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Comments
Apparently this is wrong? (I'm as surprised as anybody)
Well, the first part, not so sure about the second.
How important?
Yeah, what happened to Glowsquid anyway? I haven't seen him around lately.
^ Yeah, I mean, Super Mario Bros. is a definite graphical improvement over E.T..
Baldur's Gate get.
Wait, the enhanced edition? I hear it's a buggy mess, especially compared to the original still available for half the price and with robust modding.
Also, Cogs complete. 580 stars, I am officially a master mechanic.
Now fix my car.
If it works on steam pipes and gears mounted on sliding tiles, I'm all over that shit.
Depending on what you interpret graphics as, it goes from "depends on the game" to "absolutely integral".
I acknowledge that graphics are important, as long as it limited to meaning the characters and environment don't look creepishly blocky and there's effort put into the game design so that it meshes with everything else.
Again, it depends on what you mean when you say graphics. Even if you just assume it means the polygon count or "graphic capacity" (to be less specific), they are still pretty important for certain games. Shadow of the Colossus' amazing cinematic feel was in no small part thanks to it having quite possibly the best graphics the PS2 could provide, likewise Odin Sphere's graphics are a significant part of its appeal (and yes, Odin's Sphere graphics count as high end, or at least, they did when they came out). "Better graphics" make a variety of game experiences more viable/at all viable.
And that's just the narrowest interpretation, if you take them to mean "visual aesthetics" then they (obviously) become much more important.
In short, graphical fidelity defines how much visual information can be displayed in a game and how subtle it can be.
My Skyrim unfucked itself, and I can finally finish the Civil War questline.
=D
Anyone else feel that some of the pixelated retro-style stuff today isn't good and feels cheap?
As opposed to actually good pixel art, such as in, say, Final Fantasy VI, Castlevania, or Terraria.
Well, some of the regular super high def and realistic stuff sucks too, so there you go.
I won't say that it being pixelated and retro is what makes it sucky.
I absolutely feel that way. A lot of indie devs seem to be using a form of pixel art that's more stand-in than actually aesthetically pleasing. If you look at a lot of SNES-era 2D games, you'll find that pixel artists used every tool they could to add depth, interest and aesthetic appeal to their sprites and environments. For instance, a lot of indie game 2D sprites lack shading; SNES-era sprites would often use different shades of the same colour on surfaces to imitate the effect of light brightening some parts of a surface more than others.
Hell, even NES-era games did this, especially with environments. And it brought a sense of depth and space, even to primitive 80s-era games. With this shading technique, objects aren't simply there -- they emerge from and into the overall presentation of the game, so there's a sense that these objects occupy a little more than two dimensions. It's only the illusion of a third dimension, of course, but it provides an opportunity for pixel artists to show their stuff and get a little creative with the visual relationship between objects.
I think part of the reason they did that back then was because they were REALLY FUCKING DETERMINED to use all the tools possible to make it look at good as it can.
While the indie devs now want it to just look crappy.
My view on Graphics:
They're extremely important, because without them, there are things you can't do, and games should look good unless there's a compelling reason why that particular game shouldn't.
But. They aren't the game. And if a game tries to sell itself on graphical quality alone, it is a bad game.
And furthermore, developers need to stop conflating photorealism with aesthetic quality.
Then those indie devs are absolute idiots. The opportunities that come with 2D pixel art are very different to those that come with 3D textures. They're just handled different ways, and that section of indie devs that are half-assing it with sprites that look like they belong from an era before the NES was a thing obviously don't understand how good sprite art works.
When I was around 10, I discovered RPG Maker. In the long run, it was a pretty big deal because it implicitly encouraged me to customise the existing sprites or make new ones of my own, and I very quickly realised how to make additions consistent with the existing graphics. They obviously needed to come from the same essential palette, of course, but they needed to be shaded and shaped consistently with what existed.
Other users ended up creating their own chipsets and character sets from scratch, so if I wanted to build on those, then I'd have to learn how to make my additions consistent with them once again. It's honestly not a difficult process and you can bring a lot more out of your characters and environments with some basic knowledge of how to make your sprites. Just using darker shades for the recesses in objects and brighter ones for raised areas makes a world of difference. What's more, it's a fundamental technique of any kind of 2D art. Like, we're talking bottom-rung basics here.
The fact that so many indie devs are unwilling to apply even the most basic principles of art for the sake of their "aesthetic" paints a pretty dour picture of a certain segment of the indie dev community. I am convinced that the factors at play here are:
It's not aesthetic -- it's just laziness and lack of consideration.
Okay, since Nova pointed out the SotC thing above to me, I should add.
Graphics being a major part of a game is fine. They just can't be the only important part.
It's mostly this one. Programmers are notoriously bad at art, and most indie game devs are programmers first and foremost.
Well, and a lot of them are just bad at making games in general, but, well, that's to be expected.
There's being bad at art and there is having a square as your game's hero, main antagonist and NPC
What do you have against Pong?
Well, Pong was made in 1972 (I think), so that's excusable
There's something to be said for artistic minimalism, but it's not often pulled off.
1972, November 29th, to be precise. (For release, anyway)
The thing is, I don't think that's ever true. There's certainly games that fail in every department but the graphics one, and I'd definitely consider them to be bad games if that was the case, but I've never seen a game market itself on its graphics alone. The closest case I remember is Crysis, but I think that was more about the engine as a whole, not just the photorealism.
On an unrelated note, this episode of The Shield has the characters playing War of the Monsters. This fact makes it the best series ever made, objectively.
Last time I saw a movie that actually had recent game footage and not just Pac-Man sounds over the back side of a glowing TV, they were using the wrong system's controller and holding it wrong.
Holy shit that game existed?
I thought that was just a figment of my imagination. Or at best a muddied amalgamation of several other games.
And I just uncrated something called an Unusual Executioner (steaming) in Team Fortress 2. Is this the super rare item that the crate description was talking about? Is it worth anything?
I think that's an example of a super-rare item, yes.
sell it
acquire money from people with mixed-up life priorities.