A programmer not understanding aesthetics. That tracks. Does this dude not understand that these modern nostalgiacore games don’t have 150 people working on it like FF7. Devs choose these aesthetics in part because they are cheaper to make.
“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”
I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.
it’s not hard to relate to their frustration either, as they are basically seeing the unintentional “flaws” they failed to iron out celebrated as “signature” characteristics of the games they created
They are signature, and that’s why they’re an aesthetic choice. I’ve heard people refer to the N64 as a “blur factory”, because it was low res with even worse textures, if it had any at all. Likewise, the PS1 looked like everything was under water. If your stealth game has a secret agent and a PS1 aesthetic, we know you’re trying to take a shot at MGS1. If your horror game has a PS1 aesthetic, we know it’s your spin on Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That signature look conveys to its target audience what kind of game they’re making, and it conveys it very quickly. As a bonus, it can often be cheaper than trying to make a modern art style with fewer “flaws”.
Really? You don’t understand why people might look back fondly on the hardware limitations of early games that they now feel nostalgic for? There are still people making Game Boy games and physically releasing them, to the point that there’s now third-party handhelds that can play GB/GBC cartridges. There’s still a thriving Commodore 64 gaming community.
Some people love the ‘warm’ but inaccurate sound of tube amplifiers
People loved polaroid photos too. They were an objectively ‘bad’ media even when first introduced. But they were instant and through the miscellanea they captured, eventually a polaroid aesthetic appeared, something people want - where originally they cared about the instant photo part.
There are some things that are still weird to bring back. Like in comparison with pixel art: pixel art was a limitation but also a medium and the best art was created by masterfully utilizing it to its limits, but the PS1-style polygon z-fighting and weird texture warping were not seen as a medium, I can’t really think of a game that would utilize them for any artistic purpose, the most masterful use for them was to make them as invisible to end users as possible, and the whole art was in getting them to a minimum.
Introducing them purposefully and setting them center-stage feels weird, like building a new car out of rusty parts and making sure the seats properly smell of old farts. It is an aesthetic, for sure, but not an attractive one.
Well said. I don’t think people genuinely understand the technical difficulties this problem posed and how it only produced negatives- it’s like having a serious movie scene and then the main character randomly has chihuahua legs because of perspective warping. When it happens during gameplay it can be confusing, too. There’s no charm at all and it’s not the fun kind of jank like with physics ragdolls.
It’s not really meant to be beautiful or functional or push boundaries, it’s meant to create (or recreate) a certain atmosphere or aesthetic sense. And you can’t forget that Puppet Combo’s games got really popular on YouTube and Twitch, so their style inspired and was iterated on by others. Mouthwashing was also really influential.
Sometimes things are intentionally ugly or weird or messy or technologically outdated. Sometimes people think it’s cool to make a car out of rusty parts.
Nostalgia turns it into an art style and aesthetic. The same thing happened with pixel graphics. We’re going through the ages of video game graphics again as people that grew up with those games are now the ones creating the games. In a few years i bet we’ll start seeing games with the aesthetic of GameCube and the PS2 games.
Personally I think it’s a good thing. When it turns into an aesthetic it never truly dies and it makes the style timeless. We’ll be seeing pixel graphics and PS1 style graphics in games until people get bored of it, which they never will.
I do agree that it’s nostalgia-powered and fuelled by millennials with disposable income being a fertile market, but to me here’s the weird thing: I think pixel art can look incredibly beautiful while the old early 3D game style looks like absolute ass (such as the OG FF7 screenshot above).
But I grew up much more on the latter than the former. There has to be more to it than just nostalgia.
It’s not only nostalgia. Arbitrary limitations drive creativity. Previously the limitations were imposed by the hardware. Today the designer can choose their own limitations.
I was thinking this recently when watching footage of Dread Delusion, a 2024 game that looks like something out of 1999.
It’s a visually interesting game, maybe not profoundly so, but it gave me a passing thought about what makes a game more “artistic”. I was looking at a rocky wall texture, low res enough to count the individual pixels, but I still recognized it as rock. And then I asked myself what takes more skill: a high fidelity AAA game that just megascans a real rock surface to capture as much detail as possible, or a game like Dread Delusion trying to convey the idea of a rock in as little detail as possible.
Developers back in the day would have absolutely killed to have the hardware capabilities we have today. No longer needing to worry about fitting games on a tiny disc or cartridge measured only in MB, not even in GB. Even Dread Delusion, despite looking like a PS1 game, could not have fit on even 3 PS1 discs. But it was those very limitations that made developers really have to think carefully about their content, the total scope of the games they wanted to make, how much detail they could afford to include, etc.
I don’t think those limitations necessarily made games inherently better, because there were still a lot of bad games back in the day. But it meant that everything had more deliberation to it, where a developer would create a game that was one really good idea instead of a game made of 20 just “okay” ideas.
I think it’s because there were more limitations than just resolution that we can ignore nowadays while still considering it pixel art. Things like limited color pallettes, sprite counts, having little memory to store graphics, low framerates, analog video, CRTs…
And some people just like ass more than others. I personally think the PS1 aesthetic is charming when done right. But that’s just my opinion, totally fair to disagree.
I still see the fifth generation as a lost one for pixel art. The games that do it really well in that era are few and far between (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Suikoden, Breath of Fire IV) and even those still had 3D elements in them that have aged like milk.
I too grew up more on pixel art, but the problem I always had with 3D in the 90’s was that–on an objective, technical level–it was already being done so much better elsewhere than it was on PlayStation and the others. Both PC and arcades were consistently driving much higher framerates, and by the late 90’s, far better picture quality. It wasn’t even four years after the PSX that the Dreamcast launched and completely outclassed it in graphics potential. I feel the move to 3D in the console market was just too early. I guess I can sort of see why some would be nostalgic for it, but to me this trend is the equivalent of being nostalgic for 19th century movies.
What I don’t get is why this trend is happening now. The tech’s been there for indies and the like to do this for a while. The demo for people old enough to grow up with these games has also long been in disposable income territory. Maybe we’re just oversaturated with pixel art at this point?
Coincidentally, this point of view is probably wht this is one of the best things I heard from brian eno:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Wow, Ive never heard that before but that is such a beautiful way of putting it. I love art that’s messy and weird. Music that sounds imperfect where you can hear mistakes or “imperfections”. Either intentional or not, I love those kinds of things in art. Makes it human.
I have also not really wanted to go back to 2D games; not because of the graphics, but because of the actual game mechanics of a 2D world vs a 3D world. Case and point: Dwarf Fortress is “3D” without being 3D. The world itself is three dimensional, even though you only are presented with a 2D slice of it. Other games have replicated Dwarf Fortress’s gameplay in 3D graphics, yet are still otherwise just two-dimensional with just 1 plane of operational space.
I love me some Metroidvanias, but I would like to see more that are 3D and not literally copying the 2D design of the OGs that named the genre.
It’s not just nostalgia. Things were less enshittified in that era. The writing, story telling, world building, and creative direction were far superior and games were weirder. That’s why I like the style anyways
It reminds me of a time where things were better. They focused less on shiny, soulless graphics and more on the heart of the game. Our minds filled in more details and it was fine. Games today are much more likely to have glittery graphics and be not fun or even predatory. Then you have indie games, they might not be technically perfect but they’re much more likely to have that heart.
People just be having fun man.
Not to mention 3D modeling is pretty hard, it’s no wonder indie devs who are often self-taught artists/modelers/coders/everything-ers are doing it.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you’re submitting before posting to see if it’s already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don’t share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don’t want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
A programmer not understanding aesthetics. That tracks. Does this dude not understand that these modern nostalgiacore games don’t have 150 people working on it like FF7. Devs choose these aesthetics in part because they are cheaper to make.
I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z15zGaCUjxo
They are signature, and that’s why they’re an aesthetic choice. I’ve heard people refer to the N64 as a “blur factory”, because it was low res with even worse textures, if it had any at all. Likewise, the PS1 looked like everything was under water. If your stealth game has a secret agent and a PS1 aesthetic, we know you’re trying to take a shot at MGS1. If your horror game has a PS1 aesthetic, we know it’s your spin on Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That signature look conveys to its target audience what kind of game they’re making, and it conveys it very quickly. As a bonus, it can often be cheaper than trying to make a modern art style with fewer “flaws”.
Really? You don’t understand why people might look back fondly on the hardware limitations of early games that they now feel nostalgic for? There are still people making Game Boy games and physically releasing them, to the point that there’s now third-party handhelds that can play GB/GBC cartridges. There’s still a thriving Commodore 64 gaming community.
Edited for tone, I was having a bad day earlier.
I have a Commodore 64 with a Commodore 64 monitor in my storage. I’m more than willing to parr with it if you can find someone who is interested
Some people love the pop and hiss of records.
Some people love the ‘warm’ but inaccurate sound of tube amplifiers
People loved polaroid photos too. They were an objectively ‘bad’ media even when first introduced. But they were instant and through the miscellanea they captured, eventually a polaroid aesthetic appeared, something people want - where originally they cared about the instant photo part.
There are some things that are still weird to bring back. Like in comparison with pixel art: pixel art was a limitation but also a medium and the best art was created by masterfully utilizing it to its limits, but the PS1-style polygon z-fighting and weird texture warping were not seen as a medium, I can’t really think of a game that would utilize them for any artistic purpose, the most masterful use for them was to make them as invisible to end users as possible, and the whole art was in getting them to a minimum.
Introducing them purposefully and setting them center-stage feels weird, like building a new car out of rusty parts and making sure the seats properly smell of old farts. It is an aesthetic, for sure, but not an attractive one.
Well said. I don’t think people genuinely understand the technical difficulties this problem posed and how it only produced negatives- it’s like having a serious movie scene and then the main character randomly has chihuahua legs because of perspective warping. When it happens during gameplay it can be confusing, too. There’s no charm at all and it’s not the fun kind of jank like with physics ragdolls.
It’s not really meant to be beautiful or functional or push boundaries, it’s meant to create (or recreate) a certain atmosphere or aesthetic sense. And you can’t forget that Puppet Combo’s games got really popular on YouTube and Twitch, so their style inspired and was iterated on by others. Mouthwashing was also really influential.
Sometimes things are intentionally ugly or weird or messy or technologically outdated. Sometimes people think it’s cool to make a car out of rusty parts.
Nostalgia turns it into an art style and aesthetic. The same thing happened with pixel graphics. We’re going through the ages of video game graphics again as people that grew up with those games are now the ones creating the games. In a few years i bet we’ll start seeing games with the aesthetic of GameCube and the PS2 games.
Personally I think it’s a good thing. When it turns into an aesthetic it never truly dies and it makes the style timeless. We’ll be seeing pixel graphics and PS1 style graphics in games until people get bored of it, which they never will.
I do agree that it’s nostalgia-powered and fuelled by millennials with disposable income being a fertile market, but to me here’s the weird thing: I think pixel art can look incredibly beautiful while the old early 3D game style looks like absolute ass (such as the OG FF7 screenshot above).
But I grew up much more on the latter than the former. There has to be more to it than just nostalgia.
It’s not only nostalgia. Arbitrary limitations drive creativity. Previously the limitations were imposed by the hardware. Today the designer can choose their own limitations.
this is evident when looking at modern pixel art games. something like Celeste could never run on an SNES or Genesis.
even Shovel Knight, which is made specifically to mimic NES games, ignores some limitations of the NES
I wonder how low-poly art styles will evolve with time? even modern pixel art is quite different from the pixel art of the 2010s
I was thinking this recently when watching footage of Dread Delusion, a 2024 game that looks like something out of 1999.
It’s a visually interesting game, maybe not profoundly so, but it gave me a passing thought about what makes a game more “artistic”. I was looking at a rocky wall texture, low res enough to count the individual pixels, but I still recognized it as rock. And then I asked myself what takes more skill: a high fidelity AAA game that just megascans a real rock surface to capture as much detail as possible, or a game like Dread Delusion trying to convey the idea of a rock in as little detail as possible.
Developers back in the day would have absolutely killed to have the hardware capabilities we have today. No longer needing to worry about fitting games on a tiny disc or cartridge measured only in MB, not even in GB. Even Dread Delusion, despite looking like a PS1 game, could not have fit on even 3 PS1 discs. But it was those very limitations that made developers really have to think carefully about their content, the total scope of the games they wanted to make, how much detail they could afford to include, etc.
I don’t think those limitations necessarily made games inherently better, because there were still a lot of bad games back in the day. But it meant that everything had more deliberation to it, where a developer would create a game that was one really good idea instead of a game made of 20 just “okay” ideas.
I think it’s because there were more limitations than just resolution that we can ignore nowadays while still considering it pixel art. Things like limited color pallettes, sprite counts, having little memory to store graphics, low framerates, analog video, CRTs…
And some people just like ass more than others. I personally think the PS1 aesthetic is charming when done right. But that’s just my opinion, totally fair to disagree.
I personally like both ass and tits
I still see the fifth generation as a lost one for pixel art. The games that do it really well in that era are few and far between (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Suikoden, Breath of Fire IV) and even those still had 3D elements in them that have aged like milk.
I too grew up more on pixel art, but the problem I always had with 3D in the 90’s was that–on an objective, technical level–it was already being done so much better elsewhere than it was on PlayStation and the others. Both PC and arcades were consistently driving much higher framerates, and by the late 90’s, far better picture quality. It wasn’t even four years after the PSX that the Dreamcast launched and completely outclassed it in graphics potential. I feel the move to 3D in the console market was just too early. I guess I can sort of see why some would be nostalgic for it, but to me this trend is the equivalent of being nostalgic for 19th century movies.
What I don’t get is why this trend is happening now. The tech’s been there for indies and the like to do this for a while. The demo for people old enough to grow up with these games has also long been in disposable income territory. Maybe we’re just oversaturated with pixel art at this point?
Nostalgia is a helluva drug.
Coincidentally, this point of view is probably wht this is one of the best things I heard from brian eno:
I was hoping someone would post this quote. It’s exactly it.
I’m kind of hoping that the 28 years later movie is filmed in 1080p or something.
Wow, Ive never heard that before but that is such a beautiful way of putting it. I love art that’s messy and weird. Music that sounds imperfect where you can hear mistakes or “imperfections”. Either intentional or not, I love those kinds of things in art. Makes it human.
I recently started Shenmue 3, and I’m a little sad it’s so sharp and high res. It’s still excellent so far, but it’s missing some of the charm.
Props to this article for actually attempting to explain about how 3d graphics worked
gameplay > graphics
Ah, that ol “Papa-Lucas-Syndrome” sadly there appears to be no cure :(
Well there’s still new movies made in black and white
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12818328/
The lighthouse and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color
Yeah I don’t get it either.
When 3D games first came out, I stopped playing 2D games altogether. Needless to say, I don’t miss the blockiness of PS1 games.
I’m an absolute graphics slut but IDGAF. I love modern tech like path tracing so much that I saved up and bought a 4090 at launch. No regrets.
I have also not really wanted to go back to 2D games; not because of the graphics, but because of the actual game mechanics of a 2D world vs a 3D world. Case and point: Dwarf Fortress is “3D” without being 3D. The world itself is three dimensional, even though you only are presented with a 2D slice of it. Other games have replicated Dwarf Fortress’s gameplay in 3D graphics, yet are still otherwise just two-dimensional with just 1 plane of operational space.
I love me some Metroidvanias, but I would like to see more that are 3D and not literally copying the 2D design of the OGs that named the genre.
It’s not just nostalgia. Things were less enshittified in that era. The writing, story telling, world building, and creative direction were far superior and games were weirder. That’s why I like the style anyways
But what haves nothing to do with the art style.
It reminds me of a time where things were better. They focused less on shiny, soulless graphics and more on the heart of the game. Our minds filled in more details and it was fine. Games today are much more likely to have glittery graphics and be not fun or even predatory. Then you have indie games, they might not be technically perfect but they’re much more likely to have that heart.
People just be having fun man.
Not to mention 3D modeling is pretty hard, it’s no wonder indie devs who are often self-taught artists/modelers/coders/everything-ers are doing it.