Soul vs Soulless in video games

[El Presidente]

These two words are often used when describing video games, we all get what they both mean, and very often we agree with each other on examples of soulful vs soulless, but what do they really mean to you exactly - if it's even possible to describe that, as these might be just vague/indescribable feelings to you?

I ask this because I feel the concept of a game having "soul" is often a synonym of the game simply being very atmospheric, and in many cases they really feel like interchangeable concepts. Like Thief is an extremely atmospheric game, and it's very soulful. But that's really not it, because you also have games like Mario World or Banjo Kazooie, which have a lot of soul but those are two games I'd never apply the word "atmospheric" to describe. Likewise, many sci-fi games and things like Portal have a very (purposely) sterile feel but manage to be pretty soulful.

Maybe this is a dumb thread, and trying to explain what is a soulful thing is like going from "the Force is all around us" to "oh it's a thing produced by your mitochondrias and you happen to produce a lot of it", which ironically enough would make this a soulless thread. We can still salvage it to post examples of SOVL vs SOULLESS anyways, such as:


SOUL:

SOULLESS:

 

[Hamster]

VS

 

[Hamster]

VS

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

"the Force is all around us" to "oh it's a thing produced by your mitochondrias and you happen to produce a lot of it"

The Force is not produced by Mitochondria, all life produces it.

What is soulless? Anything made by ticking boxes rather than genuine enthusiasm, anything made that parrots an idea cynically or without understanding of what makes the idea beautiful, anything that values quantity over quality.

 

[Lemming42]

I feel like it's gonna come down to "soulful = game i like" and "soulless = game i don't like". Like, is Mass Effect soulful for example? They put a lot of effort and passion into the visuals, it's got a consistent art style and atmosphere, and they came up with some unique alien and ship designs, but it still looks "soulless" to me.

I think it also gets harder to achieve a "soulful" look as graphics become more realistic. You can just compare screenshots of Crash Bandicoot 1 on PS1 vs the remake in N Sane Trilogy. The remake has slightly washed-out colours and a slightly cartoonier art style but it's otherwise basically the same, yet the original looks much more pleasing just because early 3D graphics tend to look a lot better and more satisfyingly abstract than modern engines do, even if the designers are actively trying to replicate the feel of an older game. Same for the Spyro remakes, and Tomb Raider 1 compared with Anniversary.

 

[Athena]

Soul in video game parlance is simply the effect of caring about the end product, combined with personality (i.e. not following trends that make it generic), often aided by technical limitations. Experimentation also plays a role. And, of course, creators must set their goals to be independent of sales in order to achieve a mindset where soul is allowed to occur. The problem with today's video games is that the opposite of all this is happening all at once; no care (just working for a paycheck or having ideas stifled by others), no technical limitations often leading to visual sameness (helped by the use of the same two game engines), dev teams with 3 digit employees where ideas get diluted, and so on.

 

[Iucounu]

I ask this because I feel the concept of a game having "soul" is often a synonym of the game simply being very atmospheric, and in many cases they really feel like interchangeable concepts.

Perhaps it can have soul in all kinds of way (soulful dialog?), but I guess most of them contribute to the atmosphere. An exception might be if various parts don't fit well together (I've read Starfield is such a game), then maybe the end result will feel soulless even if each ingredient is good in isolation?

 

[Butter]

Soul = "I'm making the game I want to play. It's dripping with my personal touches and design sensibilities."
Soulless = "I'm making the game I think other people want to play. I'm second-guessing my own design sensibilities and sanding down all the rough edges for mass appeal."

 

[Iucounu]

Like, is Mass Effect soulful for example? They put a lot of effort and passion into the visuals, it's got a consistent art style and atmosphere, and they came up with some unique alien and ship designs, but it still looks "soulless" to me.

ME2 is very atmospheric, especially during the level loading screens. Kind of sets you in the mood for the fairly small an linear levels that follow --perhaps you could say that the loading screens are rewards for doing the missions? Maybe these loading screens don't play long enough on newer PCs, what a waste if that's the case.

Menacing ambience music:



Shorter video with nice loading screen graphics:

 

[Dadd]

 

[Modron]

SOVL

SOULESS

 

[mondblut]

just because early 3D graphics tend to look a lot better

Wha?

What next, CGA and ASCII having more "soul" that that soulless VGA for graphic whores?

"early 3D graphics" are the absolute worst blight ever to plague videogames. Even CGA was arguably better than that.

 

[Lemming42]

Nah, some games looked shit and it was definitely easier to make something that looks atrocious than it was in the VGA era (usually thanks to empty space combined with badly tiling textures) but but some early 3D games still look great. Crash Bandicoot as mentioned, Unreal Tournament 99, Half-Life, Hexen 2 (especially the expansion where the level design was less shit), some bits of Quake 1 (others look pretty bad admittedly), Daggerfall, Thief, Descent, M&M 6, etc. Plus, if you'll permit the Build and Jedi engines as 3D, then Dark Forces, Outlaws, and Blood look fantastic too (plus Hexen 1 and Doom if you consider the Doom engine 3D).

I've never been able to figure out exactly why, but 3D graphics from the late 2000s in particular look awful. Not sure if it's because of adapting for PS2 hardware or what but games from that era really look like shit, and it's not solely down to the trend of making everything brown and "realistic".

 

[Viata]

Every remake is soulless. All of them.

 

[Viata]

Soul = "I'm making the game I want to play. It's dripping with my personal touches and design sensibilities."
Soulless = "I'm making the game I think other people want to play. I'm second-guessing my own design sensibilities and sanding down all the rough edges for mass appeal."

The bigger the dev, less chances of "we are making the game we want to play" happening. I prefer games made by small dev, 1~10 is great enough. A lot of games I love turned out to be made by small teams, even when the dev itself was big (like Capcom or Konami), the team working on the game was around 10 people (old arcade ones were 6 or so, in fact). They made the game with passion, to the point I have seen interview where one of the programmers was like "I wanted to program a secret stage and by the time the director found out, it was too late to remove it fromt he game so we shipped it".
Like this nigga coding an animation sequence that spells a love letter to a girl he was dating, he had to do it all in a single night before his boss finds out:

 

[Gerrard]

View attachment 44706

VS

View attachment 44709

Impressive, you managed to find a game with a worse inventory interface than Witcher 3.

 

[El Presidente]

I've never been able to figure out exactly why, but 3D graphics from the late 2000s in particular look awful.

Yeah

They have that distinct "slightly improved Deus Ex Invisible War" look and feel that aged much poorer than far older stuff. Also PS3-era lighting is just awful. Not coincidentally it's the age of the exaggerated bloom everywhere.

 

[Butter]

I've never been able to figure out exactly why, but 3D graphics from the late 2000s in particular look awful.

Yeah

They have that distinct "slightly improved Deus Ex Invisible War" look and feel that aged much poorer than far older stuff. Also PS3-era lighting is just awful. Not coincidentally it's the age of the exaggerated bloom everywhere.

Literally Fallout talking heads look better than this.

 

[Sigourn]

Soul:

• Game doesn't feel like the devs falled back on established trends, thus it feels more unique, like it has a reason to exist.
• Feels better crafted.

Soulless:

• Designed by committee, or people playing it safe, thus more generic.
• A hack could have made it.

 

[Athena]

We can't forget the feedback effect that culture has around us. Good art begets good art. When you are surrounded by higher works, higher standards, higher culture, it all has a cumulative and quantitative effect on our thinking and our fruits. In the 90s, quality was everywhere because culture and values hadn't deteriorated as much. With the erosion of good culture comes the erosion of standards, the notions of what is acceptable plunges to lower and lower depths, there's no pressure to create greatness, soon you accept merely good, and aftewards you accept mediocre, a gradual downward spiral into monumental decline. Old authors die and entire mediums become incestuous, positive external inspiration disappears, and with it so does originality. We're just recycling excrement. It's in the hands of very few to ride the tiger.

 

[Lucumo]

Nintendo games tend to have soul.

 

[Lady Error]

Uninspired, bland, generic = soulless

Immersive, atmospheric, inspired = soul

 

[Vic]

big tiddies = soul

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

just because early 3D graphics tend to look a lot better

Wha?

What next, CGA and ASCII having more "soul" that that soulless VGA for graphic whores?

"early 3D graphics" are the absolute worst blight ever to plague videogames. Even CGA was arguably better than that.

Bizarre nostalgia for a particular era leads to an insistence that 3D graphics from that era haven't experienced the same aging as occurs to all 3D graphics, even when the person experiencing that nostalgia admits that 3D graphics of other eras have aged poorly. Even if a game had decent 3D graphics at the time it is released, they will inevitably become too polygonal (the number of polygons available for the meshes of 3D objects increased vastly over time), too low-resolution (technical advances allowed for higher-resolution textures for the surfaces of objects), and lacking in various other aspects (shading, shadows, anti-aliasing, etc.) that were added or improved later. Even within 3D graphics, the 2.5D type that relied heavily on 2D sprites within the 3D environments has aged better than the fully-3D type, which is why Ultima Underworld's graphics are bearable and Daggerfall's graphics still look fairly good, whereas most fully-3D RPGs from the 1990s and first half of the 2000s look horrible.

For fully-3D graphics, a strong aesthetic sense, as with Morrowind in 2002, retards the aging process, but it's only a delay. Stylization usually helps as well, relative to attempts at naturalistic 3D images.

 

[Vic]

pixel art is a thing

waiting for polygon art