why do only older games feel like they're actually trying to capture an aesthetic? every time I play an older game (and even recently when it's old and I've never played it before), they have a distinct vibe in them. new shit just feels so generic or like the art is directionless and just trying to be like an action film.
what happened?
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>what happened?
Your nostalgia coloured your judgement
Post Modernism happened. Art is so subjective it no longer has to evoke anything with novelty. As long as it looks like art it passes for it even though it lacks anything artfully worthwhile in the first place.
Because they had actual artists in charge of making them. This day publisher just scans bunch of shit and orders the rest from chinese outsourcers, where soulless peons quickly do some shitty assets between clicking like button on their mobile upvote farm.
except I just told you, even when I'm playing older games now and I've never played that game before, it's still having a unique vibe. so it's not just nostalgia
not all old games are aesthetic, we just remember the good ones
I only like older anime and games do to the originality of character designs, world building and stories.
Nostalgia is just a buzzword that dumb zoomers use to defend their shitty taste in vidya
t. played majora's mask for the first time this year and it's my all time favorite game now
It's interesting right? Just looking at a screenshot this room feels so small, but after having just beat that wolf and the cinematic with you and Shiek playing together it feels so important.
Older games were made by white males.
Especially Zelda games
There were actually many more poorly designed games back then compared to now.
You should download a full ROMset and play this for a while:
s3kr.it
As a nonweeb, I 100% agree about anime at least.
N64 zeldas probably had the best artstyle of that system
all games have a distinct style and aesthetic
but because it doesn't feature garish colours and characters with giant eyes your autistic mind just cannot grasp it
>he doesn't know
OLD GOOD
NEW BAD
Older action adventure or rpg adventure games actually felt your were going on a adventure throughout the playthrough of the game. A 7/10 game back the day was a lot more tolerable than a average generic 7/10 game made now.
Game making tools at that time weren’t sophisticated so it was hard to lazily shit out generic crap. Notice how 95% of Unity games use the same lighting models and shading effects?
This but unironically
Old games were made by bunch of young dudes wanting to make some cool stuff. These days games are made by soulless corporate automatons, with some occasional new employee accidentally making some interesting quirks.
I think it's also the fact that people going into video games nowadays are a generation of lazy people who just want to remake something that they enjoyed a lot when they were younger, so they can semi-live out their dream of having worked on that game, rather than making something completely new
>all of these and jump force being terrible
>Metro, DoA, and Dirt Rally 2 being ok
>Apex and Tetris 99 existing at all
It's been a weird and busy February.
>LOW POLYGONS AND SHITTY TEXTURES GOOD
>OBJECTS LOOKING LIKE THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO AND CLEARER TEXTURES BAD
Yeah, replaying Silver right now and it feels so good. No markers or pop ups telling you what to do. You just travel through the world and see for yourself.
Ever since the Xbox 360 games started going for realism over aesthetic.
>this fag again
The advent of postmodernism predates the earliest video games, and some of the most acclaimed video games of all time have been postmodernist.
it's not the fact they're low polygons, it's the way they put them together. there is an aesthetic that makes them pleasing to the eye and like it took skill to put it together.
nowadays it's ugly ass characters
Yeah too bad you're forced to exclusively play AAA games now.
You especially see that with RPGs where old ones were trying to emulate tabletop and new ones are trying to emulate other videogames.
When graphics were still technically shitty you had to do something to make it visually palatable and help it stand out from other games.
People might get mad at me for saying this, but RDR2 is one of the most boring looking games I've ever seen, despite having such "good" graphics. Most games make at least some concessions to style, but RDR2 is so utterly, blandly photorealistic. I really dislike how it looks
Gears 1-3 was the last series that did that imo
All that giant Gothic architecture and stuff was pretty aesthetic and set up an oppressive feeling world without ever explaining that the government was fascist or that there had been a constant cycle of war even before the Locust. The place just felt miserable, and impressive.
I feel like it's because graphical fidelity has reached a point to where they don't have to bridge the gap of pixels with creative/smart art direction anymore
This
People forget that there were dozens of systems and homebrew adventures as well. Those ideas were used in creating games, worlds and stories. Now tabletop is dying and those collaborative tales made with imagination are no longer told.
this, plus before digital distribution with copious sales, we were more discerning about our video game purchases
we did a whole lot more research into what we bought so before we even got to playing it, we already thought the game meshed with our sensibilities
now, we just buy and forget if it doesn't give us the spark within the first couple hours
>this
Alot of low poly games look like fucking garbage, but the good ones stand out.
there's never really been a game story worth talking about
Games before SNES are bad. Games after PS2 are bad.
Old video games are like abstract art. Technology was very limited so devs couldn't just replicate things from reality. Instead they had to work with the power of suggestion.
This is why old video games feel so unique and vastly different in style, because the power of suggestion is vastly more artistic than the power of reality. You see a world through the creator's lens and how they themselves view the world, instead of just seeing things for what they are.
Yes this is it.
I really think it's modern lighting engines. They are all tweaked to resemble reality as closely as possible. Moreso than that, all big budget games seem to go for that ultra-polished, Hollywood style lighting, with fill lights, back lights, highlights, etc. so every scene looks shiny and pleasing.
never thought about this. what would you say it is in retro lighting that makes it unique? could you clarify?
In addition, each dev team is using its own set of tools to approach the problem. Each console has very different strengths and weaknesses.
I don't know if remakes are inspired purely by devs wanting to be associated of iconic development teams of the past. I will agree it's lazy, but more so in the way that they don't really have to build something new from the ground up and can easily cash in on the older works that are already known without having to risk making a new IP that might fail.
>this
>why do only older games feel like they're actually trying to capture an aesthetic?
Because that's what they were trying to do.
Being limited by technology makes you find a way to express your vision in different ways.
Then remakes come along, the developers finally have a way to realize their vision, only for nostalgia and zoomers who never played the game to complain how the original had "soul".
>the developers finally have a way to realize their vision
But the directors and developers who work on these games are long gone by the time most of these remakes come out.
Except the original developers have nothing to do with these remakes
Is there anything more embarrassing than zoomers on /vr/?
I think it's just more primitive. N64 can likely only support few (if any lights) at any given time, so you see a lot of games that have one central light, and thus one main color and intensity for the scene. This singular color sets the mood for the world, making things more down-to-earth and atmospheric. It can also make scenes dark and hazy, much darker than modern games (Which again, rely on heavy use of filmic lighting even for "dark" scenes )
Boomers anywhere
>Then remakes come along, the developers finally have a way to realize their vision, only for nostalgia and zoomers who never played the game to complain how the original had "soul".
Because the graphics and art design are *a part* of the creative vision dumbass.
Change the visuals and you change the creative vision as well.