Art styles that you missed

No. Throwing any old picture into a restricted palette looks like crap. Those are clearly designed around the limitations by having flat colours and selectively dithering parts for shading. #1 and #2 in particular are only 16 total colours but it's not at all obvious. They look really colourful and sharp.

Also as says you should pay attention to Doom engine games. That was able to use 256 different colours but unlike a VN it needs to be a one-size-fits-all. In addition to choosing the overall palette for the game's visuals and art, they use other tricks, such as different palettes for when you take damage (reddish tint) or get the radiation suit (greenish). There's also the selective remapping of colours to different ones within the same palette as is used for light diminishing, and invulnerability.

Two words: Visual clarity.

Based brown and bloom.

Not really an artstyle but I miss games with realistic real time lighting instead of washed out bloom shit with prebaked shadows.

Read this . The main reason why games lately have been shit. tl;dr they all use the same schema and template, those talentless lazy hacks who know nothing of colour science.

Its not about color science. Its a technical limitation by most engines and console hardware which can't deal with lighting.
When Monolith made FEAR, they used their inhouse engine to make it. Compare that to something like Bioshock Shitfinite which has an exponentially larger budget and longer development time but looks worse. Most AAA games nowadays don't even use Bump mapping and that is something which isn't even hardware intensive.

I miss the 90s.
Garish colors with sharp gradients and /fit/ characters.

I miss normal looking skin on characters. During the 6th generation of video games, they managed to perfect that characters look like people and starting with the 7th generations they began to fuck that up and gave us these muddy claydolls that all looks they had fallen in a jar of butter. Their inability to show organic matter in the right way is also the reason why gore doesn't work anymore in video games, it just looks like cheap halloween gags and silly putty.

my nigga

I love IWD 1/2's static environments. Ultra mad that I can't find high res versions.

Nowadays we get grimdark edgy shit that teenagers and GoT normalfags like. It's a cultural hype now because America is going to hell.

It will pass.

We'll never have a new XIII game based on the El Cascador arc.

I really like the eerie from the late 90's pre rendered graphics.

Check Slap Happy Rhythm Busters for the ps1
It got cell shading and similar aesthetics to those games.

What I rarely ever see is sci-fi or games to do with the future that are believable.

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I'm not sure what it's called, would it be pixel art or anime?
I don't have images, but it was just old dating sim art. Like anime aesthetics but drawn with pixels. But now its easier to draw shit and cheaper I guess. Shame because the old art had character. I only remember flash games but do dating sims still exist? It seems Persona, Rune Factory and primarily visual novels killed them off. Maybe it's nostalgia but I'm feeling comfy remembering nice art, calm music and a comfy atmosphere. But with more effort on my part than just reading a vn and making the occasional choice.
I'm sure anime will die soon too, 3d is easier and cheaper than hand drawn frames.

Neither of those things exist.

3D animation makes up a tiny minority of anime. Very trivial to ignore if you don't like it.

Well I certainly don't miss the hideous pre-rendered trash of isometric RPGs. The sad thing is that Western developers were developing pretty good artistic talent as Build and Doom engine games continued to roll out and 2D DOS games wore on, but as soon as threedee grafix became a major fad they completely lost all artistic ability.

Need I say more?

Ruiner, my dude.

Am I to assume that this is the best PC version has to offer? Would I actually get sharper models by upscaling it on GC/PS2 emulator?
Ultimate Spider-man has the same style and it's pretty good game to boot. Like a sequel to 2.

I miss early 2000's games set in urban environments with lots of intractability as well as games like Slave: Zero, Oni, The Suffering, AvP2000 and Shogo. There's something really tight about those games, nothing's floaty, everything controls 1:1. Games were just better back then.

He's talking about High Hell. Made by the same guy who had made Heavy Bullet.

I fucking love and miss this type of art.
To this day i havent seen someone do this shit good for vidya or even worst they just use 3D portraits on the characters like in NWN2

Satanism all but disappeared from bideogames. I guess developers want to be edgy without scaring any single christian mums.

A million times this. It's really lazy and ugly, and it makes it really hard to enjoy. I wouldn't mind 3D backgrounds with 2D sprites though, I'm surprised it's not done more.

I think it's simply that people got used to that shit and so it stopped being edgy

Yep, I miss that too. Just compare Dungeon Keeper vs Dungeons 3, Diablo vs Torchlight (or even Diablo III) etc. The aesthetic tone has changed quite a lot with most games trying to look more cartoonish and colorful but even some games that try to look dark and gritty doesn't look dark and gritty but kind of meh. A lot of the older games looks a bit too grim imo (especially PS1 games with their gritty textures) but I still prefer that over the current year style that just reminds me of Android apps somehow.

A lot of indie games on Steam have that cartoonish "app" look to them. Not only do I not like it but it somehow feels disingenuous too.

I agree with you user
There was Brandish, but unfortunately in game graphics used common 90's anime art insread of Jum Suemi's godlike art.

That's a really awesome cover user
But have you heard about MEGA FUCKING TURRICAN?

cries

I find old 90s CGI very charming for some reason.

There are currently at least two games on /agdg/ that are throwbacks to that style.

Agreed. 90's CGI is also very eerie if you ask me, but maybe that's just an uncanny valley thing.

That'd be ray tracing on low-detail models.

Disciples II

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you know how easy it is to make a webm of music with a static image is? Why are you so damn lazy? also Metzen is a shit tier armature artist

That got a solid giggle out of me.

Yup, the uncanny eerie feeling is somewhat nice.
It got a really unique charm to it.

I remember when people would tell me how both the cute, flat coloured designs (or any small "weird" japanese games for that matter) and anime could coexist in videogames, and it was true until the budgets for videogames got bloated somewhere around the mid 2000's, and now japan can only stand against the west by making kadokawablob trash. I understand, and i would ignore the big releases and just search for different jap stuff, but now even fucking comiket and other niche hobbyist doujinsoft devs won't touch the "kawaii" artstyle because of how popular anime is, so i guess my last bet for cute early 2000's japanese designs and non-mobileshit experimental gameplay is rhythm heaven, taiko and puyo puyo. Never trust someone who tells you two things can coexist in videogames.

Also

The only part of this post that I understood was the last sentence.

The best part is that those games were made in a very short amount of time with a ~5 team who coded with Assembly. I think better tools or the lack of limitations have limited creativity. You don't have people making smart decisions or solutions to showcase their vision, they just do it in the most unoptimized way possible.

I love you user

I miss it when games were actually scary rather than cheap aboga boga boga jump scares or cliche mass amounts of blood and gore. I remember as a kid getting the shit scared out of me by the stone golems loud walking noises and their loud death screams.

Those fuckers were pretty frightening to deal with, especially if your ammo was low and especially when you started with that paladin. biggest mistake when you first started playing it Hexen 2 was pretty moody and it had some frightening moments too, especially when you encounter werejaguars until you learn the exploit to deal with them

speaking of, the only 90's inspired magic-themed FPS I know today is only Ziggurat, and pretty much, it's probably the only one past 2010, unless someone knows others i've missed.

Thief and STALKER were scary too.

One thing that I have noticed is that there is rarely ever any post-apocalyptic middle-ages themed stuff

It's more likely that because entry has become so damn easy, you are flooded with shit devs and shit games, which skilled devs would need to compete against. The issue in that case is that competing is more than just making a higher quality product, it can be anything from networking to spending fuckhuge amounts of money to market a turd.

Never forget they purposely made the Valkyrie fat and ugly in the mediocre remake/re-imagining because it's the current year.

**Cuntlet 2
A hex-edited, X-rated copy of the MS-DOS version of gauntlet 2 circulated underground under the name Cuntlet 2. As well as an explicit title screen (liberating the the valkyrie of her constrictive loincloth), enemy sprites were changed (to predictably "hilarious" things like bums, dildos, and of course the Death Penis) and "IT" (the communicable monster-attractor) was tastefully renamed "AIDS." Instead of leaving behind a key ring upon character death, instead in your wake is left a wet puddle on the sheets.
Finally, the pedestrian Barbarian, Elf, Valkyrie, and Wizard found themselves renamed Adonis the Love God, Queer the Fag, Venus the Whore, and Moon Beam the Hippy, respectively.**

That's what I'm working on.

Elaborate.

far be it from me being a graphicsfag but there is something to be said whe the in game art rarely matched or held up to the art used in the covers of these games back then,fortunately the gameplay usually made up for that

posted an old webm using placeholder Hexen textures but I'm aiming for something that feels like Hexen with ARPG style item generation and skills.

You never had a chance, kid.

I've played through a few levels of Marathon lately, and I have to say it can get pretty spooky. The combination of the dark levels, mid music, and being mostly alone in a ship full of aliens can get to you. It's mostly the aliens in the robes that spook me though.

mein nigger

Hello fellow same search engine user.

Game's okay, but that really disappointed me.

I wish it'd let me save with the original filename right then and there instead of having to reload the image and god forbid open up the page it's on and then having to find it there.

Are you fucking me? I miss the contrast of dark tones with bright ethereal green lightning and shit so much. Why does no one like this anymore? Diablo 2 also still looks amazing to me.

Well you could have at least pretended into enjoy it….

Yeah, I realized how retarded that sentence structure was after I posted it.

I miss the old 3D style and the way people used to do engines. You could literally see the building pieces that the games were made off, not only did it always mean that the modding was easier every single time but also the games just looked better. No matter whether dark or light, late 90's-early 2000's 3D could fit for both darker stuff, cute animu stuff and anything in between.

Isn't this pretty much why FNAFs was so popular? Beyond streamers/YouTubers that is. Creepy horror game utilizing creepy 90s-style pre-rendered CG.

I miss beautiful, colorful sprite art.
It has a very timeless beauty to it, and certainly ages well than 3Dshit does. Seems like proper sprite art is a lost art anymore.

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Download Death Rally right the fuck now. It'll ease the pain.

There's a certain art style thingy going on with many Amiga platformers, the way they do the trees, the grass and the dirt underneath it.

What's this artstyle called? Prerendered + prerendered sprites?

I think it still holds up amazingly well. The only modern game I've seen use this style is Slain but it's kind of shitty.

Cel Shading did look better 8n the low poly days. Few games pull it off well anymore, and the ones that do have had to engineer special ways of makinf it look great, like Guilty Gear Xrd

Jesus christ, how the fuck did somebody manage to mangle the graphics that badly?

I miss the days where they clearly used a 3D model but everything is 2D and the 3D models gave you the perception of depth.

See webm related.

Wasn't there some rpg that was basically a former high tech society collapsed but its stuff is still around? Like people built towns like medieval Europe but there were robots and guns and skyscrapers and shit? I know I played the demo for it but I don't remember the name.

You'll enjoy watching this then.

yess

Kenshi sorta fits the bill there. It looks post-apocalyptic, but it's actually post-collapse in a world that managed to invent sentient robots by all appearances, they were involved in causing at least one collapse but never got around to inventing guns.

The first time I played it, I zoomed in closely because there were some weird stick-like plants in the terrain. Took me a second to realize that it was actually rebar.

It also does an excellent job of showing, not telling. The world is littered with things that give you an idea of how it all went to shit, but I've only ever found once NPC that actually said anything about the collapse.

It's much more feudal Asia in appearance than European middle ages, but still, it's there.

I miss FMV. Sure, it always looked crappy, but that crappiness gave it a certain charm that I don't think could be replicated with modern tech.

gas me.

Just use shitty encoding on live-action cutscenes?

I miss the Xbox 360 era that I grew up with.

Stasis, but that's an adventur game, not an RPG

why?

VIDYA AKBAR

I really like the aesthetics of Disciples III. I never played other games in the series and never really finished this one but I really enjoyed the art and the music of the game. And the rhythmed cutscenes are pretty neat too.

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Check out RetroQuad. Pretty amazing stuff for a software rendering.

This fact isn't well known in the west but the song in your embed is actually Syria's national anthem.

Every post on 8/v/ ever

If you were born after 1989, I think you should leave. That should be a rule.

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"Better play it safe and not push back the limit too much - uh, what do you mean I just outed myself"

Outed myself as what?

I miss when games were made by fucking edgy geeks who would quote Blade Runner and Evil Dead instead of by NuMales whose favorite piece of media is Star Wars.and Lord of the Rings.

Born in 95, my first console was a Mega Drive
Only had a PS1 in 2000
PS2 only in 2004
Played on PC since 1999
Had older friends which played shit like Doom and CS.
Had one which only had his dads old DOS
My country is mediterranean, but we're slav tier

Fantasy games are always rated T now because jews need as much $$$ as possible, but I agree that fantasy settings that are basically horror with the amount of horrible shit in it is pretty sweet.

Not really because they can't/don't dare to, but more because the technology advanced so far that competent people don't bother anymore.
TA actually rendered 3D models down to paletted 8-bit sprites at runtime. And it was beautiful, just look at these crisp explosions. Everything is bland and blurred nowadays.

That word lost all meaning thanks to normalfags

Far out dude

I miss low-poly models with semi-realistic semi-cartoony textures that were in games in around beginning of 00's. They're just so simple yet so charming and expressive.

Let this overdesigned, cluttered, cartoony-like style fucking die finally. I hate it so much.

Thats all you're going to get from Blizzard now.
Since World of Warcraft and after that LoL normalfags love it.

I still haven't played Blood because it runs like shit on my machine.

what game is it? loks like some kind of parody

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It's some /agdg/ guy's attempt at a diablo clone. I'm fairly sure these are all placeholder graphics.

The neat thing about these old games is that many aren't even directly focused on horror elements but rather it becomes a byproduct of the gameplay & the atmosphere that sort of just builds on as you keep playing. I still get jump scares in SS2 from those fucking exploding androids and don't even get me started on those cyborg midwifes. As much as I like newer games like dead space 2 for the gameplay those constant scripted jumpscares that always end up with some monster throwing itself straight at your screen gets old really fast.

Are there any good High Fantasy/Dark Fantasy games for the PS1?

Hell was weird.

Started playing games in 1998.

I think the difference was that games back then were played and created by basement dwelling nerds and other social outcasts.

I miss simplistic and practical designs for Japanese games. I really liked the styles of a lot of games during the ps1 era.

That remake of Baroque that they did for the PS2/Wii didn't turn out too bad. Not good, but not bad…

Only because there's a renaissance of hand drawn animation in the industry again. During 2007-2012, a lot of anime series incorporated CG even if it didn't truly need it.

Contemporary games don't use colors right.

Agreed fellow goon, I miss when jap games were for mature gamers such as myself.

Why are the people who get overly sentimental and nostalgic about MUH 90S ANIMU make it obvious they know fuck all about it?

It's a mix, really. Both a serious attempt at a Diablo clone and a parody. I called it Beelzebox.

beelzebox.net/
you can try a prototype if you want

I want to make a throwback to the original Diablo, with its slower, methodical gameplay, a darker atmosphere (grotesque gore/blood/lighting/religious themes) than modern ARPGs and more emphasis on classless spells. I wish to emulate the art style OP misses.

But at the same time I want the game to be a bit more lighthearted - with the cartoonish characters and ridiculous names for loot and monsters. Every monster has a unique name, even the smallest mooks, for example. And the players are supposed to know at a glance that an item is better because it has a longer name.

The characters will likely remain shaped like the ones you already see, but I plan to base the final models on clay "puppets"- a bit like the legend about Diablo 1 says)

that one item just flying on the screen cracks me up more. it's a bug - items are not supposed to appear out of nowhere either.

I'll allow myself to repost a recent .mp4 with examples of various randomly generated maces as well as art from an artist frequenting /agdg/

Don't be retarded, there's a big difference between japanese bashing and disliking waifushit. What you're doing is just weebsignaling.

Yeah, i'm glad japan got a pause from EXCLUSIVELY making anime games in the 5th and 6th gen.

rofl what

You mean the "style" that makes everything objectively look like shit?

You know why that shit's gone? Because it's a believable human future that they want to stop you from reaching. It's [current year]. By all rights, we should have space travel, flying cars, space colonies, nanomachines, and what do we have instead? Mentally ill men dressed as female demons reading stories to children in schools.

That's not cel shading. That's colored lighting with a far too powerful sharpen filter.

It was probably a piss-por lazy port. Japs are notoriously terrible at making games for the PC. Have you forgotten the disgrace that was the original Dork Souls, or MGS1/2 having keyboard-only controls?

>not realizing they don't want to show satanic shit in a negative light for reasons that are obvious if you're paying attention

It'll never come back. Having to hand-draw every single frame of animation or go lazy-FinalFantasy-style and have all the enemies just stand in place isn't desired by anyone.

Same as above. That was something done at the time for technological limitations, computers/consoles that couldn't handle that many actual 3D models at once, certainly not at the poly count and level of detail shown, so they screencapped it and ran it as a series of sprites. It's not going to come back. Nobody wants to model, texture, and animate a 3D model, then turn around and screencap every animation frame into sprites just for nostalgia bait. Not profitable, neither financially nor return on investment for amount of work required.

Easy replication, but just like above, why? Who would do that? Lot of added effort for no reward when you could do the same thing and just make it look good.

A lot of fantasy games were T back then too. T was just more accepting of harsher things because logically same age rating as PG-13 movies should mean you can have blood and the curse word "shit". See: StarCraft.

I can't wait for 2026 Holla Forums to start talking about fucking Call of Duty or something and claiming the photorealistic mocap pre-rendered cutscenes were an "art style".

If I'm playing as a neckless lump of clay, it will be hard to believe I can defend myself, much less engage in combat.

I like the old primitively-Photoshopped prerendered stuff in the late 90's.

Have you tried the sourceport thingy? Its certainly not perfect, but it is better than nothing.
m210.duke4.net/

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Holy fuck you are retarded. There have always been automated methods of rendering a batch of sprites for the animations and camera angles involved. It's not a fucking "screencap" and you don't do that shit by hand.

I played the prototype. It's fun but the number of bodies piling up gets ridiculous after a while. And you should start working on environments. I see the Diablo atmosphere you are going for but the game will need levels and assets to look Diabloesque as well.

And the ambient music is creepy.

Am I the only person who liked the low-poly with no outlines aesthetic?

Are there any good websites showing off 1990's art with this aesthetic?

fuck that temple in IWD2. Triggers me to this day.

Hey it's your art guy, sorry I didn't update you yet I got caught up with doing my university work it has me animating with my built set and 2D frame by frame animation so it's time consuming. Deadline is this Wednesday 12pm so after that I'm free to keep working on it, glad to go back to doing it this shits killing me.