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

[Fedora Master]

And people are okay with this.

 

[Norfleet]

Personally, I'm tempted to use Humans of Flat as an artstyle for a game. Has anyone done that yet?

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And people are okay with this.

GRAPHICS, SCHMAPHICS! FORSOOTH!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

80s was a brief period before all the art was outsourced. Lots of animated gems from that period, especially rotoscoped stuff.

 

[luj1]

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

its generic fantasy but at least its realistic

thankfully not pixel graphics or characters with big heads

 

[luj1]

View attachment 25741

And people are okay with this.

yeah its crazy

 

[Lord Rocket]

modern game art is infantile because the artists (and programmers for that matter) who make them are infantile

kinda baffled anyone would expect anything different tbqh

(of course, then you get stuff like KotC2 which looks the way it does because Pierre is a gigaautist and such people don't understand what looks good and don't understand WHY things should look good either. the spreadsheet's the important thing for them)

 

[Barbie]

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.

Calarts is a style taught at California Institute of Arts, which is homogeneous; since the assumption is that these people will apply to the prevailing animation studios that reside near the campus. Animation studios have struck deals with Calarts to ensure they have a constant supply of consistent artstyle. It's an artstyle that is so simplified that even an untalented and non-creative person could pick it up and keep it consistent looking across the board. So CalArts style refers to whichever drawing style is prevailent in the animation industry at the time. However throughput the years the traits of thick lines, simple designs that are easy to manipulate, round heads with no distinguishing features, etc have remained consistent...

 

[Late Bloomer]

The two furry games look like absolute dog shit.

Clanfolk looks cozy to me. I like it.

Wayward Strand looks decent enough.

Glop_dweller is spot on though. There really is no other answer.

Mediocrity is praised, skill is aspersed as elitist.

 

[Rincewind]

All your examples look fine to me; they're all good at what they're trying to do. You might not like the style, that's an entirely different issue. TBH, your problem sounds a bit like "this ice cream wouldn't pass for a good steak" kind of thing. Or "80s music doesn't sound like 70s music". Well... yeah?

I quite like the style of Wayward Strand, for one. The others are not exactly my favourites style wise, but they're competently done.

EDIT: I've checked out a few Wayward Strand videos, and I really love it when people do something inventive, e.g. to combine the hand-drawn animation with 3D, and especially when they're going for a more abstract style as opposed to realism. So thanks the for the tip, I'm gonna check this one out

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

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And people are okay with this.

This is ideal cost performance. You might not like it, but this is what peak fiscal efficiency looks like.

 

[Rincewind]

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.

Is that true? If yes, that's a sad state of affairs. When I took drawing lessons as a kid, the ultimate goal was achieving realism, then at some point you just had to study human anatomy because without that it's next to impossible to draw realistic humans. And I know that human anatomy was part of the curriculum for first year students at prestigious art institutions in the 80s and 90s in Hungary.

Now, those were run by the Academy of Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts or something, and it was extremely hard to get admitted to those places. And they were state-funded, of course. What I'm hypothesizing is that these days art institutions are market-driven, hence their motivation is to generate profit, as opposed to educate a new generation of artists capable of producing high-art. Therefore, you cannot set the bar too high, otherwise you'll lose profits... everybody is welcome, just open your wallet please.

 

[tritosine2k]

"city games" on "big city platform" STEAM

Human intelligence 'peaked thousands of years ago and we've been on an intellectual and emotional decline ever since'
"controversial hypothesis of a leading geneticist who believes that the immense capacity of the human brain to learn new tricks is under attack from an array of genetic mutations that have accumulated since people started living in cities a few thousand years ago."

 

[Norfleet]

I would say that humans are undergoing a process of speciation, where we will eventually split off between the dumb Eloi cattle and the Morlocks who eat them. PEAK human intelligence is clearly higher than it used to be, but the average is almost certainly way down as the average human no longer has to really use their brain to survive.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I read somewhere a study where they found that the average (standard) QI test scoring peaked around generations born in the '70s. After that it shows a decline. If I remember correctly the test was carried out in several years, sampling people from North Europe countries.

 

[luj1]

(post)modern game art is infantile because the artists who make them are infantile bad

fixed