I'm asking more from a design standpoint than a technical one because it seems like they had everything down two (three?) generations ago. They were able to make games that had a great amount of aesthetic appeal, the character models actually did look like what the artists imagined and real enough that they didn't have to comprise much, and the sheer scope and feats they were able to do with some titles made it seem like there was some forbidden magic at work.
this is the work of the first generation of graduates with the video game design degree from modern (((universities)))
Christian Watson
>Final Fantasy XV on XB1, PS4, and PC >Zelda: BOTW on Wii U and Switch >Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii and New 3DS
Jacob Anderson
Art direction helps a lot. Most games today use a very washed out palette and go for the gritty realism approach.
Leo Price
Still cherry-picking.
Xavier Campbell
Budget wasted hiring commies
Ryan Thomas
FFXV is muddy as shit and I agree overall, BOTW looks good in that screenshot, that's a really weird angle and a really weird place to take the screenshot in Xenoblade. You're 1 for 3, I guess, but what's your point? I'm not getting it.
Robert Taylor
Quota hirings.
Lincoln Sanchez
Technical expertises cannot make up for terrible art styles.
Owen Green
A lot of it is the overuse of filtering effects, especially when they use them to disguise laziness.
For example, the Hydroponics deck in Dead Space is supposed to have contaminated air, and it's full of these floating, dusty little Necromorph particles. Disable post processing, and these vanish, because it's just a filter, not actual particles.
Matthew Bennett
You cunts are retarded
Here's a good example of good current graphics, MGSV, where the detail isn't painted into the texture, now fucking kill yourselves.
Jace Barnes
Who knows, maybe it's just plain artistic incompetence, maybe it's a lack of passion. Fifteen years ago Team Silent (among other people) were working with some pretty cutting-edge techniques, for console games anyway. If I were working on games I'd be a hell of a lot more excited to be using a new technology to implement some traditionally-choreographed action scenes instead of using a new technology to render a realistically ugly nigger.
Noah Clark
It's like poetry, it rhymes.
Eli Howard
In the old days, people who made video games often had a strong background in computer science, engineering, literature, traditional art or music. They were truly a disparate bunch of genuinely inspired weirdos. This meant that while quality was uneven as hell, there was still a measure of true artistic vision and technical effort that shone through the roughness, and the few titles with bigger budgets and larger teams could invest in extra "polish" that would almost always make a real, noticeable difference in game quality and aesthetics. Games were diamonds in the rough. Now game creation is dominated by marketers, shekel-grubbing hucksters, gender-studies majors, rejects who couldn't succeed in movies or writing, and fake geek posers. Plus, formal arts education has gone to complete shit with little to no emphasis on classical technique. Design is done by committee and focus groups to target lowest common denominator audiences, selling soley on the sheer force of advertising. Games are now mostly just a bunch of shiny polished turds, and the few gems that still follow the old ways are comparatively rare and obscure.
Xavier Collins
I think that the real problem is lightning and not graphics, just look at FEAR and Condemned, they have average graphics but the games looks fantastic thanks for the lighting and level design
Joseph Miller
Wat? FEAR level design is its weak link btw
Elijah Clark
I think most of why old games were better is because the devs saw them as subsitutes to tabletop games, while now it's treated like a trend, and an expensive one at it. Luckily, trends die.
David Peterson
I thought i was the only one having played that. If the original God of War wasn't so damn good it would be the best spartan beat em up there is.
Blake Reed
Team Silent knew how to work within the limitations of a console.
The SH games had a very short draw distance that was hidden behind fog (said fog was missing in the HD collection which made the draw distance painfully obvious); not having to render a huge environment allowed them to put a lot more detail into the character models.
Hunter James
How did anyone think that was acceptable?
Anthony Sanders
the use of fog was pretty common back in the day
Blake Wilson
Tomm Hulett, the self-proclaimed walking talking Silent Hill bible, thought it was acceptable and Konami couldn't give two shits about the quality of their products
Ryan Cook
People specifically go to school for and focus their education on learning how to make video games now, as opposed to being otherwise talented people (artists, programmers, writers, etc.) who studied actual subjects in college - academically or otherwise; it's hard to overstate the importance of tabletop gaming in the history of the vidya industry - and were generally good enough to work in other industries but who happened to end up making video games. The result is lots of games being made twentysomethings with no sense of aesthetic or tabletop experience or really any grounding in any relevant field of interest except what big publishers want games to be. People who don't really remember anything earlier than the 7th generation are THIS YEAR going to vidya school even graduating vidya school and getting their first job working for someone like EA or TakeTwo.
The influence of consoles also bears mentioning, however. Many games are designed to be either console-friendly or just designed outright for consoles, and many idort games (TW3, MGSV, etc.) are gimped to shit for no real reason other then publishers demanding "console parity" which means that if the PC version looks and plays leaps and bounds better than the console versions then someone is getting in big trouble for embarrassing Microsoft and/or Sony. This was not always the case, as people expected PC games to walk all over console versions.
Nathaniel Butler
You have brain damage.
Carter Thomas
Think of it like this. Back in the day, nobody actually considered graphics cards for PC gaming, it was all about processing power and art programs came first. Gaming was truly the last thing on anyone's minds. 2D acceleration and attaching all kinds of gizmos and dodads to simulate 3D were all the rage. If you wanted low cost 3D, you got a console to game on because real 3D was the fucking American Dream for a while. Eventually, it became the "L337 meme" to sell to the basic consumer when the high end consumers wised the fuck up and realized they were being scammed by ATI, Panisonic,etc.
Charles Richardson
Reminder that he was so butthurt he made twin perfect canon bad guys in the SH lore.
Ryder Scott
user, it's about time you brought out your pics of games that don't 1. look brown and 2. don't look like shit aesthetically.
Jackson Sanders
That must have been after they kicked Steve out, and before they brought him back. He was really the only person at the company who actually had ideas.
Dylan Howard
Looks good to me.
Luis Rivera
Well OP, you fucking gay, 3D graphics used to require a lot of artistic talent to make because they were limited. You had to be gifted to make 100 polygons look good, let alone make them look like anything. So your artists tended to be skilled. As 3D graphics capabilities advanced and got less limited, the less artistic talent it took to make them. Now you don't need any artistic talent to shit out 3D graphics.
Easton Ramirez
That looks like trash
Alexander Kelly
Are you afraid of bugs?
Logan Wood
Made by Millennials that are too busy shitting their diapers to make games.
Brody Morgan
Like this?
Jaxson Collins
I more wonder why animation has gotten worse than like a decade ago, especially facial animation seems somehow more robotic and stiff these days. I guess it's the advent of mo-cap everything and rushed development not allowing for decent cleanup.
Jace Howard
I want to laugh but I'm also sick to my stomach.
Ryan Hernandez
What really pisses me off is this pixel art retro shit, it looks stupid and you are trying to bank only on the fact that a bunch of rose glasses wearing neckbeards will gobble that shit up, meanwhile you are just too lazy to actually do some artwork.
Noah Jackson
It's because deep down inside you know it to be true
Leo Gomez
LIBERALS DO NOT BELIEVE IN OBJECTIVE BEAUTY. Orwell and Huxley both predicted a dystopia, but their visions differed. In Orwell’s, grave injustices and the burning of books were carried out to hide the truth from the population–to keep them sedated and under control. But in Huxley’s, the world was the way it was because the people changed it to be that way. It was the future they chose, not the war they lost. Orwell’s dystopia is based on the great lie of the elite few–a tyranny that is enforced. Huxley’s is based on the sweeping ignorance of the many–an apathy that is accepted. And of the two of them, only one is likely to come to pass. You don’t win by hiding the truth, because the truth will always eventually come out in the end. They are not going to destroy art because it is evil or wrong. Oh, no. They couldn’t get away with it if they tried. What’s going to happen is the destruction of existing art will become known as art. Artists will take hammers to David and lighters to the oils of Rembrandt and Van Gogh and they will call the ashes and rubble “neomodern artistic expression.” Beauty itself will become a sin in a world that pretends that sins are silly, an evil in a world that claims there is no such thing as good or evil. Light itself will become a taboo because that which lives in the dark does not want to see its own face and works–to know its own inadequacies. You are seeing this already, are you not? Look around you–at the things that people are saying and doing. Really look and really listen to what they are trying to tell you. Ugly people should become models. Shit in a can and stacks of bricks on a toilet seat are valid art. It’s okay if buildings and architecture are function-only with no form or beauty. Square monoliths of concrete, boxes of glass, and scars of asphalt are acceptable. We don’t need trees and grass and flowers; we don’t need curves and stone and color. Tear down that hundred year old oak and put up a billboard about environmentalism awareness in its place. Bulldoze over those wooden pubs and family-owned farmers markets to make way for a supermarket made of concrete bricks painted grey. Big Brother isn’t born because he is forced upon the unwilling. He is born because the shortsighted demand security in exchange for their freedoms. His presence is asked for, not invited in. Do you want the whole world to be a giant box of concrete, glass, and steel? Do you want art to mean nothing? For the “artist” to simply be someone who promotes themselves as an image or a brand, like a company trying to sell you hair dye or penis enhancement pills? Gamergate started a fight for ethics in gaming journalism. If it survives long enough, it will become one side in a war for beauty and western civilization itself.
Gabriel Adams
0/10 You're not even trying.
Jeremiah Gomez
That actually spooked me somehow.
Chase Wright
For the first time in about 15 years, they're actually caring about graphics again. The problem is that they're only caring on the developer end right now. Hopefully their next string of consumer products will bring their old graphics standards back (read: they used to release the best card in the industry cheaper than anyone else). On the portable end, they already have the best in the industry. They'll be rivaling the 360 soon.
Jonathan Garcia
I think we might have plateau'd when it comes to game graphics.
Jose Perez
Looks like a shitty flash game from newgrounds
Jacob Johnson
...
Christopher Foster
...
James Reed
(checked) dubs confirm you're a faggot
Jacob Hughes
Having played BOTW on my sister's switch, the game has a good artstyle, but technically is nothing special. A lot was sacrificed for the purpose of increasing render distance. Then again, I guess it is rather graphically impressive for a handheld game.
Anthony Miller
...
Hunter Watson
Thats just plain misunderstanding. Like I imagine he played it but was expecting a traditional experience for our time with jump scares and panic inducing moments. SH3 did have that kind of horror but it was much more tame and bolstered with its fantastic enemy design and atmosphere.
Easton Davis
Stop pretending to be smart by posting this fucking image. Both were written in the 20th century, and both made predictions that turned out to be true, although the cctv technology that we see around us today was predicted solely by orwell. The guy that made this image was desperately trying to be clever, without actually realising why or how 1984 is relevant to today's society, without actually studying its relevance to our society today.
Jace Ortiz
...
Ian Roberts
In truth, Huxley's dystopia is just fellatio for Orwell's dystopia. 1984 will come yet.
Jordan Rogers
So basically you're saying that both sides are a little bit right? Pic related, is you :^) In case it wasn't obvious enough, this is pure shitposting, don't turn it into a fucking Holla Forums derail
Elijah Smith
uncharted 4 and horizon zero dawn look better than any games ever made to this point.
Charles Collins
Yes, the image you posted is wrong. Fuck off, you cocksucking liberal. The OP of the thread is inherently political.
Gabriel Morris
Please tell me that's just clever naming and not actually real. That shit is disgusting.
We live in a timeline that plays by both rulebooks. The two worlds are quickly turning into the same dystopian nightmare, where figureheads lie about what matters before waving it off as unimportant and then raving about the most recent celebrity gossip. People are slowly turning against the machine that has distracted them for so long, only to find that all-powerful figureheads, backed by major industrial-federal organizations are now all but openly threatening them to keep their mouths shut.
They've financed false protests to create falsified consensus in order to push agendas, both in politics and in entertainment. They generate outrage and hatred to fuel imaginary feuds that allow them to consume our news streams with wave after wave of divisive rhetoric, boiling everything down to the lowest common denominator:
Everything in our world is so black and white that we are constantly told to pick a side. There's no middle-ground, no room for open discussion or reasoned debate. You MUST pick a side: failure to do so or failure to agree with my point of view makes you literally worse than the most genocidal madman in the history of genocide. It doesn't matter if you have facts or evidence to back up your opinions, feelings are too important to ignore.
People in this worldwide society we live in have been told everything they want us to hear, to make us believe everything is okay when things are only getting worse. It's happened before numerous times throughout history, and now it's synchronized on a worldwide scale; eventually, telling lies to cover up your lies catches up to you, and using lies to control a society only works for so long.
They can't lie forever. Eventually, they will openly threaten people. When they do, they will be forced to either fight back, capitulate, or find a new tactic of subversion. People will wake up from this dream they're living, whether they want to or not; the question becomes, what will it take for the populace to snap awake?
Polite sage because not video games.
Ayden Carter
Because better hardware does not suddenly make you a good game developer.
/thread
Owen Mitchell
What?
Blake Jones
Fucking summerfags
Carter Torres
fuck off shill
you forgot
Xavier Lee
Because it's important to focus resources in things that actually matter, like more inclusive games, full of diversity and empowering for the oppressed minorities.
I mean, it's 2017
Joshua Peterson
Mein Nigger The premise is eerily similar too Wish I could replay this and Shadow of Rome. Those gladiatorial battles were the shit. Also
Ryder Gonzalez
Oh but that's where you are wrong. If you terrorize population to the point where literally the only one who can openly speak about objective truth is a raving lunatic, you, or the elite have won.
China and the great leap forward followed by immediately by the great famine is a prime example of that. People/slaves were reduced to cannibalism but the only ones that were allowed to speak objective truth were those that were deemed to be complete lunatics, meaning that any sort of punishment would have been completely pointless.
Ryder Nguyen
...
Jose Jenkins
Fuck you, buddy
Zachary Ross
Yeah, you’re not fooling anyone. Fuck off.
Brutalism is the removal of all fluidity, naturality, and external beauty. Brutalism is the gutting of architecture to “box which performs task”, which is honestly the most communist thing I can imagine. Art deco looked at Victorian excess and said, “Right, that’s wasteful. How do we pare this back while still focusing on an ideological message in our artwork?” Brutalism is art deco without the message. What good is it to anyone except an ant cowering under the boot of uniformity?
Grayson Hill
If it takes HD remasters to do this, I'm fucking okay with it.
Wyatt Harris
I bet you dont even fap to floor tiles.
Thomas Carter
I think the problem is that there's very little focus on artistic direction and unison, and more on hitting specific, boring standards. No-one in AAA wants to experiment, which is why we have hundreds of games that look like TF2.
Brutalism looks cool, but I'd never want to live near that kind of place. It's kind of like the appeal of post-apocalyptic settings.
Carter Martin
That's bullshit. If Apple really cared about graphics performance, they would update their aging drivers to support OpenGL 4.5 and add Vulkan support. They tried locking developers into their own platform with Metal, but that backfired and now porting companies and vidya developers are focusing on Linux instead.
Liam Smith
1/3/4/5 look like a bunch of awful dystopian prisons, and 2 looks like some generic government building for one oppressive agency or another. Brutalism is shit, and you should fuck off with that eye-rape.
Ethan Hughes
There is nothing inherently wrong with a washed out colour palette, pic related is a recent game which has what you described yet it didn't feel bad because of the effort put into the general setting made it feel natural rather than forced or a cover for lazy design.
Carson Evans
I do actually agree with OP to a point, actually. I've noticed this a lot, especially with hair. For some reason, hair has looked really shit recently. It just doesn't look natural. It's like it goes into uncanny valley somehow, despite it just being hair.
Bentley Lopez
Please tell me this is really a biofag dev. I want to believe they're this mentally ill.
Samuel Hernandez
That’s because while we finally have the modeling capability to render hair that looks correct, we don’t have the physics capability to make it BEHAVE correctly.
Anthony Ross
t-thanks doc
Jonathan Watson
lack of art direction
Luke Brooks
This is precisely why Brutalist architecture is so good. Hippie faggots cannot stand the sight of em and go into a "muh gubbamint oppression" bloodrage over it. Maybe these structures are more in line with what you would rather look at.
Colton Long
Jews in Europe hate brutalism, because it was the last time our architecture was imposing and had any honesty and integrity. Weirdly enough, Jews in Israel like it.
t. a Jew
Jackson Brown
ITT: Holla Forums discovers the uncanny valley.
The tech for rendering inorganic objects has gotten rediculously good, especially if we are talking about using photogrammetry in a properly set up studio, but for anything that lives and breathes our brains are hyper-turned to notice even the tiniest of flaws in their appearance. The closer you get to being real, the deeper into the valley you go.
Also yeah there are devs out there that cannot into art or generally fuck up by making everything way too goddamn glossy.
Robert Morales
Hyper-tuned* Fucking autocorrect
Nathan Rogers
Wow thanks, I've never ever heard of the uncanny valley before. Thanks for bringing this totally new information forward user, your contributions are valued.
Luke Fisher
The Germans knew how to make some fucking formidable structures, that's for sure.
Lincoln Nguyen
I don't have any images, I don't have my computer, I have the MGSV models and textures on my PC, but that picture is retarded, artists didn't across the wire get lazy, games moved to lighting engines where that detail doesn't belong in the albedo/diffuse texture, and they indeed do look better. HZD being ugly is just the HZD developers being inept, I mean hell HZD is their best game in well over a decade, and it's still shit.
The character faces are a good example of good art direction, main characters only.
Andrew Flores
With the first part here you pretty much hit the nail on the head 100%. Back then we were dealing with people that studied specifically in their field, you could say specialized, as opposed to people who just get a broad education in game making and don't have a specific strong skill.
Gavin Smith
Nothing in 1984 has come true you knob. And CCTV already existed, it wasn't a prediction.
Jace Hernandez
Becouse of the diversity and ideology hires? The giant studios don't care about your competence. Just your skin colour, love of dick and Marx.
Aaron Martinez
I don't think that video is. However there are a few known diaperfags working at Bioware
Honestly I don't give a fuck about graphics. What bothers me is the shitty gamplay and shitty story the liberal developer is going to force people to tolerate if they play their shit game. Graphics is for faggots.