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No, I'd say the pixel tax is a real thing. There is an attitude among many gamers and game producers that if a game doesn't have the latest and greatest definit
by korethr 10y ago
No, I'd say the pixel tax is a real thing. There is an attitude among many gamers and game producers that if a game doesn't have the latest and greatest definition of resolution, 3d graphics, high poly count, or latest-graphics-tech-buzzwords-du-jour, it isn't good, or at least, not as good as it could have been [1]. And I'm not making that up either. I used to hold that attitude myself. I recall back in middle school and high school thinking that as soon as I could afford the latest-and-greatest Pentium IIs and a 3d-accelerated graphics card instead of the old 486 I was suck with, then, and only then, would I finally be able to play modern games and experience True Fun. Until then, I would just have to bide my time and continue to try to be content with the now-irrelevant glories of yesteryear, like Doom 2, and Privateer.
Some years later, I realized that I'd logged as many hours in UT99 as I had in emulated playthoughs of Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger, not because the graphics of UT99 were amazeballs (which they were for their time), but because like Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger, UT99 was actually _fun to play_. But when I attempted convey that idea -- that perhaps graphics were not the sole driver of fun factor -- to a game dev who had moments before been bitching about the hacks his team had to do make 3d performant on the Playstation 2, he responded that nope, a game _has_ to be 3d, or it isn't any good.
Is that a silly attitude? Sure. But it still exists. And to dismiss the possibility of such an attitude I think misses the author's point that it is more important to focus on making the best game art one can in the medium to hand, than to focus on an art style that arose from past limitations over everything else.
1. http://andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-tech-arms-race-in-aaa-and-why-im.html http://andreaspapathanasis.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-tech-arm...
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI'm more on the Quake side of the Quake/UT split. Also, why did the dev have to pull crazy hacks to make 3d performant on the PS2? I mean, if he was trying for something particularly impressive, or xbox-level graphics, sure, but the PS2 was built for manipulating polygons. It was, in a very real sense, the last console that was so aggressively optimized for one use case.
- korethr 10y agoOh, I logged plenty of hours in Quake as well, Quake 2 especially, but not because OMG! Graphics! as I thought at the time, but because I was having fun. As for the game dev, I don't know, I didn't ask. I might be mis-remembering and he might have been bitching about the PS1 instead of the PS2. shrug
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYeah, I'm not so much a fan of Quake 2, but Quake 1 and Quake 3 were also actually really fun. And this is as somebody who wasn't alive in the 90's. While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either.
- korethr 10y ago>While we're discussing how high tech isn't required in a game, I feel the need to say that they aren't mutually exculsive, either. That's fair. I think part of the whole pixel art thing is a backlash against modern graphics tech, born of one-too-many experiences with a game that, while using the latest and greatest tech to achieve visually-stunning results, was no fun to play. Taken to the extreme, it can easily become a reverse-pixel-tax attitude: A game using modern graphics tech wont be fun, or at least, not as fun as it could have been. Such an attitude is as equally silly as a pixel-tax attitude, and I think part of what drove the the author to write the original article is realizing such.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoActually, literal cases the of the reverse pixel tax, while rare, is very visible: When you try to create a game that's technically impressive, or even one that's not especially so, and you don't have the time or technical chops to back it, you wind up in a bad situation: Assassin's Creed: Unity would have been the mess it was without this, but the attempt to be technically impressive and up the crowds just made the problems worse, and further highlighted the embarassing pop-in, and embarrasing problems prior games never had. Meanwhile, the latest Call of Duty makes a hojillion dollars, still running on a heavily modified Quake 3 engine, with relatively unimpressive graphics for its time. Meanwhile meanwhile, Valve makes another smash hit, still running off of a heavily modified Quake 1 engine.