Do bad graphics equate to soul, or is it just nostalgia?

This, plus old graphics are associated with games that didn't hold your hand and let you think for yourself. Take OP's pic for example. Half Life is an extremely linear game (And that's perfectly good, IMHO), but in that sequence you have chopper and a mortar guy, and a fish. There's no stupid fucking objective markers that pop up telling you to TAKE DOWN THE CHOPPER or SECURE THE MORTAR or ESCAPE INTO THE WATER!. You have a situation, and you fucking get sweaty and deal with it after dying a couple of times because you are actually thinking for yourself and making mistakes, WOW

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Proper art direction and devs actually knew their shit.

I fucking hate the look of GldSrc engine games. I just hate it. Perhaps irrationally but who cares.

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The German dub for Gothic is fucking hilarious.

>retro-graphics reminding Quake 1 engine but made with UE4
>can barely run on my rig

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Did you try to turn off texture filtering?

I hate both, but I do hate the bilinear look even more

Well, my PC barely could run Quake back in the day so I'll say that's accurate.

just play black mesa m8

I fucking hate how unoptimized indie games have become. Small, simple games now are gigabytes in size and require a beefy computer to run well.

Because they doesn't understand how to create a good visual. They just look at some old shit and think that it's good?

>Amid Evil

yes you can make unity look fine but clearly many developers do not. Using stock assets is the very antithesis of soul

Isn't AE made on Quake Darplaces modified engine though?

I think Dusk is. Amid Evil is UE4.

>Now everything is running on unity/unreal
Cuphead was created on unity.

Well said.

Dusk is Unity, there is a quake 1 engine game called WRATH: Aeon of Ruin being made though

So did games like Hollow Knight and West of Loathing. Unity games being look the same is a giant meme.

No, that's Wrath, wich unironically looks better than any other retroFPS out here.

because good design with old graphics >bad design with lastest technology
If you search those old games documents ,you will find how many beautifull concept arts for characters, maps and other things they had. Most of them were very detailed and good but were limited just by the technology . Even with very low graphic quality ,a global vision and design is retained.

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Popular game with bad graphics = soul because it's not being carried by the graphics and the developers have to actually make a fun game
popular game with good graphics = soulless because the graphics is most likely why the game is popular and it's probably not very fun to play, but more to look at like a movie (any playstation exclusive, for example)

Because devs and publishers focus on graphics over any other feature.

Who needs gameplay as long as it looks nice for trailers and e3

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Right. Thanks for the correction anons.

Soul.

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NEW GAME B-BAD????

game soul is a retarded concept. its basically just art design and mostly nostalgia

Graphics dont equate to anything, older games just weren't copies of one another.

Unique style = soul
Generic photorealism = soulless

to be fair, back then everything was made with the Quake 2 engine aswell and they still found ways to make it unique

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Soul equates to soul.
Game will only have soul if it is crafted as an enjoyable, memorable experience by it's creator, who literally puts a part of his own soul into the creation process.
Most modern games are industrialy produced and copied microtransaction platforms, meant only to make money. They are as soul-less as the poor, misguided wage slaves that are ordered to program them.

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HL and Unreal were generic photorealism for it's time, yet they were (and still are) oozing with soul

By proving that their writers needed a swift kick in the nads? Fucking Anachronox.

>Unreal
>Generic photorealism
Have you even played unreal?

what do you mean? its been only a cliffhanger for almost 20 years

>it's creator
it's ''its''. ITS!
- Whose?
- Its.
- Is it?
- It is (it's)

It's its

>if i like the game, its soul
>if i don't like the game, it's soulless

That's because you're a fag, user.

Crude 3D graphics from 15-25 years ago are very soulful. For example, Sonic Adventure has immense amounts of soul.

Depends on the design and art style.
Sands of Time is still one of the best looking games despite its graphical limitations.
It also had some great effects and details going for it.

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>you can make a unity game look like pretty much anything pleb
And that's why it's soulless how is that so hard to understand?

soulest of soul

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why are modern aaa games so cheap and boring?

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it's the art style plus all the cheats they had to do to give it its look. old games just looked more charming than high fidelity shit, especially when modern devs don't exactly come off as hugely devoted to the games and ideas they make. committee driven development

soul

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so much
soul

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great taste, user
youtube.com/watch?v=QmrPXlb7GVo

so much more work in classic games

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Just started playing kenshi and the shitty graphics and performance, for some reason, makes it feel more soulful. i think soulful just means nostalgia for 25 year olds

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Not graphics but every single panel in this game is filled with maximum soul and you can tell they were having fun throwing this shit together. Not by hiring professional actors but just throwing some clothes together themselves and awkwardly posing for still shots.

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Nostalgia 100%. Half-life looks like shit, and always had. Half-life 2 had soul, with properly defined and unique aesthetics, while at its release being a contender for most beautiful game ever.

Being old and ugly don't mean it's "soul", it means it's old and ugly. Metro series games are full of soul in their graphics and design, while still being extremely good looking. On the other hand, The Order 1866 is a game without a hint of soul, some concept artists had a blast and made cool-looking things, but the overall cohesion of design is not there.

Only thing which is properly soulless is 1:1 game remakes like Crash and Spyro. Sure, they may be made by talented people who love the original, but there's not a hint of originality from the people involved. It's literally that kid who'd copy someone else's homework but making it slightly better.

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you got no experience i think

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Game?

>Enclave
>bad graphics
Nigga you what? The game is 17 damn years old, it was insane back then, and it's still looks great.

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I miss the visual clarity and high quality texture work videogames had before Unreal Engine 3 ruined everything.

oh ic what you mean

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How is Enclave as a game? Seems like your standard action game from the original Xbox days

well I am still confused. So you mean most modern games got no soul because they got bad graphics?

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Because the limitations are often used as a crutch and treat the limitations as an "art style". It's not the same.

Proof that it's not nostalgia, most of these modern "retro" games don't even come close to even Street Fighter 3 in animation quality.

This looks cool asf.

Good use of an open environment where a clear point of interest hints the player where to go. Nowadays you're just being funneled in tunnels to get you where you need to go. Dumbass devs listened so much to incompetent normies over the years that they've become retarded as well.

it works because it has the classic element of unlocking and meeting more hot characters to keep you going. The Gameplay is serviceable.

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It's your standard action game. You have 6 somewhat different classes, 2 intersecting campaigns for Light and Dark side, 10/10 textures and pretty nice graphics overall. I replayed it 3 or 4 times, definitely my most favorite "standard action game from the original Xbox days".

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No, I mean soul is completely unlinked to graphical fidelity.

I remember when Deus Ex: HR came out, I was playing it and thinking that games are able to add so much graphical detail at this point that it's starting to feel very cluttered and busy when you're trying to study the environment. Looking for all the logs, items laying on desks and interactables made the game feel very heavy on perception.

I've also been studying art since then and there's this concept of readability in art, meaning that you're supposed to insure that the viewer instantly understands the basic idea of what they're looking at without being overwhelmed by details, and that the artist must guide the viewer's attention by arranging the pieces of the artwork so it has a flow, and that the viewer never gets lost in the artwork.
There's a certain elegance to low poly graphics which makes it convenient not to add a lot of graphical clutter. Unfortunately high end graphics that simulate foliage and complex architecture have a really hard time telling the player that something isn't worth looking at. It's especially annoying since we've been conditioned to look for secrets, and with complex graphics you can hide secrets pretty much anywhere. It makes it feel like everything could be hiding something, and you want to check everything out, but there's so much stuff that it exhausts you.

I think it's probably hard to balance. For first person shooters like Half-Life where you're only concerned with finding health and ammo, you're probably not going to feel too bad if decide not to look for hidden caches. But for games like open world RPGs, where sometimes some of the most powerful gear and upgrades can only be found by exploring, it feels a lot worse if you don't try to explore every crevice.

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Gothic really made the best of it's shit graphics. Artstyle and atmosphere can go a long way, even with garbage polygons

so what now? Do all modern games have bad graphics? Or why are they so souless?

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When graphics were worse devs had to develop an art style to make games that were still aestetically pleasing despite the strict technical limitations.

Now that's not required as its easy to make assets that look "realistic enough" that they don't bother trying to develop an art style or even get the different assets to match stylistically with the others.
This isn't helped by the fact that now games have hundreds of people working on them, in older games it was often a single persons vision responsible for the entire look of a game, and you could tell

then still the question: why are modern games so soulless?

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If you go back and watch some old game documentaries like the making of Oblivion you can see how well the devs got along and how much fun they had even programming something as simple as the AI for an NPC, you never see devs do fun stuff like that anymore

Unique and interactive elements stand out more naturally without the need for highlighting or markers with sprites or low resolution. When everything has lots of details, it's much more difficult to make anything stand out.

I think 4:3 monitors equate to soul.
Why, I cannot say.
I think the reason new games lack SOUL is because they're all just third or first person shooters where all the enemies are guys with guns or zombies.

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Those physics were just about the only good thing about the game

Design by committee/creative decisions being driven by money people
There still are modern devs that release games with soul, look at media molecule

probably because they can't fill the space with interesting stuff

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Is that real?

They're not. Unless you're a nostalgiafag. Games like Metro Exodus exude soul through every landscape, every sight to be had. A game like Monster Hunter World feels like how the series was envisioned at first rather than how it had to be done because of technical limitations. Kamurocho in Yakuza Kiwami 2 and Judgment looks more true to life than how it ever had, and considering the quest for true-to-life design of the city in previous games, it feels more and more like the vision they properly had for their game.

You just filter out the bad old games, which there are plenty of.

The one thing I can't stand about GoldSrc games is the explosion sound.
youtu.be/arCeD5ecwtw?t=3
I don't know why I hate it but I do.

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We've been playing the old same shit for decades now. That is not connected to screen ratio, but there was more creativity during those '4:3 years' because developers were basically throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick.

Reminder that “non-realistic” and “bad graphics” are not the same thing.

media molecule is disgusting. I hate little big planet. That game looks like the most brittish shit ever. Disgusting. A better example would be zachtronics, skullgirls or street fighter

>giant meme
no, most games do look the same cause the devs are lazy

No. Visuals clearly infused with passion equates to soul, not the year they were created.

the only thing I don't like about it, is the lack of variation

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>Games like Metro Exodus exude soul through every landscape, every sight to be had.

That's all it is though, sights. Meaningful interaction with their environments is worse than ever. Press le x-button to pick up the outlined highlighted object. It's boring as fuck.

>true to life
>soul

Both

the problem is that there are so many more bad games now, where the market is a strong as never before. More people than ever are able to make games now and with more money.

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Because they are not unique and innovative anymore. Level design is bland, stories always follow the same tropes, and every game follows the same template. Nothing stands out anymore because it all look, feels and plays the same.
The reason for this is a lack of creativity and time constraints tied in with stakeholders that want results ASAP which result in a mediocre games but will sell anyways due to the billion dollar marketing budget they reserved to make sure it sells.
Quality has made way for quantity. It's all about cash these days. It's killing the vidya industry just like it's already killed the mainstream music and movie industry.
Fuck the Jews.

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Shit taste

/thread

The word you're looking for is abstraction. Games from the late nineties - early oughts had just the right amount of it, completely unintentiona of course. It was due to the limitations of their engines, blocky, almost papier mache models and large environments that did not yet succumb to the plague of corporate play testers. This is why Deus Ex's world will always ooze atmosphere from its skybox with plastered sprite of a cityscape when compared to Eidos Montreal's shitty corporate building or how Looking Glass Games will continue to be remembered in comparison to worlds inhabited by Chad McNormie and his retinue of normalfags. The more realism you put in and the more things you do to service a player, the less memorable a game gets.

Look at the pic related and tell me it's not hundred times more memorable from the shit that will get released soon.

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Modern AAA game principles were set in stone by Valve and that retard that kept going in circles so they turned level design into a corridor so he doesn't get lost. That and lootboxes - it's a fact that a microtransaction-laden game will ALWAYS get more money than something that requires players to put in effort; create a System Shock type of level design today and congratulations - you got yourself into low four figures of players playing it on our favourite DRM malware platform.

Also most game teams comprise of zoomers.

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Think of all the times in Human Revolution where you hack open a supply closet,and the room is overflowing with details but they're all static props except for the one candy bar or ammo box. Or think of how desks were covered in literal garbage.

Compare that with the original where the supply closet is much more primitive graphically, but everything in it can be picked up or used.

It's very unfortunate that you would suffer from extremely shit taste, user.

bad graphics are easier for me to get into because it feels like another world. Hyper-real shit just feels like a pale imitation of the real world and I can't get as immersed