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I'm really hoping that Zelda/Switch are successful enough to push game aesthetics in a better direction. This headlong plunge into the uncanny valley is just go

I'm really hoping that Zelda/Switch are successful enough to push game aesthetics in a better direction. This headlong plunge into the uncanny valley is just gonna lead us to the same dead end that art found itself at the end of the 19th century. No one cares about the bad aesthetics of Orientalist painting any more, and this era of hyperreal titilation is gonna meet the same fate in retrospect.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
I think the best example of this is Doom 3. It looked incredible at the time (even on the Xbox on release in 2005), but it has not aged well. Maybe today's games hold up better, but photorealism is always gonna be competing with tomorrow. On the other hand, BotW has framerate drops and limitations on the Switch and it was designed for a console that was underpowered five years ago, which doesn't bode well.
- excalibur 10y ago
  The 2005 Doom was a movie.... [EDIT: Yes I know the post above has been edited to fix/clarify, no I can't delete this post.]
  - freehunter 10y ago
    They likely meant the one that came out in late 2004, Doom 3.
    - mynameisvlad 10y ago
      Which actually did come out in 2005 for the Xbox, according to the Wikipedia article for it.
- simplicio 10y ago
  World of WarCraft is probably the best example of this effect. If they'd gone for realism, the game would've looked dated within a year or two, and had its popularity drop a lot faster. But the cartoony style let them keep going with just minor updates to the graphics for more than a decade. That decision must've made them at least a billion dollars over the last 10 or so years.
  - TheGRS 10y ago
    While I kind of think WoW looks pretty dated these days I would otherwise agree. When WoW was released it was alongside Everquest 2, which was poised to be the next big thing with realistic graphics and a name everyone recognized in MMOs (though people certainly recognized Warcraft as well). I would be surprised if anyone even really remembers Everquest 2 at this point, but for a good year or so we talked about which one would win out. WoW beat it and proceeded to beat every MMO record ever by several orders of magnitude.
    - timje1 10y ago
      I played both, and I remember talking loudly and often about how much better WoW looked despite having a fraction of the system reqs. WoW vanilla could be run on a potato - I think I had it going on a pentium 2 with a third hand graphics card...
- WillPostForFood 10y ago
  I agree about the problems of pursuing photorealism, but I think Doom 3 actually holds up well, particularly the lighting and environments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mn_fJlmbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mn_fJlmbo
- timje1 10y ago
  I remember thinking at the time "wow, the characters look like ass". I think the character models look worse than Final Fantasy X, which was a game with good art direction and miniscule polycount that came out in 2001.
_ph_ 10y ago
As I have grown up with all kinds of animated cartoons on the TV, I always wanted a computer game which sported that level of graphics. It turns out, that from the raw hardware capability, computers long ago exceeded this ability, yet there is a big scarcity of real animated games. Windwaker (HD) is a really nice exception from that. It looks like an animate comic movie. From this point of view, I am actually happy that Nintendo did not try to make the next best rendering machine, and I hope that the games do benefit from that in an aesthetically sense. Of course I would not mind if Zelda ran at 60FPS, but the visuals look just great.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  I think all kids growing up in this period had fantasies about games matching up with their imaginations of them through some technical revolution. What modern game dev misses is that it's the space to imagine things within a more abstract visual framework that creates that sense of wonder and possibility. Game aesthetics have to have "space" for their players' imaginations to fill in order to have the same impact as those from earlier eras.
  - munificent 10y ago
    This is exactly why Minecraft is one of my favorite games ever. Yesterday, my daughter made a pool out of sea lanterns because they look kind of like pool tiles. Would she have thought to do that if the art for sea lanterns was more precise? Probably not.
  - nubbins 10y ago
    Agreed but it was easier when games naturally had "space" for imagination because of technical limitations. It is really hard to self-consciously go back and work inside a self imposed frame when everything else is moving ahead.
  - nihonde 10y ago
    I still have fond memories of Jet Set Radio on Dreamcast because it captured that cell rendered feel so beautifully.
sunnyddddd 10y ago
euyyn 10y ago
If Orientalist painting is what Google images shows when you query that, those are some damn beautiful paintings.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure they are -- and they certainly are a beautiful style. Orientalist paintings are unfashionable in the current Western art world, which likes Modernism and still, 100+ years after its invention, hasn't figured out that the camera didn't make painting obsolete; but they're extremely popular in the Middle East, which used to be beautiful and is now drab, and where the rich want some sort of record of what their world ought to look like. Art has fallen into the same sort of trap as architecture, where you get otherwise-intelligent, otherwise-tasteful students of the field -- like the author of McMansion Hell -- swooning over abominations like Boston's Government Center. Trust your heart, not academia. Refine your heart, to be sure (art is that which doesn't fall apart when you start asking questions about it); but trust it.
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  Oh, I'd never argue against the beauty of some of those works or the skills of their creators. And the same is true of many AAA games. But in terms of advancing games as an art form, I think aesthetics that are more "grammatical" and "open" is the way forward (think comics/animation, Studio Ghibli). This doesn't eschew the use of Realism, but changes it from being the pinnacle we're striving for to a tool (among others) to be used in creating better art.
- Maultasche 10y ago
  They are, but they are idealistic depictions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as viewed by Europeans in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They depict some sort of European oriental fantasy world that doesn't look much like what these areas were really like at the time. I think that's why those type of paintings are considered old-fashioned and silly when we have plenty of photographs, movies, and books that tell us what these regions are actually like. Not to mention that travel is now far more accessible to non-wealthy people. I think that it's a fascinating insight into Europe at the time and how they viewed the world. It was also a lot more romantic period than now. Nationalistic paintings showing a nation's ancestors (like the Germanic tribes of the Roman era) were popular and tended to look the same way: a fantasy land ideal of what they wanted it to look like rather than what it really looked like.
jbattle 10y ago
The Long Dark [http://hinterlandgames.com/the-long-dark/ http://hinterlandgames.com/the-long-dark/] is running with a very unique asthetic and it works brilliantly. A few times I've stopped playing to just watch the sun set. It isn't realistic but it is authentic - if that makes any sense. I would have expected the painterly style to prevent my suspension of disbelief but it hasn't.
rubicon33 10y ago
Both styles have their place. Doom 2016 was an amazing game, easily a favorite of mine. I appreciated the incredible, realistic graphics. It worked for this game. Would I want Zelda, or Minecraft to be that way? Certainly not... Their aesthetic fits their world.
gdulli 10y ago
That only applies to character models, and really only faces. Environments benefit greatly from detailed graphics. Especially in this type of game where you occupy the world for so many hours and the pace is slower. These are worlds that you live in for a time. (I didn't understand why the new Doom needed sophisticated graphics because you never have much time to stop running and look at anything.) I agree it doesn't have to be a top priority to push the limits beyond where we're at today. But it's disappointing to see Zelda miss out on at least current-gen graphics. The Witcher 3 is 2 years old now, at least come close to matching that. And it's hard to justify paying a current-gen price for a console with previous-gen capabilities.
vlunkr 10y ago
It seems like lots of gamers I talk to who play lots of AAA games seem to think graphics and getting out of the uncanny valley, but IMO it's just getting worse. The people in games like Uncharted are so plastic and gross looking.
- btschaegg 10y ago
  Come to think of it, Doom 2016 had only one recognizable human in it - and she was obviously intentionally kept creepy in a very "Dead Space" oriented style. One has to wonder if the goal of that was to minimize the effect you're describing.
SeanBoocock 10y ago
For another example of a unique aesthetic in a modern series of games, I would highly recommend The Banner Saga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIH0vS9AG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIH0vS9AG4 and http://stoicstudio.com/ http://stoicstudio.com/

aaron-lebo 10y ago

I think the best example of this is Doom 3. It looked incredible at the time (even on the Xbox on release in 2005), but it has not aged well. Maybe today's games hold up better, but photorealism is always gonna be competing with tomorrow. On the other hand, BotW has framerate drops and limitations on the Switch and it was designed for a console that was underpowered five years ago, which doesn't bode well.

excalibur 10y ago
The 2005 Doom was a movie.... [EDIT: Yes I know the post above has been edited to fix/clarify, no I can't delete this post.]
- freehunter 10y ago
  They likely meant the one that came out in late 2004, Doom 3.
  - mynameisvlad 10y ago
    Which actually did come out in 2005 for the Xbox, according to the Wikipedia article for it.
simplicio 10y ago
World of WarCraft is probably the best example of this effect. If they'd gone for realism, the game would've looked dated within a year or two, and had its popularity drop a lot faster. But the cartoony style let them keep going with just minor updates to the graphics for more than a decade. That decision must've made them at least a billion dollars over the last 10 or so years.
- TheGRS 10y ago
  While I kind of think WoW looks pretty dated these days I would otherwise agree. When WoW was released it was alongside Everquest 2, which was poised to be the next big thing with realistic graphics and a name everyone recognized in MMOs (though people certainly recognized Warcraft as well). I would be surprised if anyone even really remembers Everquest 2 at this point, but for a good year or so we talked about which one would win out. WoW beat it and proceeded to beat every MMO record ever by several orders of magnitude.
  - timje1 10y ago
    I played both, and I remember talking loudly and often about how much better WoW looked despite having a fraction of the system reqs. WoW vanilla could be run on a potato - I think I had it going on a pentium 2 with a third hand graphics card...
WillPostForFood 10y ago
I agree about the problems of pursuing photorealism, but I think Doom 3 actually holds up well, particularly the lighting and environments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mn_fJlmbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mn_fJlmbo
timje1 10y ago
I remember thinking at the time "wow, the characters look like ass". I think the character models look worse than Final Fantasy X, which was a game with good art direction and miniscule polycount that came out in 2001.

_ph_ 10y ago

As I have grown up with all kinds of animated cartoons on the TV, I always wanted a computer game which sported that level of graphics. It turns out, that from the raw hardware capability, computers long ago exceeded this ability, yet there is a big scarcity of real animated games. Windwaker (HD) is a really nice exception from that. It looks like an animate comic movie. From this point of view, I am actually happy that Nintendo did not try to make the next best rendering machine, and I hope that the games do benefit from that in an aesthetically sense. Of course I would not mind if Zelda ran at 60FPS, but the visuals look just great.

alphonsegaston 10y ago
I think all kids growing up in this period had fantasies about games matching up with their imaginations of them through some technical revolution. What modern game dev misses is that it's the space to imagine things within a more abstract visual framework that creates that sense of wonder and possibility. Game aesthetics have to have "space" for their players' imaginations to fill in order to have the same impact as those from earlier eras.
- munificent 10y ago
  This is exactly why Minecraft is one of my favorite games ever. Yesterday, my daughter made a pool out of sea lanterns because they look kind of like pool tiles. Would she have thought to do that if the art for sea lanterns was more precise? Probably not.
- nubbins 10y ago
  Agreed but it was easier when games naturally had "space" for imagination because of technical limitations. It is really hard to self-consciously go back and work inside a self imposed frame when everything else is moving ahead.
- nihonde 10y ago
  I still have fond memories of Jet Set Radio on Dreamcast because it captured that cell rendered feel so beautifully.

sunnyddddd 10y ago

euyyn 10y ago

If Orientalist painting is what Google images shows when you query that, those are some damn beautiful paintings.

clock_tower 10y ago
I'm pretty sure they are -- and they certainly are a beautiful style. Orientalist paintings are unfashionable in the current Western art world, which likes Modernism and still, 100+ years after its invention, hasn't figured out that the camera didn't make painting obsolete; but they're extremely popular in the Middle East, which used to be beautiful and is now drab, and where the rich want some sort of record of what their world ought to look like. Art has fallen into the same sort of trap as architecture, where you get otherwise-intelligent, otherwise-tasteful students of the field -- like the author of McMansion Hell -- swooning over abominations like Boston's Government Center. Trust your heart, not academia. Refine your heart, to be sure (art is that which doesn't fall apart when you start asking questions about it); but trust it.
alphonsegaston 10y ago
Oh, I'd never argue against the beauty of some of those works or the skills of their creators. And the same is true of many AAA games. But in terms of advancing games as an art form, I think aesthetics that are more "grammatical" and "open" is the way forward (think comics/animation, Studio Ghibli). This doesn't eschew the use of Realism, but changes it from being the pinnacle we're striving for to a tool (among others) to be used in creating better art.
Maultasche 10y ago
They are, but they are idealistic depictions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as viewed by Europeans in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They depict some sort of European oriental fantasy world that doesn't look much like what these areas were really like at the time. I think that's why those type of paintings are considered old-fashioned and silly when we have plenty of photographs, movies, and books that tell us what these regions are actually like. Not to mention that travel is now far more accessible to non-wealthy people. I think that it's a fascinating insight into Europe at the time and how they viewed the world. It was also a lot more romantic period than now. Nationalistic paintings showing a nation's ancestors (like the Germanic tribes of the Roman era) were popular and tended to look the same way: a fantasy land ideal of what they wanted it to look like rather than what it really looked like.

jbattle 10y ago

The Long Dark [http://hinterlandgames.com/the-long-dark/ http://hinterlandgames.com/the-long-dark/] is running with a very unique asthetic and it works brilliantly. A few times I've stopped playing to just watch the sun set. It isn't realistic but it is authentic - if that makes any sense. I would have expected the painterly style to prevent my suspension of disbelief but it hasn't.

rubicon33 10y ago

Both styles have their place. Doom 2016 was an amazing game, easily a favorite of mine. I appreciated the incredible, realistic graphics. It worked for this game. Would I want Zelda, or Minecraft to be that way? Certainly not... Their aesthetic fits their world.

gdulli 10y ago

That only applies to character models, and really only faces. Environments benefit greatly from detailed graphics. Especially in this type of game where you occupy the world for so many hours and the pace is slower. These are worlds that you live in for a time. (I didn't understand why the new Doom needed sophisticated graphics because you never have much time to stop running and look at anything.) I agree it doesn't have to be a top priority to push the limits beyond where we're at today. But it's disappointing to see Zelda miss out on at least current-gen graphics. The Witcher 3 is 2 years old now, at least come close to matching that. And it's hard to justify paying a current-gen price for a console with previous-gen capabilities.

vlunkr 10y ago

It seems like lots of gamers I talk to who play lots of AAA games seem to think graphics and getting out of the uncanny valley, but IMO it's just getting worse. The people in games like Uncharted are so plastic and gross looking.

btschaegg 10y ago
Come to think of it, Doom 2016 had only one recognizable human in it - and she was obviously intentionally kept creepy in a very "Dead Space" oriented style. One has to wonder if the goal of that was to minimize the effect you're describing.

SeanBoocock 10y ago

For another example of a unique aesthetic in a modern series of games, I would highly recommend The Banner Saga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIH0vS9AG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIH0vS9AG4 and http://stoicstudio.com/ http://stoicstudio.com/