LogFAQs > #970706699

HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

you can critique visuals all you want but most of the "critique" in this topic is just equating an art style being objectively bad on some sort of "good art" metric

Like I'm not actually familiar enough with AV and AV2. But Golden Idol I have no problem with calling "ugly" because it is very deliberately a grotesque version of classic adventure games and like SCUMM stuff. That is way, way different from saying "graphics don't matter," it is actually the exact opposite.

Likewise a game looking "cheap" really doesn't bother me much because the reason indie games look cheap is because they...often are? Like Calico I've seen played and it looks fine, even good! It's a 3d indie game, they look like that. But it doesn't have "bad graphics," the effort is going into the visual design and color pallette rather than sheer graphical fidelity. Is it MY preferred aesthetic? No but who gives a shit. It accomplishes the goals it sets out to do.

Games can miss the mark with this all the time (Octopath, for example, has a neat style with a lot of visual effects that end up muddying the look in an unfortunate way) but it's unclear to me what people think the mark even is

Oh, I'm with you there, I really dislike the slant towards a linear scale of quality that some people tend to have. But I also can't be surprised when a game like Calico, which reminds me of early PS2 graphics mixed with an N64 blur, draws a mixed response. It doesn't make it outright bad, but there's a question of efficacy that's fair to ask even when you understand where they're coming from.

shane15 posted...

End of the day the retro pixel style should be left to indie devs who have no money to work with. The big publishers should be working in 3D. If companies like Idea Factory and Falcom can work do it then there's no excuse.

Hard disagree. We need just the opposite, big budget developers doing true spritework. There's a reason no sprite-based game in the last 25 years has matched the visual impact of Symphony of the Night: nobody has the time and budget to put in that work. I like a lot of big pixel indie games, I think stuff like Celeste looks excellent, but there's an uncanny nature to a lot of them and I'd love to see that overcome.