>>719027059
Soul represents the medium of video games before PBR graphics destroyed their unique low poly visual merit. Much like how CGI ruined hollywood movies, the advent of advanced physically based rendering has completely destroyed the video game aesthetic and created a homogenized, bastardization of video game visuals that has impacted every facet of their design.

Games from the PS2 and earlier were made by hand. The hand of the artist is ever present. Whether it's the hand painted / photobashed textures of Half Life 1, or the comic book exaggerated realism of GTA 3, or the painterly colors of World of Warcraft, or the pixel art in Chrono Trigger or the low poly skies of Spyro on PS1... video games used to have a visual language all their own. Our brains entered a digital world of man made art to explore and interact with...

But then PBR graphics came. Low poly simplified worlds disappeared in favor of highly complex, visually dense, ultra realistic worlds. Procedural generation fills the gaps. The human hand is lost. Characters weren't painted they were sculpted. Every single material in the game has bumps and roughness and shininess and is reacting to every light source "realistically"... but it's all just NOISE. The art is gone, it's just blurry, noisy, visual density as far as the eye can (barely) see.

When games became CGI movies, and they lost their low poly spacial uniqueness, they faltered away from a medium of digital worlds of interactivity into digital set dressing for barely interactive movies at immense artistic cost.

The more realistic games get, the less interactive, the less "games" they are allowed to be. You can't just jump 10 feet into the air, it's unrealistic! the animations won't look right! All the fun of games is being erased by mocapped, ultra realistic slop and it's all because everyone thought better graphics would improve games... but it actually degrades the medium.