Realistic graphics vs soul

[Anonymous No.8185128]

I look at modern games with realistic graphics, and they just don't do it for me. Is it because they are just too realistic, or do they just have poor artstyle? Pic related is an example of a game with a good balance of realism and soulful artstyle imo.

[Anonymous No.8185138]

>>8185128
"Soul" (in the way its used here) is a meaningless buzzword that comes from /v/.
Something you like:
>LE SOUL
Something you don't like:
>LE SOULESS

[Anonymous No.8185145]

>>8185128
The problem is when they throw any art direction out the window and just load it up full of post processing effects and call it a day.

[Anonymous No.8185152]

>>8185138
In this context it makes more sense as
soul - having to create effects by hand, usually because the target hardware can't really do it reliably.
soulless - having the engine pull effects off for you, a one size fits all solution.

[Anonymous No.8185172]

>>8185152
>soulless - having the engine pull effects off for you, a one size fits all solution
by this definition no film can have soul because they can just manipulate ready made lighting systems.

[Anonymous No.8185176]

>>8185152
Interesting response to that for once. While I respect the sensible explanation, It almost always will be used on this website to show preference. If one person can disagree with another about what soul is in a comparison screenshot, it really does just feel like bias. I've never heard it explained like that though, I'll give you that

[Anonymous No.8185186]

>>8185128
The graphics in your screenshot look pretty good, and pretty realistic. Like, not photorealistic, but clearly they wanted the game to have environments like in real life, with characters that look like real people, and I think they've achieved that well here.

[Anonymous No.8185232]

>>8185128
Development time should be spent more on making a game fun, interesting and stylistic instead of just photo real. Doesn't matter what era they're made in. Even normals are going to realize that heavily this gen.

[Anonymous No.8185247]

>>8185138
Soul = A passionate working within limitations to create something visually, mechanically and possibly narratively distinct. Creating something greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Soulless = The opposite

Examples:
Halo: CE/2/3 = Soul
Halo 4/5 = Soulless
Star Wars: A New Hope = Soul
Star Wars: The Force Awakens = Soulless
Chrysler Building = Soul
Freedom Tower = Soulless

It’s not just video games. It’s film, it’s architecture, it’s any art form.

It has less to do with age, and more to do with creative intent and execution.

Breath of the Wild is a contemporary game, and it oozes with soul because the team working on it was creatively charged and focused.
Cyberpunk 2077 had all the money and “man”power in the world behind it, but it was designed by committee for too broad an audience and it shows.

It isn’t just a contemporary buzzword. Before it became “popular”, this kind of categorization had been around a long time.
>”They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.”
Think of soulless as something being pressed in a Chinese sweatshop, and soulful as something being crafted in a garage.
You have zero taste if you can’t understand this concept.

[Anonymous No.8185305]

>>8185138
This is true because that's how I use the terms.

[Anonymous No.8185415]

>>8185128
A lot of games with more realistic graphics just don't feel enjoyable to look at for me because they're always visually cluttered. There's just so much extra crap everywhere for detail that it's a waste of time to actually look at most of it so you start tuning it out, and then they have to put in objective markers and things like that because otherwise you'd never find anything in the clutter.

Around 6th gen felt like the best balance between realism and style, and it had enough of a limitation that games simply didn't have the power to be visually cluttered. What I really liked is that they used textures on walls/floors for detail while mostly remaining bare otherwise, instead of throwing in a ton of props everywhere that mostly just get in your way.

[Anonymous No.8185518]

>>8185128
why of all things did you post a bathroom pic?

[Anonymous No.8185663]

>>8185172
Your post makes zero sense

[Anonymous No.8185673]

>>8185415
It's funny that objective markers are mandatory in modern games because there's so much visual noise and yet the art direction isn't strong enough to give places a distinct look and feel
Wonder how many games would be improved by giving different levels a different lighting filter and that's it

[Anonymous No.8185753]

>>8185128
I think its also because every modern game forces you to look at it with the same exact camera angles. SH2 had changing camera angles because it was a horror game from the classic era of horror games. I wish we could see a modern game (horror preferably) doing this idea again.

[Anonymous No.8185787]

>>8185518
I love piss

[Anonymous No.8185804]

>>8185247
Soul = Anything that makes me feel comfy
Soulless = Anything that gives me an existential crisis

[Anonymous No.8185806]

>>8185247
I don't like botw.

[Anonymous No.8185861]

>>8185128
This is still too realistic I would say. Games are supposed to take us away from reality not put more of it in. Everyone picks on Nintendo, but their games are often colorful with cartoon-like qualities and the lack of realism is a good thing.

[Anonymous No.8185896]

>>8185172
True. Now get lost.

[Anonymous No.8185971]

>>8185247
>Halo
>Star Wars
US GAMERS HUH
US NERDS HAHA

[Anonymous No.8185980]

>>8185971
>grouping halo 1 with that
Hi zoomer.

[Anonymous No.8186001]

>>8185980
I'm probably older than your parents you absolute fucking imbecile.

[s-a-g-e No.8186113]

>>8185247
This post in 4 words
OLD = SOUL
NEW = SOULLESS

In 10 years the newest batch of retards with be bemoaning how soulful The Force Awakens is compared to Star Wars Episode 10 and how Halo 8 isn't as soulful as Halo 5.
It's a meaningless term, the concept of it is solely dependant on the subjective view and age of its user, attempt to expand your vocabulary and try out some new adjectives.

The terminology has been around for a long time and it mainly pertained to black culture; SOUL FOOD, SOUL MUSIC. Only recently has it been hijacked and dumb fucks are attributing soul to asinine shit like fucking video games and movies.
I despise you and everyone like you.

[Anonymous No.8186643]

>>8185138
>>8186113
>>8185804
Soulless spergs that cannot see the forest for the trees.
>>8185247
>Creating something greater than the sum of it's parts.
This guy gets it. Soul is not necessarily just older = better. It's when a game's visuals, music, and themes come together in an inspired way, without relying on flavour of the month cliches or generic imagery/ techniques.
F.E.A.R. had soul with the J-Horror in office buildings vibe. RE7 had soul with it's backwoods Cajun grindhouse vibe. On the other hand, games COD or Battlefield lack soul because they fall into generic mil-shooter/ sci-fi tropes. Of course "soul" is a subjective descriptor, but like obscenity, "[you] know it when [you] see it."

[Anonymous No.8186670]

>>8185415
Good thoughts.
-OP

[Anonymous No.8186671]

>>8185518
best screen i could find in a short amount of time

[Anonymous No.8186673]

>>8185861
fair enough

[Anonymous No.8186708]

>>8185128
>Pic related is an example of a game with a good balance of realism and soulful artstyle imo.
I think SH2 was trying to be as realistic as possible but the technology wasn't quite there yet. I don't think they were trying to balance anything, they just did the best they could in the realistic direction.

[Anonymous No.8186730]

>>8185247
>>8186643
Based. Even as a meme, soul filters out the soulless spergs.

[Anonymous No.8186771]

I think it comes mostly down to visual clutter being stuck in the uncanny valley, just looks a lot like distracting garbage cluttering the screen at this point of development.

[Anonymous No.8186779]

>>8186113
>soul food
What? As in food for your soul? Like jazz is food for your soul or what? The fuck does this even mean?

[Anonymous No.8186793]

>>8186779
It just means normal food that people in the Southeastern US eat, but they call it that name when blacks make it because they're special or something.

[Anonymous No.8186806]

>>8185152
>having the engine pull effects off for you, a one size fits all solution
I think this is actually sort of the opposite of the problem afflicting game graphics. devs have to put so many manhours into brute forcing minute details by hand that any potential artistic flourish gets weighed down by the resource investment. If they could lazily have the engine simply take care of the effects as is often accused it'd free them up to prioritize the high level composition.

[Anonymous No.8186831]

>>8186113
Absolutely false. Take a look through all SNES games, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aAsqUkTKLs

Lost of old games, but most of them are garbage. Maybe even worse garbage than soulless AAA games produced today.

A lot of "soulful" games are old for two reasons:
1. Shit has been filtered through time and crappy games are mostly forgotten
2. A lot more experimentation and creativity was allowed back in the day. Teams were smaller. Newer games are mostly done by committee of businessman/idea-men and executed by overworked people who only care about their paycheck.

[Anonymous No.8187215]

>>8186708
yeah probably. but i mean it looks good, whereas a modern game like Control just looks so indistinct and confusing.

[Anonymous No.8187220]

>>8185247
>finally someone understands what soul me-
>Breath of the Wild is a contemporary game, and it oozes with soul
Opinion dicarded.

[Anonymous No.8187263]

>>8187220
lmao to each their own.
I originally typed Bloodborne, but went with BotW. It’s kind of hard to pick examples of truly soulful contemporary games, at least ones I’ve bothered playing.

[Anonymous No.8187283]

Maybe instead of soul or soulless, use instead:
-creative
-good atmsophere
-abstract in a good way

-generic
-lacking ambition
-visually cluttered

[Anonymous No.8187302]

>>8185128
I play games for the, you know, gameplay
If you want "artstyle" go watch a movie or something
Game graphics are only relevant if theyre so bad you cant tell whats going on. 2d games have had good enough graphics since SNES, and 3d was good enough starting with Dreamcast

[Anonymous No.8187309]

I don't even like most modern games, yet some of the shit that gets said here makes no sense.
>>8185152
As >>8186806 said, a lot of small details are still made by hand. It's just that there's so many and the artstyle usually gets so bland that it doesn't get noticed.
>>8186643
There are a lot of games that get called "soulful" that are using flavor of the month cliches, especially the older anime games for PC-98 etc. CoD is generic, but even it has its own style for fans of it. My brothers have played every game since 2006, and they're always talking about the distinct style or aesthetic that some of the games have compared to others. Meanwhile, people like me or you probably just see the lot as generic.
I think we have to realize that the further we go, the harder it is to seem unique and different. Older games that felt same-y still managed to be good because they focused on being fun, same as newer games that take a concept and redo it. "Soulless" is a bad way to say why I'm not a fan of a lot of (not all) newer games. The reasons are more complicated than that, and seem to make it hard to get to the specific reasons why a game can be bad (aka a game that's trying too hard to be realistic that it loses an interesting artstyle, or a game that looks good but plays very generically).

[Anonymous No.8187310]

>>8187302
>Game graphics are only relevant if theyre so bad you cant tell whats going on
but this is literally the problem with modern games. everything is so detail-packed and indistinct. you can't tell what the game is trying to show you.

[Anonymous No.8187313]

most of the time, soul means "good atmosphere", doesn't it?

[Anonymous No.8187392]

>>8187313
soul means the game gives you goosebumps

[Anonymous No.8187408]

>>8187313
That's the confusing part. People lump in a ton of other stuff, like "unique" or "put together bit by bit" or "made with a lot of heart and care". That's why people tend to make fun of it as "things I like vs things I don't like". You can inference usually what people mean each time, but it's so annoying compared to just saying the thing.

[Anonymous No.8187416]

>>8185247
botw is a painfully generic trend chaser, cyberpunk is a game where you can replace your arms with katanas

[Anonymous No.8187435]

why are people actually talking about the soul/soulless shit? it's literally a vague meme with a hint of truth to it which is what makes it funny lol. i mean it has merit but i'm just saying trying to define what "soul" is is like when people try to talk about what art is. they'd rather just use vague terms and feelings to describe shit rather than just point at concrete things like a game being unique/having an artistic vision.

[Anonymous No.8187438]

>>8187435
But it does have meaning and always has. You just thought it was a meme

[Anonymous No.8187508]

you can make your game super artistic, asthetic, soulful, unique, creative, and all of that, and still end up making a shitty game. shenmue comes to mind.

[Anonymous No.8187535]

>>8187438
no one said it had no meaning retard. reread what i said. its a joke with truth to it. part of the joke is that is is vague and thus hard to pinpoint, which is actually true of most things that are good.

[Anonymous No.8187589]

>>8187416
Cyberpunk 2077 is a fat-free Fallout wrapped up inside a Snoy movie-game with a pathetic drop of GTA added.
8 years of dev time bro, and they pooped THAT out.
Perhaps the biggest waste of an IP of all time.
It's just barely an RPG, and it's fucking based on a tabletop RPG. I played for about four hours before uninstalling because the stink of tranny shit was making me puke.

BotW absolutely borrowed some elements from boobysoft games/dark souls/survival games, but not enough to say it was chasing trends. It's not trying to be another game, it's Zelda through and through. It married all borrowed elements deftly to LoZ, and it's visual style is about as soulful as you can get post-2009.

BotW rustles a lot of jimmies here, and you don't have to like it, but in my opinion it hits the nail on the head for "video game" more-so than anything else new I've bothered an attempt to play in the last five years.

[Anonymous No.8187726]

>>8187589
>it has nintendo written on it therefore good

[Anonymous No.8187786]

What I really dislike is how graphics became so standardized. Especially for ambientation. Search something like "best graphics o videogames" and you probably aren't able to tell apart games from eachother unless there is a character or a weapon. It feels like there are a couple of templates and every major game use one of thoses.
Every generation since realism became the major goal, there has been a clear trend in every gen. The 7th gen had those filters that made everything have the same colours. The 9th has ray tracing and almost every major game has a shit ton of lighting everywhere.Just look at how almost every game has that moment where you're in a place with a lot of trees, an open field or an abandoned city with an absurd amount of lighting just to show how realistic their graphics look, but they all look exactly the same.
There was more experimentation with artsyles before the 7th generation. The 6th already had that feel that everything was trying to be realistic, but the limitations lead to way more styles in major games.

[Anonymous No.8187873]

>>8187263
>Bloodborne
Even worse

[Anonymous No.8187884]

>>8187873
Okay, then you name a modern game with soul, hotshot.

[Anonymous No.8187885]

I curse the day Spyro Reignited started this Soul/less autism. Curse it I say!

[Anonymous No.8187901]

>>8185128
>poor artstyle
This. This is why Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes are beautiful, but DMC5 looks like complete garbage.

[Anonymous No.8187903]

>>8187884
Not the other poster, but I have a suggestion: Sayonara Wild Hearts.

[Anonymous No.8187916]

Its because old games focus on sharpness or detail.
The new games focus on blurr and smoothness. And fog.

[Anonymous No.8188129]

>>8187916
yeah it seems like that. if I ever get into "high-end" games, maybe I'll need to play them on PC so I can turn this stuff off.

[Anonymous No.8188131]

>>8187903
i just looked that up and it gave my laptop aids

[Anonymous No.8188145]

High-quality graphics > Realistic graphics
Real life is boring

[Anonymous No.8188165]

>>8185753
This. Silent Hill absolutely nailed the angles thing. Never seen another series being so good at it. It makes the game feel kind of like a movie (in a good way).

[Anonymous No.8188534]

>>8185247
Mental gym just to say a more charming version of what >>8185138 said

[Anonymous No.8189319]

>>8188131
Kill yourself

[Anonymous No.8189783]

>>8188534
are you ab-so-lutely CHARMED by him? oo-la-la.

[Anonymous No.8189823]

>>8185128
silent hill 2 had realistic graphics

[Anonymous No.8189839]

>>8187884
I don't know, I wouldn't touch any fucking modern game, they all look like shit
Deadly Premonition 2 maybe? Its a janky broken piece of shit but the Japfuck put his heart and soul in it for sure

[Anonymous No.8189919]

the actual reasons modern graphics, even for non-realistic games, usually look like shit is because they outsource all of the non-primary assets (everything outside of main characters, important bosses, that sort of thing) to the cheapest unrelated Indian and Chinese companies they can find. It's really obvious in say, FF7 Remake's NPCs and random clutter when compared to the actual stylized stuff created in house by Square.

Back in the day the in house artists were responsible for every asset, so it meant the quality and consistency was a lot higher.

[Anonymous No.8189951]

>>8185753
There are some classic style survival horror games being made by indies
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1367590/Tormented_Souls/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1335530/Alisa/

[Anonymous No.8190225]

>>8185128
>>I look at modern games with realistic graphics, and they just don't do it for me
>posting a modern game with realistic graphics
cringe
t. pong player

[Anonymous No.8190408]

>>8190225
lol SH2 is probably the most realistic game i've ever played. only played it for 5 minutes though - gonna do SH1 first.

[Anonymous No.8190409]

>>8189919
i wish game companies would just collectively decide to stop doing HD. or at least stop doing HD assets, even if the res is HD.

[Anonymous No.8190413]

>>8190408
>gonna do SH1 first.
nice. it's best to play 1 first because some people struggle with it if they already played 2.

[Anonymous No.8190415]

>>8190409
It seems like some companies are working on upscaling methods so that everything doesn't have to be painstakingly created in the highest resolution possible by hand every time. It's not perfect and doesn't look quite as good yet but it could possibly bring down the time and money needed for that stuff which would be good.

[Anonymous No.8190459]

>>8188131

Eat a cock.

[Anonymous No.8190743]

>>8190415
well as long as it doesn't make everything look distorted and blurry like most """"""""AI"""""""" stuff does.

[Anonymous No.8190748]

>>8190413
well i mean i might as well. silly to start off with the second game when the first one is good too.

[Anonymous No.8190752]

>ctrl-f
Good that fucking schizo isn't shitting up this thread yet.

[Anonymous No.8190757]

>>8190752
which one?

[Anonymous No.8191032]

>>8187884
Sable. it's that easy. you're so close to understanding what SOUL actually is. you got close with BOTW but it's still soulless trash

[Anonymous No.8191079]

>>8190748
play on hard. normal is a bit of a snooze.
1. a couple tips: you can off your flashlight to stealth by enemies, can be very useful in interior areas to avoid fights.
2. it's usually worth thoroughly exploring the overworld ares, there's a few optional buildings you can enter to get supplies, and there's usually health packs and ammo scattered around the streets. I'll admit the camera angles can make this a little tedious you'll often have to run up and down streets twice because you won't be able to see both sides of the street at once.

[Anonymous No.8191082]

>>8191079
3. in order to efficiently kill enemies you'll need to perform a context stomp move when you down them or else they'll get up several times.

[Anonymous No.8191091]

>>8191082
4. this involves story spoilers so I'll mince my words a little. a ways into the game you'll come to an area called silenthill resort, you'll want to very carefully and thoroughly explore the silent hill resort area before you head to the amusement park section. you're looking for a bar.

[Anonymous No.8191983]

>>8185128
No its design that went from treating the environment as a puzzle to something that you simply traverse while stuff happens.

[Anonymous No.8191986]

>>8185152
>soul - novel approximation of what you are trying to create.
>soulless - realistic approximation of what you are trying to make.

it could just be that less detail in games made things like traversing levels easier and you could make things more complicated vs the hallways or following arrows in games these days.

[Anonymous No.8192723]

Soul basically means the game communicates a sense of earnestness. If you ever get the sense that the game was made for reasons beyond making money, and defies what would sell, it is soulful.

[Anonymous No.8192781]

When a game/movie/song is made by a human being with a specific intention behind it, you can tell.

Nowadays most things are not made thay way. Each part of the process gets handed over to a hyper specialized professional who is good at his craft but doesn't care abou6the project. They get bullet points explained to them by a project manager on a zoom call and go through 3-10 rounds of revisions until it's good enough to convince a higher up manager that this part pf the manufacturing is complete. When things are done this way, you can also tell.

You might not notice consciously, but your unconscious does.

However, of it weren't for industrial soulless manufactured art, most modern artists would have no job and would have to work at McDonald's or kill themselves. Just another tragedy of the current age.

[Anonymous No.8192823]

>>8185138

In terms of video games:

Soul: designed and implemented with ingenuity and passion, love for for the work or the product, often created by innovators and artists treading a new path in a new medium or pushing the boundaries of an existing one. If it is created by a large company it is often a side project with very little focus at first, or a reunion of people who have already made something great working with young innovators. When people are making something soulful they often think "This is really cool. Wow, people are going to be really impressed by this and enjoy it".

See: Link's Awakening, FF6, Deus Ex

Soulless: often a copy of something soulful, derivative, designed by committee, created by careerists and and drones grinding out manhours, while having their creative instincts hemmed in by management due dates, deadlines and milestones which are hammered out first- before the concept - created for the love of money. When people are creating something soulless they often think "People like X type of game, this is an X type of game with elements from other X type games. We are really going to cash in on the customer's love of the previous iteration of this product."

See: Every Madden Game, Every MMO since Warcraft (inclusive, oldschool runescape exclusive).

Sometimes you can have a golem of a game. A souless project where some devs and artists sneak in a bit of passion here and there. You find cool easter eggs, events and surprises in otherwise bland games some times. Mass Effect 1 was a golem, the rest of the series was soulless. SoTN had soul, the rest of the Igavanias were golems.

Soulless does not mean unenjoyable either. Everyone here has ground out hundreds of hours with mediocre titles and passed time and had fun - but they lacked the spark where you could intuit "the devs were really having fun here" and didn't feel special at all.

[Anonymous No.8192835]

>>8192781
it's not a modern problem, artists had to make a living off of the commissions of the nobility once, often writing bullshit stories about the great deeds of Brutus of Troy, and how he actually is the ancestor of the family that commissioned the artist. Art has always largely been soulless, but it funds the soulful stuff so I'm content.

[Anonymous No.8192989]

>>8192835
Hey that's a good perspective, thanks for that

[Anonymous No.8193086]

>>8185138
You fucking autismo, soul means charm, good direction, effort and creativity.
What kind of retard doesn't get that instantly? What kind of imbecile can not sense when a game has got that "x factor", that "thing"?

[Anonymous No.8193197]

>>8191079
>>8191082
>>8191091
thanks

[Anonymous No.8194179]

>>8185128
>>8185138
>popular and new stuff bad
>nah actually you're all wrong

[Anonymous No.8195331]

>>8185518
if a video game has a soulful bathroom you know the rest of the game will be good

[Anonymous No.8195380]

>>8195331

[Anonymous No.8195668]

>>8185128
> Pic related is an example of a game with a good balance of realism and soulful artstyle imo.

That is a picture of the highest level of realism that was possible at the time, you nitwit.

[Anonymous No.8195986]

>>8192723
I like this definition

[Anonymous No.8196306]

>>8195668
doesn't make a difference if it was intentional or not.

[Anonymous No.8197813]

>>8185138
No. Soul is to thrive within limitations, to do more with less.

[Anonymous No.8198000]

honestly guys i really can't fucking do this anymore. i look back at the 5th, 6th and even to the 7th gen and really wonder where all that passion has gone. The big companies delivered like crazy and created games that gameplaytechnically aged better than some garbage from the west nowadays nobody has fun replaying at any time. Shows were more explosive, the market wasn't affluent with garbage indies and the game design didn't focus on the philosophy of "ok, how can i waste the players time the most with absolutely trivial and arbitrary tasks?".

i really hope it's just a down time we're going through and devs will return to making fun and interactive games. where did ideas like Pac-Man, Digger, Bomberman and Tetris go? Where did the arcade-esque idea of "here are the rules of the system. enjoy" go? Why does this medium feel like yet another tool for some random asshole to output his narrative trash? It feels like games are not made to be played anymore. And despite my hope it doesn't seem to end anytime soon considering they began to drag movie IP's into this medium. Games are transforming into glorified movies at this point. And all the gameplay has to offer wasting your time with open world and random side quests.

The only reason gaming isn't dead is because the few japanese companies (Square, Sega, Namco, Capcom) are still making good games and even that only every now and then.

[Anonymous No.8198016]

>>8185128
>sillent hill 2
>retro game
c'mon, i'm not this old...

[Anonymous No.8198421]

>>8198000
>Square
>still making good games

[Anonymous No.8198427]

>>8192723
Bit of a shitty thing though, since there are tons of games that are great and passionate that were built almost explicitly for cash. Hell, you have a producer to handle that stuff for a purpose. Doesn't help that tons of people don't even mean this when they say soul

[Anonymous No.8198491]

>8198000
There comes a time when I want to respond to a post and the subject it brings up, but I can't shake off the feeling that the post isn't genuine or just trying to bait.
To the rest of the thread, this soul vs soulless stuff is probably just because of how remake-heavy things have been. Something is always lost when changing graphics especially, or going from 2D to 3D. Something's gained too, but sometimes not for those who loved the game before. Nostalgia can play a part, taste in graphic styles can play a part, it's something devs have to deal with. The only thing that bothers me about the soul stuff, other than the "woe is me" people that usually spam it, is that it tries to make up some excuse to shit on devs that are actually trying hard.
Not everyone is stuck in EA or Activision. Some devs really do work hard to make their games. Some aren't innovating but are pushing old concepts till their limit to make something great. Some are making weird games that might not be as fun to play, but they're pushing boundaries on what you can do in a game. If they still don't hit for you, maybe it's not because they lack soul or originality. Maybe you're just getting jaded from being around so many people who hate new stuff, or don't want anything truly new, instead something that's "like what I played before but just better".

[Anonymous No.8198609]

I think my issue is that games generally tend to lack a sort of adversarial playfulness that they used to have, not in the sense of ninja gaiden smashing your face into the wall or adventure game moon logic, just the idea that a game might occasionally ask the player to do a little deductive reasoning or unconventional thinking for their own enjoyment. Now games treat you like a dim wittedl curmudgeon that can't ever deviate from the expected dopamine loop.
Take the original thief for example, aside from the basic sneak and whack guard on the back of the head gameplay it expected you to use a compass and landmarks to orient yourself without the use of an omniscient mini map, in a modern game a system like that would be deemed extraneous and unfun, and it would be streamlined.

[Anonymous No.8198621]

>>8198491
I'll entertain your post if you admit what you're arguing is entirely within the realm of indie and small studios.

[Anonymous No.8198651]

>>8198609
While that does fit the tone, I imagine now with more QA testing, most people would get confused or just not wanna go through the effort. Archaic stuff can add to the mood, sure, but if it detracts from the real meat of the game, I think people would be less interested.
And the reason for that? Because tons of people from that era complaining about it in letters or, for more modern stuff, emails. Fans always feel like they know what's best, and that improvements they ask for are more important than the vision of the team. Real complicated issue, since you don't want to land on either extreme. Probably why games that homage older genres (Etrian Odyssey and the like) or ones with teams that don't go for a public manager tend to keep more of that playfulness.

[Anonymous No.8199580]

>>8198421
We can argue about XV but they had some good shit during the 7th gen. NEO wasn't bad either. I think they're just in a hangover that lasted the entire 8th gen

[Anonymous No.8199617]

>>8198651
well to add to it, player convenience and ease of access to information having such high priorities in modern design philosophy, too many potential game mechanics have been written off as overhead. Even when a system like thief's has ample justification to be fit into the core loop it's inevitably deemed haram.

[Anonymous No.8200784]

>>8185128
Tone mapping killed art.
Everything is crushed down to dull grays with zero saturation. Old games did not give a fuck about "objectionable" oversaturation.
See that Croteam puzzle game for something modern without tone mapping.

[Anonymous No.8200926]

>>8185128
This
Modern games just try to be realistic. There are so many ways to manipulate art to invoke a certain feeling/atmosphere, and they all get left behind when just trying to be realistic

[Anonymous No.8201694]

>>8200784
I think this has a lot to do with why modern games look so shit.
Normally you would bother to select the palette of your textures so that the game would have a specific look to it, however with the advent of tone mapping you just throw in a bunch of textures and then make whatever changes globally to the final render, the end result is very dull and monochromatic even though there are tons of different colors on the scene.