Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread

[Dayyālu]

Spoiler

Infinitron you know what to do!

 

[thesecret1]

Infinitron you know what to do!

I nominate first question to be "Why are you so old?"

 

[Modron]

Posting to confirm that I unironically think the Exiles were his best looking games and this looking like shit still has more to do with it being designed for concurrent release on iphones than anything else.

 

[Irenaeus' Vagina]

I would play Exiles on mobile.

 

[Tacgnol]

Queen's Wish look is a result of him listening to a loud minority of autists arguing that the original Exiles were his best looking games.

Then why does it look nothing at all like Exile?

Yeah, I don't know why he thought RPGMaker style JRPG graphics would appeal to the Exile fanbase.

I really liked how Exile just had a "flat" 2D style that didn't bother with perspective. The result was you had nice clean visuals.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Can he expand into a small 30 people studio like Obsidian and make a game with PoE quality level ?

Given his personality, I can't imagine Jeff plays well with others.

Well going by Avellone's reports, neither does Feargus.

Avellone is a meth addict lashing out at his former boss for trying to get him help

 

[passerby]

Queen's Wish look is a result of him listening to a loud minority of autists arguing that the original Exiles were his best looking games.

Then why does it look nothing at all like Exile?

Yeah, I don't know why he thought RPGMaker style JRPG graphics would appeal to the Exile fanbase.

I really liked how Exile just had a "flat" 2D style that didn't bother with perspective. The result was you had nice clean visuals.

The only difference in RPGMaker style in Queen's Wish is that decorative and units sprites can be taller than the tile height and wall tiles have visually a perspective ( only visually, wall tiles don't overleap sprites and walkable tiles, just like in Exile ), otherwise it's the same thing.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The problem I have with the art is that he didn't even try.
Compare his garbage to Knights of the Chalice:

KotC looks (IMO) great. It didn't take a team of artists or a AAA budget to make it look great.
If he cares so little about his product, why should I play it let alone buy it?

 

[Drowed]

The biggest downside of RPG Maker games is the fact that 99% of them follow the anime aesthetics, with disproportionate characters with huge heads and small bodies. That said, on the other hand, many of them have a much more coherent and unified sense of art direction than Vogel's new game.

The Amber Throne:

Spoiler

LISA:

Spoiler

Stray Cat Crossing:

Spoiler

If random people using RPG Maker can do this, Vogel with a fucking Kickstarter of 100,000 USD can make his game look better, FFS.

 

[Bad Sector]

If he cares so little about his product, why should I play it let alone buy it?

Maybe the only part he cares little about is the visual side and prefers to spend the time he'd otherwise spent into visuals in the story or other non-visual aspects? If he is worse at visuals than story/design/otherstuff wouldn't make more sense to spend his limited time (time doesn't expand to do everything you want, you have to prioritise) on his strengths instead of weaknesses so that he can get the most out of it? The current graphics may not be pretty and clash with each other in some areas, but they are still functional.

 

[passerby]

The problem I have with the art is that he didn't even try.

KotC looks (IMO) great. It didn't take a team of artists or a AAA budget to make it look great.
If he cares so little about his product, why should I play it let alone buy it?

The issue is simply about hiring a competent artist instead of a hack. KOTC graphics probably required less work hours to create, than Queen's Wish ones, but were designed with a style.
I'm not even sure, he doesn't care... I think he is on the spectrum and is simply unable to understand, appreciate and recognise good aesthetics.

Think about attribute/skill graphics from avernum character screen, or cave tilesets in red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, pink etc. "variations" in some Geneforges created by moving a single color component slider ( loosing contrast by turning black pixels into dark pink for example).
On top of these being unbelievably lazy, it takes a special kind of person to not recognise that character screen would look better without child drawings, or original grey cave walls everywhere would look better than red, green, blue, yellow, cyan and pink ones.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If he cares so little about his product, why should I play it let alone buy it?

Maybe the only part he cares little about is the visual side and prefers to spend the time he'd otherwise spent into visuals in the story or other non-visual aspects? If he is worse at visuals than story/design/otherstuff wouldn't make more sense to spend his limited time (time doesn't expand to do everything you want, you have to prioritise) on his strengths instead of weaknesses so that he can get the most out of it? The current graphics may not be pretty and clash with each other in some areas, but they are still functional.

Visuals are part of video games, just like the story, music, gameplay, etc., are. That does not mean they have to be the equivalent of AAA, but just slapping some crap you found online together is going to look terrible and destroy immersion. There are a lot of ASCII-based games that look better than Queen's Wish does simply by having a consistent style: Cogmind and Brogue are two examples off my head that have an ASCII mode which looks great.

For simplistic styles — Look at Caves of Qud:

The art is so damn simplistic, but it has a consistent style to it. When I play CoQ, I'm fully immersed in the game. Combine that with some of the ambient music from the game:

The game just oozes atmosphere. It didn't require a team of artists to make it, to the best of my knowledge.

and prefers to spend the time he'd otherwise spent into visuals in the story or other non-visual aspects?

Queen's Wish is a game that had a $100k kickstarter.

 

[JarlFrank]

The problem I have with the art is that he didn't even try.

KotC looks (IMO) great. It didn't take a team of artists or a AAA budget to make it look great.
If he cares so little about his product, why should I play it let alone buy it?

The issue is simply about hiring a competent artist instead of a hack. KOTC graphics probably required less work hours to create, than Queen's Wish ones, but were designed with a style.
I'm not even sure, he doesn't care... I think he is on the spectrum and is simply unable to understand, appreciate and recognise good aesthetics.

Think about attribute/skill graphics from avernum character screen, or cave tilesets in red, green, blue, yellow, cyan, pink etc. "variations" in some Geneforges created by moving a single color component slider ( loosing contrast turning black pixels into dark pink for example).
These two examples, on top of being unbelievably lazy, take a special kind of person to not recognise the character screen would look better without child drawings, or original grey cave walls everywhere would look better than red, green, blue, yellow, cyan and pink ones.

Yeah, Vogel's graphical design has been in such consistently bad taste that the only possible explanation is that he simply cannot into art at all.

When I first played Vogel's games - what, 10 years ago? It was a long time ago for sure - I was put off by the visuals, even though I had never been a graphics whore. At the same time I was discovering old DOS games I missed in the 90s and never had any issue with their graphics. Yet the visuals of Vogel's games put me off.

I mean, just... look at the character portraits. I could get better art from some guy on deviantart for 10 bucks apiece, not even exaggerating.
And the colors of the tileset and the objects on the floor just look like puke. If I wanted to describe the visuals in one word, it would be "puke colored".
And then there's the tendency of just coloring higher level enemy sprites differently, which always looks weird and off.

I mean... just look at it. It's functional, sure, but it's just not beautiful at all. Everything looks terrible, from the tileset to the interface.

 

[Dayyālu]

The Amber Throne:

Spoiler

Holy fucking shit that looks like a 90ies children's book done by Frenchmen, it's magnificent.

Queen's Wish is a game that had a $100k kickstarter.

You misunderstand. The 100k weren't for the game. They were for the retirement fund. Now he can develop and sell the game and be sure that even if it fails to break even on Steam he already got the money.

Kickstarter wasn't for a better game and Vogel never promised such: it was as a guarantee that the minimum sales would be reached. Also apparently the response to his bizzarre article was so bad that we'll get a response next week that I can already summarize: "I am a 25+ years old veteran and I know what I am doing".

 

[thesecret1]

Also apparently the response to his bizzarre article was so bad that we'll get a response next week that I can already summarize: "I am a 25+ years old veteran and I know what I am doing".

That would be the good result. I expect him to go full passive aggressive instead.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

I love how Vogel insists that he's an artist and then proceeds to make points no artist would ever make. It's a wordier version of this

The best part is that while Vogel is busy writing virgin blogposts trying to explain his lack of effort, chad Styg has already released a decent looking game with sprites that were made by bashing together geometry in 3dsMax2007. When found out that you can't make the portraits that way, he commissioned them from a slav that made them for a crate's worth of vodka.
Why is it that Styg can do what Vogel can't? There's a ton of slavs out there who will work for laughable wages. There are competent spriters who only work with Kickstarter and indie games, too, despite those paying fuck all. You don't need to dig deep to find their contact info either. It's all very well known, these people aren't peddling their services on a shady abandoned server in the Deep Dark Net. They're all out there, on devianart, on Tumblr, on Artstation, they're in the credits of another indie one-shot wonder that sold 2000 copies. They'll set you up with a decent art, just be a good art director, know when to micro and when to fuck off, and you'll be fine.

The biggest takeaway here is that Vogel is not an industry veteran, he's an industry survivor. He treats the industry like a monkey would treat a fire - sure he managed to avoid getting burned so far, but fuck if he knows how it actually works or why it's so painful to stick your hand right in. There's no conscious process behind what he does, no matter how many wordy blogposts he produces to cover it up, just like there's no marketing value in his hot takes.

 

[thesecret1]

He treats the industry like a monkey would treat a fire - sure he managed to avoid getting burned so far, but fuck if he knows how it actually works or why it's so painful to stick your hand right in.

Did he ever figure out why Nethergate failed, or does he think it a cruel strike from god or something?

 

[Panzermeido]

When found out that you can't make the portraits that way, he commissioned them from a slav that made them for a crate's worth of vodka.

I have it here on good faith that no vodka was actually purchased for the given wages

As for Vogel, his is a story of a man who has zero talent for art direction, and thus perceives lack of art direction as a an art direction all by itself. When confronted with his retardation, the response is an immediate spontaneous combustion just below the bowels.

 

[Bad Sector]

Visuals are part of video games, just like the story, music, gameplay, etc., are. That does not mean they have to be the equivalent of AAA, but just slapping some crap you found online together is going to look terrible and destroy immersion.

I agree, however even in the best of games not everything gets the same priority, my argument was that he may care too little about the visuals to put any more effort than the absolutely minimum but may care a lot for the other aspects of the game and put a lot of effort in those. You may disagree with such an unbalanced focus and that is perfectly fine, nothing to argue about that, but you wrote "If he cares so little about his product" which to me reads like there is an assumption that he cares about visuals enough to show that he cares little about the product (since the visuals are not good). What i'm saying is that it may be instead that he cares little about the visuals to affect how much overall he cares about the product, so it isn't that he doesn't care about his product but that he puts different importance at the parts that make up his product than what you do.

Or to try and put it differently, he may care a lot about his product but "care points" are calculated using a much lower factor for visuals than yours :-P

Queen's Wish is a game that had a $100k kickstarter.

I'm not sure what you want to say with that, you can't buy taste and besides i don't know how much Vogel's livings costs are. $100k does not sound much for US (from what i've read online, i've never been there) and from a quick Google search it looks like in Seattle (where he lives) $76k is what is considered a comfortable wage with the average IT job being around $100k.

 

[V_K]

Queen's Wish is a game that had a $100k kickstarter.

I'm not sure what you want to say with that, you can't buy taste and besides i don't know how much Vogel's livings costs are. $100k does not sound much for US (from what i've read online, i've never been there) and from a quick Google search it looks like in Seattle (where he lives) $76k is what is considered a comfortable wage with the average IT job being around $100k.

Well, 100k budget minus 76k salary still leaves more than half the budget of a game that looks like this:

Besides, the kickstarter budget is not all he got, he's still selling older games.

 

[JarlFrank]

Visuals are part of video games, just like the story, music, gameplay, etc., are. That does not mean they have to be the equivalent of AAA, but just slapping some crap you found online together is going to look terrible and destroy immersion.

I agree, however even in the best of games not everything gets the same priority, my argument was that he may care too little about the visuals to put any more effort than the absolutely minimum but may care a lot for the other aspects of the game and put a lot of effort in those. You may disagree with such an unbalanced focus and that is perfectly fine, nothing to argue about that, but you wrote "If he cares so little about his product" which to me reads like there is an assumption that he cares about visuals enough to show that he cares little about the product (since the visuals are not good). What i'm saying is that it may be instead that he cares little about the visuals to affect how much overall he cares about the product, so it isn't that he doesn't care about his product but that he puts different importance at the parts that make up his product than what you do.

Or to try and put it differently, he may care a lot about his product but "care points" are calculated using a much lower factor for visuals than yours :-P

If we look at how bland, generic and disappointing Avadon was - a by-the-numbers clone of Bioware RPGs, with little imgination put into it compared to Geneforge or even Avernum, I'd assume that he doesn't care that much about the qualities of his games anymore.

 

[Bad Sector]

V_K Sure, but doing good visuals implies that he cares about visuals (and even is able to judge good visuals instead of accepting whatever the artists he hires throws at his lap). I do not think it is an issue of money unless that money was enough to totally delegate anything related to visuals to someone else and he had zero say on that. From his blog post i doubt he's even near having such a budget.

JarlFrank perhaps, i haven't played any of his newer games TBH. My only reaction was to the "he doesn't care about visuals therefore he doesn't care about the entire game".

 

[JarlFrank]

Sure, but doing good visuals implies that he cares about visuals (and even is able to judge good visuals instead of accepting whatever the artists he hires throws at his lap). I do not think it is an issue of money unless that money was enough to totally delegate anything related to visuals to someone else and he had zero say on that. From his blog post i doubt he's even near having such a budget.

You can hire a hopeful young artist who really loves computer games for a thousand bucks tops to give your game a decent art direction, especially if you have a relatively well-known name such as Vogel.

Thing is, he just never cared for that kind of thing.

How did all those other games people have posted screenshots of in this thread managed to get good art with a fraction of Vogel's budget? Why can't he do the same?

 

[Bad Sector]

Thing is, he just never cared for that kind of thing.

How did all those other games people have posted screenshots of in this thread managed to get good art with a fraction of Vogel's budget? Why can't he do the same?

But that is my point and i agree with you here: he doesn't care about visuals to do the same. If he cared he could do a lot of things to improve the visuals, even ignoring paying anyone to do anything, just adding lightsources to his engine, even simple tile based ones that would barely take an afternoon to implement (and he already *does* have shading for visibility), would improve the readability of his scenes a lot.

 

[Dayyālu]

The biggest takeaway here is that Vogel is not an industry veteran, he's an industry survivor. He treats the industry like a monkey would treat a fire - sure he managed to avoid getting burned so far, but fuck if he knows how it actually works or why it's so painful to stick your hand right in. There's no conscious process behind what he does, no matter how many wordy blogposts he produces to cover it up, just like there's no marketing value in his hot takes.

That's probably the best take. If you hear his interviews or read his blogposts, there's very little of value in it, there's a lot of improvisation and "i think it works like that because I think so". He was wrong quite a few of times. We call such people "bar politicians": it's very easy to know everything when you are at the bar, but it's the same we are doing here in this thread honestly.

We just don't have the delusions that what we're doing is holy word of an industry veteran.

How did all those other games people have posted screenshots of in this thread managed to get good art with a fraction of Vogel's budget? Why can't he do the same?

Because that would require effort, because that would require dealing with non-english artists in communities he doesn't know, because that would require more money than he wants to spend, because if he improves the graphical quality too much he would then need to upgrade all the graphics and he needs the artists to be as cheap and disposable as possible.

Again, it's clear that there's no interest in optimizing or even having adequate art style: the only point that could make Vogel care is if someone managed to convince him that a better presentation would give him better sales (and for the genre in the contemporary age that's not certain, the market is bloated).

He's making a game for the niche that wants to play his games, graphics be damned. There's no need to get better graphics, there's no need to search for other audiences, there's no need to take risks.

It's all rather clear if disappointing.

Another example: music. He could Kevin McLeod it like every RPGmaker game does, but that would require effort. Like, listening to the songs, choosing how to use them. He never did so, he can't be arsed to learn, it's not worth the time for his audience. So, he'll never do it.