and MUDs? Heh. Nice try, KIDDO. *teleports behind u*
it wasn't a lecture, and its hilarious that you feel the need to defend yourself from a 'kiddo'. insecure much ? I wont toot my own horn here though.
I never said you don't know MUDs or anything like that. What I meant that adventure games as a GENRE don't really need graphics and unlike many other genres by nature of the genre, they can survive off no graphics at all. You've never tried to dispute that fact, even though your initial post was a stab at the 'if graphics prevents you from playing a game, you're in the wrong genre'.

That's cool and all, but it's not the mid-1990s anymore. 2D graphics were already considered "outdated" and "retro" when Wadjet Eye first started publishing adventure games like The Shivah, and this isn't the brave new frontier of 3D graphics.
adventure games are kinda in their own world graphics-wise. a world that is far behind other genres, simply because (again) graphics aren't THAT important as to blow most of the budget there. and thank god.

What they are doing here, regardless of how you choose to characterize it, is purposely switching from the good-looking "outdated" 2D graphics seen in the first game to bad-looking, outdated (notice the lack of quotation marks) 3D graphics in the sequel. The sequel looking shittier than the original for no really good reason is actively annoying.
in this case, I actually agree with you as well more or less - and Ive made it clear too before in my post, as far as my subjective opinion goes. I still don't get why you felt the need to comment on the part where I generalized about adventures and graphics
 

jfrisby

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I thought I saw Ben Chandler posting something about 3d modelling and assumed he was working on this... It would be kind of funny if Wadjet Eye reenacted the Sierra/Lucasarts 320x240 > 640x (Unavowed, we are here ) >3D > ...
 
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bddevil

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Well, I agree with you about Primordia's puzzles (at least vis-a-vis Resonance, which has sublime puzzles; the early build of Technobabylon I played had some issues with puzzles -- not with the puzzles themselves, but the disconnect between the puzzles and the tone; I believe that the ones I flagged got removed), but I really disagree with this quoted language


For at least a decade (say, 1988 to 1998, which is to say, the genre's golden age), adventure games were probably the most visually appealing games on the market. Since then, I would say adventure games have generally had strong visuals, too -- The Longest Journey Franchise, Daedalic, the Tell Tale games, Broken Age, Amanita, etc. They may not be as cutting edge, but they are still aesthetically quite strong.
adventure games can look strong graphically because of static nature, sure. they can also look 'bad' graphically especially if put into 3D in late 90s/early 2000s. Simon the Sorcerer 3D, GK3 and many other games from that time did not age well visually imo.
I don't disagree with you there. my point was quite different.

So it doesn't seem to me that there's anything particular about the genre of adventure games that would justify playing a game with bad graphics. It might be that bad graphics ought generally to be forgiven
so if you made conclusion about the latter, where exactly do you disagree ? just because many adventure games at the time were more aesthetically pleasing (due to being static art background/pre-rendered) than other games doesn't mean that people cared about graphics to the point where graphics would be a reason for them to NOT play a game. Im a huge fan of the genre sure, but Ive never recalled me thinking 'theres no way I play this game because it looks like ass' about an adventure. other genres- sure. people always gave adventures with shitty graphics chances because graphics were never high up (or at least to me) on the list of things.

Weeeeellllll... I think this is wrong.

Obviously, it is extraordinarily rare (though not unheard of) for a developer to say, "I want to make this look less appealing." (I think it actually happens with some art-type games with minimalist graphics.) But the idea that bad graphics are always sins of omission (i.e., "We didn't think to make them better!") rather than than sins of commission (i.e., "We wanted to make them this way!") is incorrect. Very often bad graphics (by which I mean, graphics that are less appealing to some player or group of players) come from well-intentioned bad decisions -- a desire to pursue some new technology (3D, FMV, whatever), a desire to go for a different style (painterly or anime or pixelated or whatever), an ambition gone awry (say, the facial animations in ME: Andromeda), etc., etc. For instance, while there's no disputing taste, I vastly prefer RPG Maker 2000's graphics to any of the subsequent engines, even though vastly more resources have been spent in making and marketing the later ones -- it's not that the developer invested less in graphics, it just elected to have a cuter, higher resolution style that doesn't appeal to me (being a fan of the Final Fantasy III-era SNES graphics). The TTON portraits are another example -- very clearly, plenty of money and time was spent on those portraits (perhaps more money and time than on AOD's portraits?), but generally people didn't care for them.
I read your post after I wrote my reply to Blaine, but I addressed it there. there is a difference between good intentions that end up badly vs being stubborn and 'my way or the highway'ing it. and like in any developers job, I assume (Im not a game dev but am a software dev- and you obviously are a game dev ;)) priorities are always in play. what you said about portraits is bad management of priorities. for example ATOM made portraits as stylized real people portraits all different for many many NPCS, and players DID notice, but I don't think players would care much if at all if this wasn't the case. its putting cherry on a cupcake when you haven't had a worthy meal yet and are still starving. its feature that so cosmetic no one really needs it per se. kinda like unused backgrounds in adventure games that are served only as a location Segway between screens that actually are interactive. they are nice, sure, but in the grand scheme of things they are filler.

what I was trying to say, graphics is also a priority thing, just on a bigger scale with more commitment. if at some point you realize it doesn't work you can't just scrap it and start from scratch. unless you're making Duke Nukem Forever.
 

MRY

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So it doesn't seem to me that there's anything particular about the genre of adventure games that would justify playing a game with bad graphics. It might be that bad graphics ought generally to be forgiven
so if you made conclusion about the latter, where exactly do you disagree ? just because many adventure games at the time were more aesthetically pleasing (due to being static art background/pre-rendered) than other games doesn't mean that people cared about graphics to the point where graphics would be a reason for them to NOT play a game. Im a huge fan of the genre sure, but Ive never recalled me thinking 'theres no way I play this game because it looks like ass' about an adventure. other genres- sure. people always gave adventures with shitty graphics chances because graphics were never high up (or at least to me) on the list of things.
"People" here seems like "I." (I don't mean that as an accusation or criticism, it just doesn't fit with my experience with the market from a player's or a developer's perspective.)

We agree that for at least a decade, adventure games had better graphics than any other genre. Usually, if graphics are a defining quality of a genre, that means the player base cares about graphics. Since adventure games were defined by their graphics during the golden age of adventure games, I assume that, compared to fans of other genres, adventure gamers actually care more about visuals. My response to your post was based on the suggestion that adventure game players care less about visuals, which would certainly be a surprise to all the saps at Lucas, Sierra, Daedelic, etc. who spent the majority of their games' budgets on the visuals. It's true that a small minority of adventure game players will play games with bad graphics -- a somewhat smaller number of players than are willing to put up with, say, Knights of the Chalice's visuals, but it's not zero -- but they aren't the norm. It sounds like you're in that minority, which is great, because it helps keep the genre alive even in bad circumstances.

Setting aside the descriptive fact that I think most adventure gamers care a fair bit about visuals, I would say that I agree with them normatively. If you take atmosphere away from adventure games, there's really very little left. Unlike genres where the core gameplay loop is composed of "rules" to something that is recognizably a "game," I've never been quite sure what, if anything, the core game loop is in a point-and-click. (A Myst-like with more logic-puzzle orientation could get away with no atmosphere.) It's puzzle solving, but the puzzles aren't particularly interesting without atmosphere. Of course some adventure games can construct that atmosphere with text alone (e.g., Anchorhead or Metamorphoses) or with minimalist graphics, but that's usually because some other non-gameplay aspect (like the writing) is pulled off masterfully. By contrast, you can have an RPG that has nothing but a gameplay loop -- crap graphics, crap writing, crap sound, etc., and yet still be addictive and engaging. Same with strategy games, sim games, many kinds of action games, etc.

what you said about portraits is bad management of priorities.
Maybe we're just trying to say the same thing with different words. What I would say is that the aesthetics in a game represent an interaction of managerial judgment and resources. As long as the judgment isn't at 0%, you can make up for bad judgment with more resources, to be sure. But often visuals in a game look bad because someone wanted the visuals to look like that in the first (or second, or third) instance. It's not because they didn't have resources to get it right the first time, they just used those resources incorrectly. God knows that happens with me all the time because I'm an idiot.
 

zeitgeist

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You know how, when technology moved on, and they started doing all this high resolution art, it turned out that a lot of Amiga and PC pixel artists from the early 90s couldn't really draw that well, and had a rather dubious sense of visual style? There is something to be said for putting formal constraints on the artists, lest they embarrass themselves.
 

MRY

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You know how, when technology moved on, and they started doing all this high resolution art, it turned out that a lot of Amiga and PC pixel artists from the early 90s couldn't really draw that well, and had a rather dubious sense of visual style? There is something to be said for putting formal constraints on the artists, lest they embarrass themselves.
Is that actually accurate history? My sense was that the lousy high-resolution adventure game graphics (I actually can't think of that many games with it) had different artists altogether. Like one obvious instance of such precipitous decline in Space Quest V to Space Quest 6 (yes, they switched numeral style). SQV's art credist are: Shawn Sharp, Mike Jahnke, Kerrie Abbott, Ron Clayborn, Rhonda Conley, Jarrett Jester, and Sean Murphy. SQ6's are: Michael Hutchison, Karin Nestor, Frances Anne Powell, John Shroades, Barry Sundt, Christopher Willis, Deanna Yhalkee. No overlap at all.

In fact, off the top of my head, that's the only series I can think of that did a VGA->SVGA jump without also changing from pixel art to either cel art (e.g., King's Quest, Monkey Island), 3D (e.g., Gabriel Knight, Simon the Sorcerer, QFG), or FMV (e.g., PQ, GK). Which ones did you have in mind?
 

Blaine

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...since there is no such thing as objective taste in visual appearance....

This is rich coming from someone who's complaining about "semantics."

Fortunately, I don't need to counter your gibberish directly. What can be objectively measured beyond all argument are the collective reactions of Codexers and other potential customers to the new art style. The overwhelming majority of Codexers who've checked this thread clearly view it as a hopw roewur ne downgrade, while the halfheartedly lukewarm reactions of non-Codexers on social media are strongly reminiscent of disappointed people who are unfortunately too wimpy to grow a backbone and deploy some rudeness where rudeness is necessary.

No such thing as objective taste in visual appearance, my ass. Perhaps you should start a cake-making business and just use a bucket to slop icing on your layer cakes. I'm sure your customers will understand that their tastes aren't objective. When you have customers to whom you wish to sell a product, THEIR tastes ARE objective, as far as you're concerned.
 

Drakron

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And the reason was Space Quest last released game was in 1996, the following title would be partially 3D but it was cancelled so ...

Accurate history shows that adventure games at that time moved to 3D and/or FMV (until that fad passed on) because it was the new thing, Wing Commander I and II were also pixel but WCIII was 3d with FMV, "pixels" were used because that was what was available and when technology advanced so did companies because consumers would not buy a game that was visually dated and there was no technical reason to not use improved methods, also arguing adventure games do not care about graphics is kinda absurd, if it looks bad then it looks bad and the use of "pixel art" is the same of having a movie in just black and white as a deliberate aesthetic choice after technology allowed games to move beyond that.

And thats kinda of the problem isnt it? People that liked the game visuals did it because of aesthetics and not because its 1992 and thats all your 486DX2 can handle.
 

Blaine

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Pixel art is rather unique, though. For one thing, throughout much of the era during which pixel and sprite art were used in commercial games, 3D graphics were available and had been for many years—they were just very primitive and limited (see ELITE). Therefore, pixel art was used because it looked a whole lot nicer than wireframes and dithering.

Even if one argues that games were limited to pixel art, though, pixel art and sprites can still exude aesthetic appeal and charm today. A surprising number of pixel art games have sold millions, even tens of millions of copies via Steam, and people clearly love the way they look in addition to enjoying the gameplay. Granted, these games don't sell as many copies as the latest FIFA, and only an elite few pixel art-based games ever make it to the big time... but they still do make it to the big time.

Personally, I find well done pixel art appealing in its own right, and not because of nostalgia or because I think it'll score me retro brownie points on the Internet.
 

MRY

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not because of nostalgia
IMO, it's impossible to know whether or not it's nostalgia, unless you're considerably younger than I am. Pixel graphics have become the de facto Baby Boomer Christmas pop songs of video games -- because they were a formative experience of a generation that exerted massive market power in the relevant field, they have become treated as "classics" even though they were just pop material. Basically nerd culture of the mid-1980s to early-1990s is now sacrosanct in popular culture. The result is that NES/SNES/VGA graphics are "timeless." I have no idea whether the reason I like 320x200x256 adventure games is because they are objectively aesthetically pleasing or if it's because it reminds me of the games I played as a kid. But I suspect that's a big part of it because, for instance, Amiga games tended to have a slightly different style of pixel graphics (IMO, the distinctive look is that they have poor light sourcing but a lot of gradients, and sprites that are somewhat too large to allow for good gameplay), and when I see games with that style of art, it does nothing for me. By contrast, NES graphics that are surely "objectively" worse trigger a positive response. I can rationalize it all sorts of ways (such as complaining about Amiga light sourcing) but I suspect it's just like Baby Boomers thinking that their Christmas pop songs are classics while today's Christmas pop songs are trash.

--EDIT--

This is to me a quintessential Amiga screenshot:
173481-shadow-of-the-beast-amiga-screenshot-bloody-thorn.png

Note how the thorn's gradients all have different light sources.
 

Drakron

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A lot of those games were basic and even bad, there been some deliberate attempts at "recapturing the magic" that just make us recall how basic and bad games where back then when they go too far, you have the Obra Dim that is certainly doing some of that but it doesnt go try to be a 100% emulation of those days, its a modern game with modern graphics that just make people remember how games look back in those days because hell you could do that in ZX Spectrum.

Popular culture appropriation of Nerd Culture of that timeframe is incredible irritating for me because nerds back then were not popular and had to hide their hobby, now we have a bunch of fucking millennial posers basically culture appropriating what I experienced and at the same time shitting all over that generation with fucking moral signaling and I am using the term in the sense they just act that way to bully other people and fit in, exactly the same that happened to the nerds of the 80/90's, that is REALLY the fucking kicker.

But speaking of nostalgia, you dont see many if any trying to emulate earlier 3d graphics because those looked like shit, look at FF VII were the models are GOD AWFUL ... the background is great but damn, the 3d character models? And that goes back to that WIP image, the problem is that its a WIP but it looks strait out of a 3d modeling program, its on that zone were its "OMG! Looks so real" such as RDR2 but close so it looks fake and thats the problem, it gives the idea it have no soul because it lacks one, its just a 3d render like any 3d render.
 

bddevil

Educated
Joined
Apr 4, 2016
Messages
71
...since there is no such thing as objective taste in visual appearance....

This is rich coming from someone who's complaining about "semantics."

Fortunately, I don't need to counter your gibberish directly. What can be objectively measured beyond all argument are the collective reactions of Codexers and other potential customers to the new art style. The overwhelming majority of Codexers who've checked this thread clearly view it as a hopw roewur ne downgrade, while the halfheartedly lukewarm reactions of non-Codexers on social media are strongly reminiscent of disappointed people who are unfortunately too wimpy to grow a backbone and deploy some rudeness where rudeness is necessary.

No such thing as objective taste in visual appearance, my ass. Perhaps you should start a cake-making business and just use a bucket to slop icing on your layer cakes. I'm sure your customers will understand that their tastes aren't objective. When you have customers to whom you wish to sell a product, THEIR tastes ARE objective, as far as you're concerned.
So following your logic, you think there is 'objective taste', thus you REALLY think that developers gather round a table and decide to do something objectively bad on purpose, in order to...?

Help me out here, fill in the blanks. What is the motivation to do something that is 'objectively' detrimental to their product, both from mainstream and niche standpoint ?

It logically doesn't make any sense.

And you still, unlike MRY, haven't addressed my point which you quoted in the very first place.
 

bddevil

Educated
Joined
Apr 4, 2016
Messages
71
We agree that for at least a decade, adventure games had better graphics than any other genre.
No, I did not agree with that. I agreed that in general, adventure games had aesthetically pleasing visuals. That does not mean they had 'better graphics' than other genres. And it only applies to backgrounds. They definitely did not have better animations than other genres, at least not obviously so.

Usually, if graphics are a defining quality of a genre, that means the player base cares about graphics. Since adventure games were defined by their graphics during the golden age of adventure games
I don't understand how the goalposts ended up on the other side of the field here.
Aesthetically pleasing/good graphics != defined by graphics though

We went from acknowledging something that was generally done well to somehow assuming its the most defining feature ? How and by what virtue ? This is a logical leap that I cannot follow, sorry - and as you can guess, I do not agree with it at all. Even during the brief FMV craze, games like Pandora Directive or X-Files: The Game were not defined by graphics.

I assume that, compared to fans of other genres, adventure gamers actually care more about visuals. My response to your post was based on the suggestion that adventure game players care less about visuals, which would certainly be a surprise to all the saps at Lucas, Sierra, Daedelic, etc. who spent the majority of their games' budgets on the visuals.

Well, the budget thing is funny. Like I've mentioned before, adventure games are generally static, have a well-defined state machine, and not reactive, so programming and QA'ing them obviously doesnt take a genius or a huge team.

I'm sure people can do great adventures using wintermute or adventure game engine or whatever is popular right now. Adventure games are low-cost if you don't do graphics/animation. or voice acting.

Sure, big studios spent most of their budget on making good graphics because they could and those games were in demand back then. So obviously good graphics will cost the most in making an adventure game.

Simply because for most of those other (ie, non graphics) things they had things in place. Listening to Schafer talk about GF, they had lots of problems moving to the new engine, yet they still had tons of things in-house to help them with that. And that's with a very risky move to improve graphics which ultimately probably cost them in mainstream as it was a market flop.

I would like to think (again, Im not one, so obviously it's just speculation) the modern day indie adventure developer spends more time thinking about dialogues, setting, story, characters, puzzles, etc. They are easier to make than great graphics, so I would hope priority is placed there and we'd have a gem on our hands moreso than games where priority is placed on graphics. Graphics can be updated at some point, but the rest cannot.

If you take atmosphere away from adventure games, there's really very little left.

atmosphere != graphics. graphics is a subset of atmosphere.
if I can get 'atmosphere' reading a book or playing a text adventure game, then atmosphere can surely exist on its own. no doubt graphics contribute to it, but it's not a dependency.

It's puzzle solving, but the puzzles aren't particularly interesting without atmosphere.
that's arguable and probably subjective. I would disagree, but I am a puzzle lover though, so I am biased and I will not argue here.

Of course some adventure games can construct that atmosphere with text alone (e.g., Anchorhead or Metamorphoses) or with minimalist graphics, but that's usually because some other non-gameplay aspect (like the writing) is pulled off masterfully.
So you agree, the less you are forced to DEPEND on graphics, the better you have to make other components ? That's precisely what I want from adventure games. Other components. I can replace the background with my imagination if everything else is great. Sure, in some cases, it'd be tough - it would be tough to replace Blade Runner or TLJ cyberpunk visuals with ugly pixels, but I would think it's more than possible due to strength of them as games first and not photoalbums with interactivity. If a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead of relying on that picture to say only 10 words, if every developer and designer uses their skills to the maximum and produces 1000 words for that picture (and if thats the tradeoff, make the picture worse), the picture's worth would be less and at some point it would be replaceable.

Since Dave was lurking in this thread, I want to say there were thousand times in the Blackwell series things where I wish things would be just more complex - from dialogues to puzzles and to characters - and while graphics certainly contributed to the atmosphere, if there was an option to make graphics 10 times worse and those games have more details and be less linear interactive novel narrative, I would take it every day, and 7 times on a Sunday.

By contrast, you can have an RPG that has nothing but a gameplay loop -- crap graphics, crap writing, crap sound, etc., and yet still be addictive and engaging. Same with strategy games, sim games, many kinds of action games, etc.
I see your point, but I'm not sure it's true for the majority - since you talked about majority beforehand. There is a reason why Microsoft Flight sim was cancelled once consoles took over. They would have to make graphics much better and it seemed the mainstream console gamers didnt care for a flight sim whose main asset was not graphics but sim immersion. Before indie games burst on a scene with the digital distro age, there were very little games that had shit graphics but amazing gameplay, in general. And those games from big devs/publishers eventually became almost extinct.

Maybe we're just trying to say the same thing with different words. What I would say is that the aesthetics in a game represent an interaction of managerial judgment and resources. As long as the judgment isn't at 0%, you can make up for bad judgment with more resources, to be sure. But often visuals in a game look bad because someone wanted the visuals to look like that in the first (or second, or third) instance. It's not because they didn't have resources to get it right the first time, they just used those resources incorrectly. God knows that happens with me all the time because I'm an idiot.
That's fair.

Also. Thanks for constructive dialogue, it's a pleasure arguing with you :salute:

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