Soul vs Soulless in video games

[Azdul]

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".

Take Daggerfall as an example.

It has detailed, prerendered models (done on Silicon Graphics workstation ?) and some handpainted ones. Software renderer pushes megabytes upon megabytes of images / textures on the screen.

It would look terrible as PS2 / 3Dfx Voodoo 1 title - as all textures would have to be scaled down to fit together within 1-2 MB of texture RAM. Some prerendered textures would be replaced by real 3D models - but nowhere near the levels of fidelity that are possible today:

Imagine this done with 50 triangles on PS2 / Voodoo 1.

And it would have colored lightning in the dungeons - because no feature of hardware renderers will be left unused. Colors of lights would be chosen by programmers working 80 hours a week - so (255, 0, 0), (0, 255, 0) and (0, 0, 255).

 

[Lemming42]

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.

Yeah, or alternatively I just actually like the visuals in the games I mentioned, for the reason I mentioned - they lend themselves to abstraction in a way that was harder to do for later games, which end up tending towards varying degrees of realism, even when stylised.

Imagine this done with 100 triangles on PS2 / Voodoo 1.

I wonder if that's the issue, PS2-era visuals were too high-fidelity to achieve the same beneficial abstraction that some earlier games did, but too low-fidelity to look impressive in the way many modern games do. The lighting was consistently weird as fuck too, everything looking shiny and strange.

 

[Viata]

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.

Tbh, talking heads are done so well it sucks we are never getting it anymore.

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

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.

This is unironically my favourite era of gaming. The graphics aren't perfect but they were not stupid enough to waste resources on realistic leaf texture. This is the era where technology caught up to the imagination so you could actually make the games you always envisioned. Dead rising is THE zombie experience because the 360 allowed actual hordes. Halo 3 had huge arenas with multiple vehicles, scarabs and infantry all fighting. Assassin's creed finally let you really explore a huge city that wasn't just blocks with doors painted on them. I agree some of it is ugly, but in terms of creativity and technology this is the peak cross over point. Everything after this generation has too much invested in graphics and repeating what was done here with little to no innovation. Even Assassin's creed 20's only real change is they copied Demon's souls and far cry a bit more than they already were.

Nintendo games tend to have soul.

Pokemon and the constant 2d Mario clones would like a word with you. I don't think anything Mario since the SNES has had soul. They're enjoyable games but they're watered down to be mass consumer friendly and tested into a fine grey sludge. They never went beyond Mario 3's power ups and make the same game with a new power up over and over. With level design declining rapidly between each title. They're still enjoyable but they are exactly what people describe as soulless rehashes.

 

[El Presidente]

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".

Huge soul vs soulless example if I ever seen one, but there's much more to it than simply 2D > 3D, and most would wrap up the comparison on that alone. Left feels like a planned composition, right feels like "we gotta fill the shelves with stuff", and we know for a fact that was the case because they were just trying to replicate the original drawing. Notice how the proportions are completely off too. In the original image the metal helmet is displayed very prominently, because the idea was that the tip at its top didn't fit the height of the shelf, so it had to be placed on an angle that conveniently made for a pretty striking image that catches your attention. Meanwhile on the 3D version the helmet looks much smaller and far more uninteresting, it just sits there. Notice the proportions on that black cloth on the last shelf too. 3D version is just sad.

In short, those images are good examples:
Soul = personality/expression
Soulless = we have a job to do, fill up this stuff with content

 

[DJOGamer PT]

>Game I like = SOVL
>Slop I don't like = soulless

/thread


There you go
Now we can move on to a more recent /v/ meme thread fad
Because this one has been since 2022

 

[Viata]

Pokemon

Not developed by Nintendo.

 

[caffeine]

>Game I like = SOVL
>Slop I don't like = soulless

/thread

This but unironically.

 

[Vic]

but can you truly call a game where the developer put his heart and soul in soulless? even if it's something you don't like you have to realize there is some substance to it, no?

even if you don't like The Beatles I don't think anybody can call their music soulless

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

Pokemon

Not developed by Nintendo.

Nintendo own 50% of the Pokemon company. Any game released is part of their developer studios even if they don't own stock in Game freak/Creatures (there's some debate if they do or not).

 

[Lemming42]

This is unironically my favourite era of gaming. The graphics aren't perfect but they were not stupid enough to waste resources on realistic leaf texture. This is the era where technology caught up to the imagination so you could actually make the games you always envisioned. Dead rising is THE zombie experience because the 360 allowed actual hordes. Halo 3 had huge arenas with multiple vehicles, scarabs and infantry all fighting. Assassin's creed finally let you really explore a huge city that wasn't just blocks with doors painted on them. I agree some of it is ugly, but in terms of creativity and technology this is the peak cross over point. Everything after this generation has too much invested in graphics and repeating what was done here with little to no innovation. Even Assassin's creed 20's only real change is they copied Demon's souls and far cry a bit more than they already were.

In terms of what devs were enabled to do then sure (though there's the old argument about how technical limitations might end up resulting in better games) but visually most of it looks horrible to me. To pick your examples, Dead Rising, Halo 3 and AssCreed all just kind of go for bland photorealism (maybe a bit stylised in Dead Rising's case), and have lighting that makes everything look oddly shiny like it's made of plastic. There's something very specific about games from that era that looks off to me.

It could just be that the trend was towards realistic styles rather than fantastical ones, but then again AssCreed's Jerusalem looks fantastic from a technical standpoint and doesn't need any abstraction thanks to its impressive scale and level of detail, so I don't think that's it either. Maybe it's all just down to the lighting.

 

[octavius]

Game has soul if the designers poured their souls into it.

 

[NecroLord]

I see a game being soulful when it is a work of genuine passion and creativity made by nerds for other nerds who enjoy it.
Soulless is pretty much every bland piece of Triple A entertainment released today...

 

[NecroLord]

Soul

Soulless

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Soul means exactly what it says: the creator puts a piece of their soul into the product. That is, they are designing/implementing the product in a very personal, individual way that has a lot of personal meaning, and other people can detect that.

Soulless is mass produced stuff, created with market research, designed to optimize revenue, copying the latest successful trends, but containing none of anybody's personal stuff.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Even the logo looks soulless

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

 

[mondblut]

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.

Conossieurs of "early 3d" be like:

 

[mondblut]

Even the logo looks soulless

Top - disgusting anime cancer.

Bottom - less disgusting anime cancer. Almost human-like, in fact.

If it weren't final faggotry, I'd file it under "incline".

 

[Halfling Rodeo]

This is unironically my favourite era of gaming. The graphics aren't perfect but they were not stupid enough to waste resources on realistic leaf texture. This is the era where technology caught up to the imagination so you could actually make the games you always envisioned. Dead rising is THE zombie experience because the 360 allowed actual hordes. Halo 3 had huge arenas with multiple vehicles, scarabs and infantry all fighting. Assassin's creed finally let you really explore a huge city that wasn't just blocks with doors painted on them. I agree some of it is ugly, but in terms of creativity and technology this is the peak cross over point. Everything after this generation has too much invested in graphics and repeating what was done here with little to no innovation. Even Assassin's creed 20's only real change is they copied Demon's souls and far cry a bit more than they already were.

In terms of what devs were enabled to do then sure (though there's the old argument about how technical limitations might end up resulting in better games) but visually most of it looks horrible to me. To pick your examples, Dead Rising, Halo 3 and AssCreed all just kind of go for bland photorealism (maybe a bit stylised in Dead Rising's case), and have lighting that makes everything look oddly shiny like it's made of plastic. There's something very specific about games from that era that looks off to me.

It could just be that the trend was towards realistic styles rather than fantastical ones, but then again AssCreed's Jerusalem looks fantastic from a technical standpoint and doesn't need any abstraction thanks to its impressive scale and level of detail, so I don't think that's it either. Maybe it's all just down to the lighting.

The eras lighting is pretty bad, especially the 360 which regularly would show shadows through hard surfaces. You could see a player on the floor above you in a lot of triple A games. There were still limitations with disc size and even power of the machine to a degree. There's a bunch of jank about the era but that's also part of the soul to me. Rag doll looks fucking stupid, but who doesn't enjoy seeing how those things end up? They're enjoyable to mess around with and I'm willing to look past the flaws because there's elements there to enjoy still. All those elements have been stripped out of gaming now.

 

[Vic]

not everything is decline

 

[Athena]

not everything is decline

Damn, the SNES packed some impressive graphics in 1991.