Factual, so sick of modern graphics >yes our game is 106 Tittybytes large but just hear me out >everything looks like plastic, shadows are calculated in real time, god rays, and you can see the pores on your guy's face >and all you're giving up is any sense of stylization or distinct art styles between IPs :^) Maybe this is a boomer take but I think video games should be small and look a little shitty. If a game looks too good that's actually a red flag for me, I wanna see some polygons. Usually the issue with games that look too good is they tend to be overdesigned, like in a game like Manhunt vs Forespoken, right, they're both set (at least in the beginning, in the case of Forespoken) in urban slums, but the vibe is way different. Forespoken obviously looks way better, but Manhunt is more soulful in its presentation and I feel sells the atmosphere better, because it couldn't afford to be 8 million gorillabytes large and waste space on useless bullshit. So every piece of garbage on the ground, every car, every street sign, is placed intentionally to add to the atmosphere. Working within your boundaries and all that. It's also an issue of the culture surrounding development methinks. While it's obviously good that nobody feels unwelcome in a dev team for their demographic or whatever, I feel that the push for diversification has kinda killed character design. The chick from Forespoken is so lame and forgettable and it's because she feels like a checklist. I have no issue with her being black or a woman, but when it feels like she's those things just so the game can be like "look how progressive we are :^)" it makes me not like her, especially because she's written like shit on top of it. Feels pandering. Sorry for the tangent but video games used to have coherent art styles and cool protagonists >inb4 so by "cool protagonists" you mean white men? le checkmate... nyo. the chick from Mirror's Edge is an Asian lady and she's cool. What I'm trying to get at is there's this very millennial (I assume) rejection of traditional film elements in character design. I'm a fan of the idea that not every protag needs to be a supermodel tier action movie hero, and that ordinary people tend to look boring, but come on. Give me an original IP in the last like 5 years with a genuinely cool protagonist design. Fuck it, even a cool enemy design. You can't, and if you can, I've probably never heard of it, because shit is so atomized now that my feed is totally different from yours. Ted K was right about technology.
Anyways, what I'm trying to contrast it with is the development office of ye olden days, when game devs were more like groups of friends fucking around trying to make something cool than slaves to the publisher trying to churn out the most commercially viable product possible. That's why shit like cheat codes and easter eggs are things of the past btw. When the publisher gods have 8 other games coming down the slop tube you need to work on one after another, you don't have time to put stupid shit into your game. At least, that's what I assume the case is for devs these days.
Sad, truly. I just want all publishers ever to explode into gore and bones right now, and let devs be devs, work on games more slowly, make them smaller and with more heart.
Side note but I'm equally sick of muh Dave Szymanski ps2 era graphics horror/boomshoot game. It feels so facetious, like somebody went "Oh? You're sick of mass produced, 8 billion polygon slop? I've got just the thing for you: Mass produced, 300 polygon slop meant to prey on your nostalgia! Buy, buy, buy!"
