Thread 11941830

I kinda prefer how 6th gen games look. Models did not look like made of cardboard like during the 5th gen, but also not overly detailed like the 7th gen onwards.
Maybe is just nostalgia, but there is something about those graphics that just feels different

This is also the period I have the most nostalgia for. 2D and early 3D are both beautiful in their own way, but I think pristine PS2 graphics go a little unnoticed by comparison. Character models looked could still look very "real" while still being recognizably video game characters and not an uncanny mockery of reality. Pushing graphics beyond this point was largely a waste of effort.

yeah it’s interesting, but it does seem with the latest 3D scan tech that the uncanny valley has been overcome. or maybe we’re just used to it by now.

it’s just hard to imagine a developer pushing graphics like this and people not just asking “why”

>>11941830 (OP)
>Posts gen 6.5 game
t. 90s kid born in 1999

I don't care. As long as the game is good.

>I prefer how 6th gen games look
>Maybe it's just nostalgia
>just feels different
You had no need to dox yourself as a 96 born zillennial

>>11941830 (OP)
SOTC doesn't represent it's gen in the slightest. The game was chasing every single advanced graphical effect they could recreate on the PS2. The animation system alone is based on back then cutting edge techniques. It in no way a 6th gen looking or working game. It's a outlier.

Maybe it was just a Capcom thing, but one thing i really loved about this graphics in this generation was how character models, specially in japanese games, often translated anime features and proportions such as big eyes into 3D, probably as a way to make models seem more appealing when compromising detail for stable polygon counts. It was very noticeable in RE4, God Hand and Devil May Cry.

And yeah, it's a very nice spot between the 5th gen where characters were basically jaggy action figures with swappable face textures, the 7th and 8th gen with uncanny unreal engine uglyness, or the 9th gen where you can view every single pore and wrinkle of Dante's face in 4K.

>>11941830 (OP)
This was a golden era for visual clarity in games. Before the current vaseline era or the hyperdetailed texture 8th gen era or the inadequate resolution blurry texture low frame rate 7th gen era. The directX 8-9 era had so many games that look great and are visually easy to read, making for some really timeless action and shooting games.

>>11941830 (OP)
The PS2 and Xbox, and even the GameCube in some games, were the consoles where I stopped noticing how low-resolution the models were and just marveled at how absorbing everything felt. I don't know if it was specifically because of the graphical fidelity of the generation or if it was because game designers had gotten pretty good at USING the graphics and styling of a game to make it feel immersive. One thing I do know is that it was a time when games still looked bold and artistic and weren't overly concerned with impressing tourists with realistic graphics.

This was also a generation when we started hammering out a lot of issues that had plagued certain genres. Shooters became more popular on consoles, RPGs started branching out into different formats, stealth action games found their stride... it felt like anything could happen and the only limits were your imagination. Despite the turmoil of the early 21st century, it felt good to be a gamer.

>>11941830 (OP)
I lie 7th gen two but yes, renderware was a great era.
>>11941883
Nothing beats early computing games for nostalgia from about 1980-2005 because it was evolving at the speed of light

>>11941830 (OP)
Funny you use SotC as an example, because Demon's Souls perfected this style, and that was in 2009. I maintain that the deciding factor between retro and non-retro should be games/consoles that were designed with standard definition in mind.

>>11942494
The PC version of Halo looks so bad.

>>11941830 (OP)
I'd be fine with 6th gen IF it had better capability for LIGHTING. That's the biggest difference. Don't know why people only bring up increased polygon counts.

But that reminds me, Vagrant Story on PS1 had nice lighting. Don't know exactly hod they did it, but the highlights look good in cutscenes. Good facial expressions too for a PS1 game.

Graphics don't age simple as that. You can still play original Doom/Duke/Blood/Quake and they will still look amazing. If a game looked good back in the day it will still look good.

>>11943138
I was discussing this with a friend of mine while talking about a certain MMO that's been around for a while and he made it a point to make a distinction between graphical fidelity and quality of art, with style being the determining factor. A game with a solid, coherent, and well-crafted style will look good no matter what engine it renders on (although the graphical capabilities of the system rendering it will have to be considered when determining what style to use).

The unfortunate corollary is that a game that looks like shit will always look like shit no matter what you render it on, but that's what mods are for.

>>11942997
The PC version looks identical. Stop living in the past.

>>11943229
Yep for some reason most visual effects from that era of games don't work at higher resolution. For example, even though the PC version of GTASA is a shitty port, 90% of effects/filters like heat wave only works at 640x480 correctly.

>>11942475
>This was a golden era for visual clarity in games.
You obviously never played SotC then. Game is very blurry due to several factors like motion blur on the camera, accumulation blur on the character when moving and low fps. Not to mention it uses a transparent layer in the distance to simulate a very blurry DoF. What OP posted isn't how the game looks originally it's either from the port or a emulator.

>>11943651
I have played that game on ps2, but it's the rare exception in that generation. Most of the games are pretty sharp and have good contrasting colors. SOTC graphics are ahead of their time in that they have the same issues that were common complaints about ps360 games.

>>11943163
The technical capabilities determine what kind of art style can be used and new ones were being invented every few years. Different art styles were used for Atari VCS and NES. It is really only the current generation that the art styles have barely evolved.

>>11942093
>or the 9th gen where you can view every single pore and wrinkle of Dante's face in 4K.

9th gen is just 8th gen with hit and miss raytracing

>>11943684
>It is really only the current generation that the art styles have barely evolved.
What's left to evolve into, everything's been done

>>11941830 (OP)
I get that. A simpler look does not mean a worse look, frequently the opposite. With more graphics comes the desire to fill the environment with meaningless noise. Simplest example that comes to mind is Dark Soul 2 vs 3. I fell in love with DS2's general look and art style while despising DS3 completely.

DS3 is so busy and cluttered and ugly (and brown). They couldn't make a fucking house without building it out of tombstones, tree roots and waving screeching skeletons.
Meanwhile there are places in DS2 that are only a few steps away from looking like they came out of a korean MMO: stone buildings which are just a bit too large and a bit too undecorated, like someone took a PS2 game and just remastered it with better graphics. But I like that, it has a simple comfy charm. It ends up being a sort of fantasy brutalism.

Of course I suspect a lot of what I love was caused by rushed developement vs deliberate choice, but whatever.

>>11943698
I've heard people make that exact same comment about ps3 and ps4 btw.

We're in a period of stagnation, but there will be another technological breakthrough sometime. Of course there will be physical and economical limits to computer technology, but I don't believe we're already there.
We are in a situation where art is limited by creativity due to the almost limitless programmability of modern GPU but still practically is limited by computation. Some of the ray tracing demos and mods are genuinely cool but it is nowhere near what can be done if GPUs get big enough.

>>11941883
They should have stopped graphics at that point and focused more on fun physics like moving objects and destructible environments imo

>>11943706
Are you saying new tech will unlock new art styles or..?

>>11943712
Yes, eventually. Here's a facile example. I'm not a big fan of aislop but it is already possible to make a game with ai frame generation instead of rasterization. It looks surreal and quite wobbly and is very inefficient in terms of quality and computer resource/electricity use. You could theoretically make something that looks good or at least interestingly different than how all the rasterized games look. There may also come a point where it scales better than rasterization in terms of the amount of detail or the smoothness of the image. For example, the artefacts you get are blurriness and smearing and images that don't really make any sense, but you don't get any jaggies or moire patterns.

>>11943705
DeS looks the best design-wise to me, probably due to the Playstation dev team helping with it.
>>11943706
There probably wont be another wave of great creations. Most talented people are leaving the business and the point of AI is to gather all their information then eliminate the need for them, so it will be corporations and rich people using AI to pump out the same mainstream stuff. They will always have access to the best AI tech etc. and will always have the advantage in the marketplace, which shrinks and sub-divides into further niches. Once sex games and toy peripherals advance then that will take away alot of customers and their times and regular games will become even more of a niche besides the biggest series, like GTA or whatever. Even if a new, creative person wants to work on a passion project, he has no access to an environment to grow and learn, so those that succeed will be even fewer and far between. There will also be oversaturation in the market making it harder to be noticed.

>>11943774
This is just a doomer stacking excuses. Creative people can't use ever more accessible tools and AI to stand out among "rich people using AI to pump out mainstream stuff"?

What next

>>11943828
While I was writing it I was like damn this is negative, but I would expect it to go in that direction. I didn't include any positive what-ifs or alternate scenarios because I figure you or someone else were covering the positive side and I didn't need to fence-sit.

>>11943856
>I figure you or someone else were covering the positive side
Lol on 4chan?

>>11942879
>>11943774
>DeS
There were also Nier (specifically the OG 360/PS3 version not the remaster) and Pandora's Tower with a similar style

>>11943115
>Vagrant Story on PS1 had nice lighting. Don't know exactly hod they did it, but the highlights look good in cutscenes
IIRC, they made custom textures for each angle/shot.

>>11944375
I suspected that, but it was so masterfully done I started doubting my knowledge of what a late PS1 game can pull off lol. The face animations for example caught me off guard.

>>11942047
you cant judge art history by the mean

I just played through Star Wars Battlefront 2004 and 2005 on PC. It is a great example of how clear graphics with strong contrasting colors make for a timeless art style. That rather than SOTC is an example of how good games in 6th gen typically looked.
(except the Endor level, they made that an impenetrable forest on purpose but damn is it hard to see anything in that one)

>>11943651
>What OP posted isn't how the game looks originally
That's how the game looked on my CRT

>>11941830 (OP)
They really needed good animation and physycs to pull it off, otherwise ypi get constantine cutscenes for the ps2

>>11943138
>Doom
doom looks absolutely horrible and already did so back in the 90s. every shooter before quake is literally unplayable

>>11945168
Quake has boring level design and no memorable levels unlike Doom

>>11942997
Halo PC port was an abomination. First time I ever noticed how awful a port looked and I was only 11.

>>11945168
Quake has no map. Doom is automatically better for that alone

>>11941830 (OP)
>Maybe is just nostalgia
It is nostalgia
Take the fucking rose tinted glasses off.

>>11941830 (OP)
I love 5th and 6th gen graphics more than anything. I don't mind modern graphics though as long as they don't have the overly lit blinding lighting IDK how to describe it Battlefield 6 has a lot of it. I fucking hate "realistic lighting" or whatever people call it.

>>11944375
>Make custom textures for each shot
>Xenogears they wanted all unique NPC's
>FFVIII no, you need to animate this fur lining
>Similar shit in FFT, FF12
>Why game no meet deadline!?
Based

>>11941830 (OP)
one thing I'll give you is the comparison to the early seventh gen. people tend not to consider the difference between mature baked and handpainted lighting techniques in the sixth gen and early dynamic lighting and procedural generation in the seventh. devs had more systematic modular tools but the end effect was often less refined than what you would get in the sixth gen. compare silent hill 3 to downpour or really any ue3 title and it's obvious.