Decline Why do so many modern (indie) games use a shitty art style?

[Tavar]

Hi all,
I watched a video about the upcoming games in July recently and I was stunned by how shitty the art style of many of those games is.

Shitty art

Another current example is Return to Monkey Island. Seriously, what is wrong with this industry? I realize that these are small developers with limited budget and that they aim at a stylized art style to reduce costs. But this is no excuse given that beautiful indie games like Darkest Dungeon and Katana Zero exist. What's the root cause here? Is it a lack of talent or are these artist just following some horrible trend?

 

[fork]

Because it's cheaper, easier, everyone's a special snowflake and mustn't be critisised, and, and I'm not even kidding here, actual good art is looked down upon nowadays. You can see it everywhere; games, literature, architecture, web design (cough), you name it. Everything is shit and the shit's being praised.

 

[Glop_dweller]

It's true. Mediocrity is praised, skill is aspersed as elitist. I have seen paint from a tube, squirted on canvas and duct tape, in a gallery, priced at $1500—and that's just in person. I have seen far worse priced (and sold) at far more.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the bear one looks fine to me? decent children's cartoon/child-friendly artstyle, significantly better than calarts shit
clanfolk is obviously ripping off rimworld except worse

 

[Butter]

Indie devs are frequently autistic trannies. Not exactly a group renowned for their aesthetic sensibilities.

 

[TheSoul]

 

[Falksi]

Trendz innit?

But these trends are driven by game devs & companies too tight to spend good time/money/effort on quality product, so making shit stuff "cool" makes more sense to them, as the retards who buy this shit will just keep buying it regardless of the reality.

Nintendo are a big part of that. The Switch offers next to nothing which other platforms do in terms of game quality, yet Nintendo get away with releasing games 5 to 30 years old at top dollar pricing, and often with shittier performance than on a lot of their parent systems too, simply because they push themselves as "THE family/RPG/whatever" system. So they know they can rip the fuck out of their dumb customer base to the max because they lap that type of shit up.

Bollocks like Pokemon, Splatoon, Botw, etc. all give this wank art style a huge push, and Nintendo fanboys lap it up as their overlords desire, regurgitate it, and suddenly every silly cunt (like Gilbert) is copying it, both to reduce costs and because it sells.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

because
1) calarts
2) shit comes a dime a dozen
3) shit is easy, anyone can
4) uniformity: if no one raises the bar all the others can happily keep living below it
5) uniformity: not being original makes everything look like a single huge brand, if for some reason you stuck to one you're attracted to all the others because looking the same they might be actually the same
6) uniformity: sheeple.

 

[Naveen]

It's easier now to do art for videogames, or digital art in general, as there are almost no barriers to entry and there are a lot of resources out there that make your life much simpler, from just buying your assets to copying other people's art or the thousand of tutorials out there. Non-artists seriously underestimate how much you can just copy nowadays with all the stuff that you can find online and how little creativity or skill is actually needed. This breeds laziness, and people seem to have gotten used to it, especially around indie circles. There seems to be no pressure for them to put in some extra effort. And there's always the excuse of having chosen a "unique" or "individual" art style. Also, and this is more of a wild hypothesis but I think it's correct, there's peer pressure to not excel too much. Many of these indie developers are terminally online or have a strong social media presence as their main PR, so there might be a hidden incentive to not be too good, as I have seen this can cause other people (by that, I mean other developers, not necessarily consumers) to just ignore you as they can feel jealous/threatened. Mediocre stuff, on the other hand, can get retweeted or shared easily.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Maybe the skill of drawing is also decreasing with every generation, because it is a very hard earned skill.

For anyone interested in the subject I recommend to get some old book from around 1900 to 1914, or older, lets say a expensive encyclopedia. The quality of drawings in these old books is breathtaking, normally those guys could draw in a way that looked as good as or better than photos. I have also seen hand drawn portraits from the time of Napoleon that actually looked like photos. If those guys were still alive today graphics would take your breath away. But what we have is a bunch of lazy kids who can only rinse and repeat with photoshop filters and think it makes them artists.

The good thing though is that AI is taking over this area. The quality of AI generated art is already better and it costs almost nothing. Of course it lacks any human component, but who cares if the stuff in 99% of games is pure trash

 

[Lim-Dûl]

There are plenty of artists who can create highly detailed art, but most gamers have shit taste and prefer/demand shit art, and doing video game art is low prestige work that doesn't pay well, so we get very few competent artists who think it worthwhile to work with indie devs.

 

[Üstad]

Nugamers making games and emergence of nugamers as large scale customers.

 

[luj1]

beautiful indie games like Darkest Dungeon

lol

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

I blame the gays.

 

[Falksi]

There are plenty of artists who can create highly detailed art, but most gamers have shit taste and prefer/demand shit art, and doing video game art is low prestige work that doesn't pay well, so we get very few competent artists who think it worthwhile to work with indie devs.

Some of the fanart I've seen on social media is stunning. If the big devs wanted to employ these people they could, but like you say the pay and prestige are wank. Absolute tight arsed cunts.

 

[Fargus]

I dunno... Lack of proper art direction? Hipster and tumblr vibes? No money to hire a good artist? No taste?

Just look at codex's beloved Knights of the Chalice 2. Fucking daz3d in character creation? lul

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Wayward Strand looks pretty good outside of those ugly-ass humans.
That said, from what I've read on the subject of art education over the years, most western professional courses on art lean towards the Calarts style or your typical ugly modernist art. So most artists are going to be one of those, or they're going to be amateurs, with all the caveats and problems that comes with. The people who can draw like, say, Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta are going to have too high a price tag for your average video game developer to afford and the people who can probably don't want to pay it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

the bear one looks fine to me? decent children's cartoon/child-friendly artstyle, significantly better than calarts shit

Am I missing something?
If their intention was making it look like those older storybooks, I think they did a rather good job of it.

 

[Zenithsan]

I don't think that the motive is cheapness or lack of talent. The devs just have different visual taste than you, and that's fine.
I do find those examples very boring, and I do see a trend with that cartoony design, too much polish for my taste.
I like more "ugly", minimalistic or raw graphics, like these

 

[Tavar]

beautiful indie games like Darkest Dungeon

lol

What? Darkest Dungeon has a great art style.

the bear one looks fine to me? decent children's cartoon/child-friendly artstyle, significantly better than calarts shit

Am I missing something?
If their intention was making it look like those older storybooks, I think they did a rather good job of it.

This screenshot looks ok (even though the bear looks weird and it still isn't exactly beautiful). I was mostly turned off by the terrible UI colors (brown and blue) and by the "red-nosed" humans shown in the trailer. But I agree that it is probably the least terrible out of my list.

A lot of you mentioned the "calarts style" as the root cause for this problem. I googled it a bit to find out what exactly it is on about, but results haven't been very fruitful. Apparently, it is not an exactly definied style, but just a catch all phrase for low effort drawings and animation. However, I found this interesting graphic during my search:

The 1980 one clearly looks the best to me with 2010 being the worst of the bunch. It seems that the decline is real.

 

[Storyfag]

What's the root cause here?

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[KörangarTheMighty]

The 1980 one clearly looks the best to me with 2010 being the worst of the bunch. It seems that the decline is real.

Be careful when using images like this to say this or that period in particular is better. Between the 80s and 90s there were many improvements in animation that aren't immediately obvious just looking at this. Particularly, the gradual lessening of recycled animation between episodes if we're talking about cartoons also the zany antics that were in vogue in the 90s by necessity were more complex than what you get when dealing with purely humanoid forms. They had to reach back to the 30s and 40s for inspiration for a lot of that.

Using the Don Bluth style as an example of the 80s is also cherry picking, the reality is that style began in the 60s and remained in use through to the early 2000s. One of the examples they use for the 80s category in that image is Penny from Inspector Gadget, however if you actually look at the other main characters in that show they're essentially as goofy as the 90s animation category. CalArts (2010s) is decline obviously and it's easy to spot because of the uniformity. There was no such uniformity in the 80s and 90s until Cartoon Network's accursed style took over fully at the turn of the century.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

HD media just exalt the paucity of artistic proficiency.

 

[Machocruz]

Be careful when using images like this to say this or that period in particular is better. Between the 80s and 90s there were many improvements in animation that aren't immediately obvious just looking at this. Particularly, the gradual lessening of recycled animation between episodes if we're talking about cartoons also the zany antics that were in vogue in the 90s by necessity were more complex than what you get when dealing with purely humanoid forms. They had to reach back to the 30s and 40s for inspiration for a lot of that.

Using the Don Bluth style as an example of the 80s is also cherry picking, the reality is that style began in the 60s and remained in use through to the early 2000s. One of the examples they use for the 80s category in that image is Penny from Inspector Gadget, however if you actually look at the other main characters in that show they're essentially as goofy as the 90s animation category. CalArts (2010s) is decline obviously and it's easy to spot because of the uniformity. There was no such uniformity in the 80s and 90s until Cartoon Network's accursed style took over fully at the turn of the century.

I agree. In the 70s and 80s, we're mostly still under the influence of the Disney house style that, while well drawn technically, had been becoming increasingly safe, bland, and rote. There was an over fixation on being "on model" , stock expressions for every character across every product, and corporate formulas for how characters should look so as to appeal to the most amount of people as possible. You can see it in the evolution of the Mickey Mouse design over the decades. It became all very contrived and boring.

In the 90s you have John Kricfalusi and his Ren and Stimpy throwing off the Disney yoke, as his mentor and employer Ralph Bakshi had attempted in the 70s. Both were influenced by the animation of the 30s and 40s, with Bakshi having been employed by one of the studios that was producing cartoons back then, Terrytoons. Ren and Stimpy, and it's zany antics, would become hugely influential on American tv animation for a while.

The problem with the 70s and 80s examples are not only are they bland and nondescript, you can't move them in any interesting ways or else you'd be off-model, which was a huge no-no. If you're Don Bluth and can draw and animate well and have a large enough budget and long enough deadline, you can do more than the Scooby-Do people within that confine, but nothing like R&S or Animaniacs or the 40s stuff.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

The problem with the 70s and 80s examples are not only are they bland and nondescript, you can't move them in any interesting ways or else you'd be off-model, which was a huge no-no. If you're Don Bluth and can draw and animate well and have a large enough budget and long enough deadline, you can do more than the Scooby-Do people within that confine, but nothing like R&S or Animaniacs or the 40s stuff.

I quite like the early 80s "He-Man realism" but yes, essentially it's a lot more limited in what can be animated within budget.