/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.5069691]

I don't understand. Modern games have so much more to offer than retro ones but yet retro games have are WAY more rich in color than today's games.

[Anonymous No.5069721]

My theory (which doesn't come from a place of education) is the way that light is complex in real life and the way that colors in video games have become more complex are two different things.

I assume the technology should be 10x better than it was, but a lot of games still look like crap. What that says to me is that a lot of developers have the tools, but not the artistic or scientific background to know how to implement these things properly. Again, neither do I, but I generally know what looks good and what doesn't.

[Anonymous No.5069779]

>>5069721
I like this guy

[Anonymous No.5069840]

>>5069721
it's somewhat the opposite. back then there weren't generic grad courses on game or art design with a focus on game development.
plus the "custom" engines built from the ground up, so people just winged it based off their own perception of "yeah, this looks good"

now everyone studies the same basic blorange 101 for making big in hollywood and just tickles the dynamic lightning option in Unreal
proof are those OoT/Mario64 demos made in U4 that look just as devoid of color/life as any other AAA blockbuster

people don't realize the late '00s trend of making everything user-friendly kinda put a halt on tech advancement.
same reason why a numale that just graduated gets offended when people say ripping code off stackoverflow isn't gonna cut it

can't wait to see them try that with the Linux kernel and see how far it gets

[Anonymous No.5069937]

>>5069721
You can go to the source. The artists. Most games at the time used real color ranges thanks to CRTs. With flat screens, blacks became a liability and we entered an age of pastels and greys. A lot of artists back then were analog trained exclusively, so they worked to bring deep color ranges to the screen to start with. Nowadays digital art is done on flat screens, almost no one practices analog art(especially with color) and the user screens are usually cheap TN screens that can't handle deep blacks at all. What happens is the average games tends to be grey, or use default shader code because whoever is doing the art has no real life experience of color management and no easy way to grasp it from how his tools function. Add to that that many artists learn to draw/speedpaint on greys because they're less intimidating...
tl;dr: sheer incompetence

[Anonymous No.5069969]

It is a case of real time lighting. Trying to replicate light effects on bright surfaces with believable real time colour absorption and emission is next to impossible on most consumer hardware. Hence muted colours to avoid it.

[Anonymous No.5069974]

>>5069937
Certainly a factor.
Another factor is detail/texture. Older games had less, and used more solid & saturated color. As we've added more fine detail into games things have become less saturated so the detail stands out.

[Anonymous No.5069983]

>>5069721
Yeah a thing that the Abe's Oddysee, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro remakes all have in common is that the color sucks compared to their respective originals. The art departments had a very firm grasp on color theory.

[Anonymous No.5069987]

I imagine a large part of it is the obsession with realism/realistic lighting. Real life isn't cartoony colorful. This trend was probably the worst in the mid-late 2000s, aka the age of "brown and bloom". Probably the worst offender was Gears of War, where the saturation was so low you might be under the impression it's in grayscale. But that became a meme and we've since started moving somewhat away from the brown-and-bloom look, but it's still quite subdued compared to older games.

[Anonymous No.5070042]

>>5069969
All this image does is make me want to eat tide pods

[Anonymous No.5070080]

It's easy to generalize of course, but there have always been some games that try for realism and realistic pallets and those that go for more stylized ones. Plenty of games now are brightly coloured, there are just more options.

There is a distinction between pre and post 5th gen or so when color pallets got huge but even still there were a lot of brownish snes games.

[Anonymous No.5070149]

>>5069983
I'm an aspiring pixel artist. I suck and need to put the practice in so know I'm not some expert. One of the things that sets good art apart from mediocre is the color pallette. Pixel art (and low res) basically make you focus on the small details if you want something to look good. Modern games let you do so much, but maybe too much, to the point you can easily lose focus on the small details.

Look at some early computer games. Very high detail and shiny textures, but look bad and pieced together. Lighting sources don't match and neither does the color pallette. Pic related. This leads to a "high def" yet shit looking game. Higher resolution artwork that misses the mark on important small things never looks as good as something simpler that hits all the aspects well.

This honestly translates to any game no matter what gen and style of graphics.

An analogy would be a haiku vs. a novel. It's easier to write a haiku, but if you want it to be good, you have to be fucking clever and make sure it's on point. If you write a novel, chances are any paragraph in the novel won't be as elegant as the haiku. This isn't to say novels are inherently worse than haiku, just that the limited nature of haiku forces you to be damn near perfect. Novels can be damn good but it takes a lot more work overall to make one excellent.

[Anonymous No.5070229]

What a poofter thread. I was hoping for a PSO thread.

[Anonymous No.5070246]

>>5070229
then make one

[Anonymous No.5070286]

I'm not a visual artist, but let me add my 2 cents.

In the early days of 3D, there just wasn't any of the tools or techniques we have nowdays for making models and meshes. The software and slow hardware of the time made it so that modelers used basic tools and primitives to make stuff out of. Because of this, artists were in the mindset of trying to evoke the feeling of what a particular object or room might be, since they didn't have the ability to bring it across literally. They focused on the most important aspects, trying to use every artistic skill they had to bring across their ideas.

Nowdays, we have so much processing power that its trivial to lay it all out perfectly. Instead of carefully considering what things they need to use to evoke a particular place or idea, modern designers are content with implementing things as literally as possible. In the 90s, a spacecraft corridor would use things like an unusual shape, colored lighting, bits of transparent textures and occasional breaks in the geometry to add interest. Nowdays, the same spacecraft corridor would be a bland plastic rectangle with an overly shiny floor. Instead of trying to evoke some place thats truly magnificent and straight from the imagination, we're left with an unconvincing imitation from life.

[Anonymous No.5070319]

It's all about contrast. Simpler graphics generally have more clearly defined colors and patterns, thus creating greater contrast. As you add detail, contrast begins to diminish. Think of it this way -- what has more contrast, a white square and black square next to one another, or those two squares next to a grey square?

Pic related is an example of what I mean, a level from Timesplitters 1 (not retro but old enough to demonstrate my point). The colors look so vivid and lively because they have high contrast. If the graphics were far more detailed, the contrast would be eroded by the presence of additional colors and hues (an inherent quality of added detail).

I could be wrong but this is how I've always felt about it. Detail strips away vibrance to a degree, and this is why a cartoon will always look more vibrant than real life. It is still possible to create vibrant looking games, but certain details must be sacraficed to do so.

[Anonymous No.5070539]

You know the tired OLD = SOUL / NEW = SOULLESS meme that cropped up a while ago? It's basically that, older games had artists work on them to compensate for technological limitations, while newer games have technology to compensate for artistic limitations. The human element has been removed from games.

[Anonymous No.5070596]

lmao so much cherry picking in this thread

[Anonymous No.5070669]

>>5070596
is this supposed to be a counterexample?

[Anonymous No.5070765]

>>5070596
Yes, Fallout® is great. I bought another copy of this fantastic game today.

[Anonymous No.5070772]

>>5070765
it's not skyrim you meme loving fag, that doesn't even work here, cunt

[Anonymous No.5071016]

>>5070596
Welcome to the daily "old=good, new=bad" circlejerk thread.

[Anonymous No.5071021]

>>5070772
Toddposting also includes Fallout you nigger

[Anonymous No.5071342]

>>5069691
Reality is brown. TM

[Anonymous No.5071365]

>old thing good
>new thing bad
>young people who like new thing bad
>newest thing worst
>youngest people who like newest thing bad
>old people who like old thing also bad

[Anonymous No.5073192]

>>5071016
>>5071365
You can't just mindlessly bring this up whenever anyone dares to say something suffered with time. Especially in this case, no one is saying games suck now; this topic is about only one aspect of the games which people have brought some thoughtful and not entirely negative points to the table.

and even if it was a circlejerk, you can't expect to come to the one board that has "Retro" in the title and not see a bit of that, that's like going to a gay bar and shouting "WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FAGS IN HERE?"

[Anonymous No.5073326]

>>5070765
based

[Anonymous No.5073330]

>>5071365
>>old people who like old thing also bad
You done goofed with this one dumbass.

[Anonymous No.5073351]

New games have so much shit going on with them all colors turn to mess in our heads

[Anonymous No.5073508]

>>5071016
>being this desperate for cool points on the internet you go contrarian to the point of full retardation

[Anonymous No.5073578]

aren't newer games more realistic and less goofy

[Anonymous No.5073824]

Colors I miss in modern video games:

-Purple
-Royal blue
-Yellow
-Glowing green
-Non-neon pink
-Naturalistic oranges

[Anonymous No.5073959]

>>5069691
Asktually they're poor in color. That's why they look more "rich".

>>5069721
Nah. They have teams of artists and scientists. They just aren't designing things that way because it's not what the market wants.

>>5071365
>pooposter who speak hulk bad

[Anonymous No.5074730]

>>5073824
omg i really agree with you :(

[Anonymous No.5074762]

>>5073824
Play halo then, it’s a crazy colorful vibrant game

[Anonymous No.5074775]

A lot of times modern games try to cover up graphical deficiencies with fog-like palettes. It's so you don't notice some of the wonkier textures

[Anonymous No.5074780]

>>5069691
Thank the unreal engine.

[Anonymous No.5074849]

>>5074762
but i'd rather play a good game

[Anonymous No.5074897]

>>5074775
That looks nice.

A lot of modern games just throw everything a the game without creating a coherent visual composition. A lot of old games tried to give a sort of picturesque feeling.

>>5074780
I remember it being good, unfortunately most are misusing it.

[Anonymous No.5074978]

>>5069987
I kind agree with you about the realistic lighting and bloom. Of course we all know the horrible use of bloom in the remake of Wind Waker for WiiU, but even after that, Nintendo has been using a slightly realistic lighting and soft bloom for games like Mario Odyssey, Super Mario 3D World or Captain Toad, that makes the colors less saturated.
I remember after playing the Super Mario Galaxy games, noticing something strange in the color palette and artstyle of new Nintendo games, which was they were starting to use of realistic lighting in all their games. Also, this has had the effect of making those games too realistic (with a plastic-like texture) and similar between them.

[Anonymous No.5074997]

Games have gotten more colorful now, but the 7th gen was awful with that sort of thing. I have a few guesses as to why as a failed indie dev:

1: Color grading became possible in games just a few years after it became possible for film. There weren't many tasteful examples to go off of, and game developers were eager to separate themselves visually from last-gen games. So they went overboard.

2. Realtime shadows and SSAO became widespread around this time, which was good enough fo rscenes with dull colors. But what couldn't be done in real time was global illumination, specifically the color bleeding that results from it. The more colorful the scene, the more noticeable the lack of color bleeding is. A lot of the exceptions to whole brown&bloom thing - Sonic Unleashed/Generations, Uncharted, Wipeout HD, Mirror's Edge - used global illumination baked into lightmaps, and their graphical fidelity came at the cost of having "static" scenes that took up a shitton of storage space and memory.

3. 7th gen games were basically pure testosterone packed into the shape of a DVD, and colors are for babies. See: Overstrike/Fuse.

Call of Duty 4 ties into all 3 of these, and every game at the time wanted to be CoD4.

[Anonymous No.5075004]

>>5074997

I also think developers used limited color palettes for marketing purposes, to give their games an identity. Call of Duty was the green game, Battlefield was the blue game, DE:HR was the piss filter game.

[Anonymous No.5075016]

>>5070080
I think a good example would be A Hat in Time. That game is very bright and vibrant and really knows how to use color.

[Anonymous No.5075143]

>>5074775
True, i'm so glad the days of GL_FOG are behind us.

[Anonymous No.5075160]

>>5075016
Looked like Skies of Arcadia at first glance, without opening the thumbnail.

[Anonymous No.5075173]

>>5074775
Optimize your shit

[Anonymous No.5075186]

>>5069691
>modern games have so much more to offer

This is sometimes more of a curse than a blessing. Actually, it usually is.