Like...for miles in every direction, all I can see are pitchforks, and here I am standing alone on a small hill thinking to myself "Holy shit. That's the Spiderweb software guy. I've played every single one of his games, EVERY SINGLE ONE, and loved all of them."
The graphics in the games are exactly as good as they need to be to make wonderful story-driven RPGs.
While the style may not be modern, the gameplay and stories tend to be quite good. I would also argue that a game that looks great doesn't necessarily imply that the game is any good. Battlefront 2 is a great looking game that is ultimately a soulless, lootbox filled shitshow with painfully bland gameplay.
Anyone saying that he needs to hire an art director have completely missed the point of his article: his business can only support his family. He has also been able to maintain this business for 20 years, which is a lot more than can be said about any other indies.
Ultimately, this is a style that Jeff likes, and it makes him money. If people don't like it, then they can go play something else. He still has his fan base that keeps him afloat.
EDIT: grammar
I think there's no point in making their games looking any different than they do (because it's part of their brand, now) but the correct response to a question of why they don't make a "better" looking game is that they don't care. Or, maybe, it's a taste issue. Flailing your hands about how people totally did not appreciate you going through the trouble of making the graphics isometric or hiring underpaid artists is not the way to go. It's maybe "honest" but it's IMO at best a misunderstanding of and at worst a severe lack of respect for art direction and visual design.
No, he plainly states it is a cost issue. He can't afford to hire the people who could create truly "good" art for his games.
You can actually see some decent concept art and character design in their current games but they're drowned out by a stubborn refusal to actually change the overall balance of detail, suffocating those decent artworks in a sea of blurry/noisy backgrounds. It's a colossal waste, really, only explainable by a stubborn refusal to "learn art", which I can respect by itself, but the post comes off as utter denial of that even happening.
It's okay to dismiss art direction and make that some kind of design philosophy, it works for their games. But blaming it on everything but dismissal feels wrong.
People keep posting in the thread that games with "bad art" still look good with "good art direction" but art direction also costs money, which he still doesn't have.
It's an extra risk he doesn't want to his lifestyle that has worked for him for 25 years.
Sounds like "people who care" are people that have spent a lot of money on art and need to respond to this post to justify it. Or are artists themselves and need to prove their worth.
Money talks.
All too often I think people are happy to throw their hands in the air and presume that indie success is just ‘impossible’. This article, for me, added some much-needed nuance to the discussion.
Spiderweb tends to focus on different aspects of game making that are admittedly a lot less visual, but are arguably no less artistic. This is a wildly hyperbolic analogy, but it seems to me that suggesting that Jeff Vogel doesn't care much about art because his games are weak on the visuals is a bit like suggesting that Led Zeppelin didn't care so much about art because their shows didn't offer the same visual spectacle as a GWAR performance.
- (Screenshot of Ultima V) - "This is what looks normal to me"
- "Queen's Wish has a very retro square-tile top-down view, reminiscent of old Ultima games, old Pokemon games..."
- (Screenshot of Baba is You) - "If a game that looks like this can be a hit, maybe there can be room for me?"
- (Screenshot of Atari Adventure) - "If you don't like it, maybe the problem is you."
Apart from maybe(!) Atari Adventure, all of those games look far better than Queen's Wish. Even Ultima V shades one side of its walls, something none of his games have accomplished based on these screenshots.
It's an insulting strawman to say that the people criticizing his art would also reject these other games with simple art. It's also insulting to the artists who worked on those games, producing better results in a similar budget. Maybe the insult is unintentional, because he genuinely can't tell the difference himself. But if that's the case, he should just admit that, rather than hiding behind his choice to use a top-down perspective.
It's the hundreds of tiny details like this, that make for great design and good art, regardless of how retro the medium is. That's what this guy seems to be utterly blind to, and it really rubs against people who DO like to spend the effort and time on such tiny details to get the design just right ... only for this guy to call it "looks good enough for me" and then imitate it badly.
Just stick to the business explanation, because there's nothing wrong with running a business on shitty art.
1) If you look at Avernum 3 and Queen's Wish, the characters you are supposed to control don't "stick out" visually. I must have looked at the Avernum picture half a dozen times and actually missed the 3 other characters in the picture other than the cloak and the dragon. That's a huge mistake in visual design--and that is the fault of the designer not the artist. QW has similar issues in that the character design isn't very distinctive: without those horrible colored circles you can't tell friend from foe. And the visual design of the characters makes distinguishing classes difficult. Again, that's designer failure--not art failure.
2) If you look at QW, there are 4 different levels of art. The bottom icons are gorgeous and would fit in a AAA game. The portraits look like potato cam from 1999. The characters look like bad pseudo 2.5D from 1993. And the background sprites look like they are from "My First RPG Maker". You can choose any of those, be consistent, and people won't feel too bad. Look at Exile and Avernum--they have a consistent art level across everything and don't strike me as ugly. What you cannot do is mix and match the levels--that's very jarring and people will complain.
I feel like "exactly as good as they need to be" would actually be quite a bit simpler and, through lack of clutter, easier to use. See, for example, the Caves of Qud art style - https://i.imgur.com/Tul3mn3.png - which is substantially less visually complex than any of the Spiderweb Software games but, IMO, much easier to interpret.
"Exactly as good as they need to be" means "graphics and interface are of a sufficient quality to not significantly hamper interaction with the game, but just barely."
For example, a chess board drawn freestyle in crayon with a bunch of black and white poker chips that have "pawn", "knight", etc written on them in sharpie is "exactly as good as it needs to be," but it sure as heck isn't the same thing as an elegantly minimalist chess board.
I've actually been tempted to buy Avadon the black fortress a few times. It keeps showing up on steam(after reading this I had to double check, for some reason I had a feeling it was one of his games), again i find the graphics to be appealing. I'm just not sure if i want to invest the time into an RPG right now.
It seems like an easy solution would be to allow the tiles in the game to be editable and let people make new ones if they're unhappy with the ones that ship with the game.
The problem I have with it is that it all looks really generic -- like default "RPG Maker" tiles or stock art. The old-school Exile art was simple, but it was unique and had its own distinctive style.
I don't think it'll run on a modern Linux system without a lot of hacking, though.
I remember seeing a first person shooter after years of ignoring games, and being really impressed by the advances in graphics, but in seconds, I could see it was still a world made of indestructible cardboard, which was very disappointing. I suppose things have improved somewhat, depending on genre, but anyway, the issue is that people are easily distracted by graphics, not that they detract from anything per se.
The guy's been getting criticisms for 25 years. I think he's justified in writing a single blog post in defense of his art style. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
Also, 'art style' is a stretch.
Finally, yes, if I don't like it, I don't have to read it. Yet, I did, and I'm free to express my dissatisfaction and disagreement with the article's message: if you don't like it, you don't have to read it.
It means it's not unprompted. It's a reply.
I think he's justified in writing a blog post about his business decision and should have kept it at that.
But defending this as an "art style" is like making really shitty cheap knockoff "vintage style" furniture and claiming part of the reason is because you love the artistic style of historic wood working. No you do it for the money, and people who actually like vintage historic wood work might get annoyed that you are pushing your work as the same.
Uh, no, he freely concedes his games are ugly. The title of the article is "Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap".
And the graphism are good enough imo.
Other games look beautiful, yes, but they also somehow always end up getting kind of boring several hours in.
You're making the mistake of thinking that a game that looks good must use more resources. That doesn't make sense.
If one took the exact same resources and gave them a more consistent art style, keeping the same file sizes or even lowering them, the games could look just fine and yet still fine on a low-end machine.
Better looking graphics or art != larger file sizes.
But to the GP, you should go play his games! Try "Avernum: Escape from the Pit", his remake of his remake of his original game (he's got a system down pat). It's the best game he's made, IMO, and the iPad version is really good if you've got one lying around. PC/Mac version is good too, of course, but I found the touch interface really nice and a refreshing way to play a game I'd already exhaustively completed twice, so I'd hope it'd meet more modern sensibilities pretty well.
Art just isn't critical to making amazing games... some old BBS games like Tradewars 2002 will always be among my favorites, and their ASCII images barely qualified as art.