2DWillNeverDie
2dwillneverdie.com
2dwillneverdie.com
https://cardgallery.tales-tra.com/cards_blue.htm
https://www.deviantart.com/abysswolf/gallery
Literally hundreds of characters. Between this guy and TFA, I feel spoiled.
I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .
Then again, it is indeed a much different aesthetic than pixel art.
Early 3D on the PC was better than on the N64, though. The low draw distance and blanketing everything with fog was pretty horrendous in a lot of games.
Also it enhances the places with more furniture, trees, objects and new areas. OFC there are new weapons and upgrades too.
This is, unfortunately, easy to ruin that with partial mods, breaking your immersion when two objects from different universes are in the same room.
Now, I played the remake recently - the game is actually excellent ! It’s just that at the time ( to me at least ) the original art was so ugly as to ruin the game / break immersion. This is an issue I’ve never had with 2D games, pixelated or not.
I think most people would agree that early 3D games (PSX and N64 era) - particularly ones attempting to achieve texture-mapped photorealism, like FF7, GoldenEye, Tomb Raider etc. did not age gracefully, at least where graphics are concerned.
Contrast that with something like Mario 64, which, while still chonky, looks way better because it’s so highly stylized.
What I’m saying is that there was a time ( which lasted for a while ) when 3d games experiences were worse than 2D games, and it took a while for 3d games to catch up.
Surprisingly enough ( to me at least) games evolved in the right direction (immersive games with stories and good gameplay and not just more empty technical demos ) when the industry might have gone wrong instead.
I’ve been busy catching up with what I’ve missed ( which is extremely enjoyable since time is a very good way to find out what’s good ), and it feels like things got better around 2010-2015 so 15 years after it stopped being interesting.
But my favorite early 3D game was Total Annihilation. Which is not a 3D game. It's a 2D game with a 3D rendering engine. Classic RTS isometric POV, but all of the benefits of a 3D engine (arbitrary model rotations, movement dynamics, rockets flying through the air, shrapnel...oh, the shrapnel).
Similarly with Warcraft III, another RTS done with a 3D engine. Its gift was the interstitial cinematics done with the engine for story telling purposes.
In both these cases, 3D added immensely to an ostensibly 2D experience. I also imagine once they got things sorted out, it made things much easier for the level and scenario designers to be able to just put Objects into their flat-with-some-terrain 3D worlds.
You’re right - 3d improved the game. However outside of examples such as this one , I feel that it generally took a while (15 years maybe ?) for game designers and coders to eventually find a middle ground , as in use the latest technical fad, but still make a game that is pleasant to play and better than without the technical fad.
I'm guessing young folk have more nostalgia for this type of thing
I agree that the early 3D games (PS1/N64) have not aged well graphically.
https://github.com/GhostlyDark/OoT-Reloaded
(big fan here)
Demo: https://acatovic.github.io/afterlight-play/ Tool I used to create 2D sprites: https://github.com/acatovic/ai-game-studio
I wish those techniques were passed down a lot more.
The first five Pokemon generations had fantastic pixel art. Each generation had its own distinct style and felt like a solid step up from the last.
The fifth generation (Pokemon Black/White) was unique in the sense that it was the first generation that used the same hardware (the Nintendo DS) as the previous generation, so they had a chance to get more experimental by using a pseudo-3D overworld and fully animated sprites during battle to help differentiate those games from Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.
After that, they attempted to make the transition to full 3D for the 3DS era, which is where the series really fell off a cliff. Each new generation feels less like a new world full of distinct handcrafted sprites and more like a poorly-shaded mess of recycled 3D assets that somehow struggles to maintain its intended frame rate.
When I first heard people complain I shrugged it off because people always complain. But having seen it myself...
So many easy to fix basic mistakes. Such poor craftsmanship. I would have never shipped something looking like that.
SNK fighting games are incredible as well. Mark of the Wolves and Last Blade 2 have some incredible art and animation. Always makes me sad when I remember nobody really plays these things anymore.
The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation. It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D character and then place them into a special scene/camera arrangement for automatic capture into a sprite sheet.
Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.
And yet, it's still very common in the indie space. I just played some Vampire Survivors, for example (although I don't think it's very good in terms of art direction, but that aside).
As for the 3d / 2d one, two games come to mind; one is Factorio (of course, it's very popular with software developers) where most assets are created in 3d then converted to 2d sprites. I want to claim it's great for performance given how much Stuff is on screen at any given time (just like Vampire Survivors), but then Satisfactory came out and showed that giant complex player-built factories can also work and perform well in 3D.
The other one is Hollow Knight where all art is hand drawn (digitally I presume but I don't actually know), but rendered in 3d (from a fixed perspective so it still looks and plays like a 2d game), easy parallax and high flexibility in the "spacing" of the layers and I'm sure there's other reasons too.
Some do. The talking heads in Fallout were sculptures, for example (I think from paper, but cannot remember well).
But drawing vs rendering from 3D models can be either an aesthetic choice (Braid is an example) or an optimal choice depending on your workflow, expertise, equipment etc.
And in the current times, also Generative NNs I think were proven a possibility to generate animation.
> in the current games economy
Indie vs mainstream have different ways.
bro doesn't know Metal Slug
I find it much more painful to put in any amount of time into something that isn't what I intended. Of all the places to insist on efficiency, this is probably the most unreasonable.
With an infinite expected return time...
Looks beautiful, beautiful soundtrack, very much has you puzzled when solving the puzzles for the first time, tons of secrets, and maybe we can call it an adventure.
The puzzle game is adventure-adjacent in that it involves walking-around exploration, carried items/keys, locked doors with switches, exchanging items, and bridges.
Topologically, it is a network of 3D rooms connected by "doors" that are actually non-euclidean portals. You walk around, but you can also change the direction of gravity 6 ways, and--here's the kicker--every room tiles infinitely with itself.
So while I won't deny it's easy to get stuck in some areas of the room-network trying to remember how to get to another, individual rooms are 3D yet also havea a quirky way of constraining your random walk.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/473950/Manifold_Garden/
It had a charm the full game was missing. It reminded me of a puppet show and how large something so low fidelity can feel when filled out by imagination.
Wasn’t there a dive on Freddy Pharkus up on FP recently?
These kind of folks still exist and still create. There is a lot more noise to sort through these days.
That's why you will find the modern AAA games (which is of course 3D) very soulless. However, the same soul still remains in indie games.
This aesthetic will keep trucking on in the AI era of slop, which will eat pixel art, will eat vector art, will try to eat high-res 3D art (and fail miserably), while only indies will care about the PSX/PS2 aesthetic with its fake dithering and 960x540 viewport size.
3D (up to when I could be attentive) was immensely ugly, unartistic, if you take "2D as design" as a parameter. Flat (paradoxically), random - you take a screenshot and typically find the opposite of aesthetic pleasure. The instrument is not immediately fit for artistic purpose.
-- That more control can be imposed to painted flat material is hardly controvertible.
-- That the results prove that triangles defined objects are tools that require much higher mastery - well, if you cannot see it for yourself, suppose a panel of art critics will be there.
It doesn’t make sense to want to refute an argument you don’t understand. If you don’t know what the argument means, you don’t know if you agree or not.
Seems like you’re assuming (probably correctly) that “soulful” means something positive in some specific axis and your immediate reaction is that no, the thing you like must be better in every way. That response is already tainted with bias.
Playing Tiny Life for the first time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLkrxRJiRI
One important premise of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics is that you can trade resolution for identification and empathy. Lower graphical resolution is not just pixels swapped for soul as if it were a compromise, it's the mechanism that produces the binding. Every specific a face carries is a specific that can contradict the player, so subtracting detail buys the player room inside the character. A photorealistic face is somebody else's; a six-pixel face is yours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics
Scott's point is that when the world is concrete but the person is iconic, the player wears the person while believing the place -- which is what The Sims did with mumbling low-poly people in carefully detailed rooms, and what LCP did with one man drawn in a handful of pixels whom players named and worried about for forty years.
He calls the effect "masking":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(comics)
Little Computer People Review (Commodore 64):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBRXWUVMAg4
The Sims wouldn't exist without This | Nostalgia Nerd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYz_leh9J3E
That is why "soul over resolution" is not a hedge about the graphics, it's a claim about what the graphics are for.
Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford, April 26, 1996, previewing the Dollhouse prototype that became The Sims:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk&t=4470s
Student: What about from person to person, you talking about the information that's contained within the objects, so there can be information in another person, that you want to interact with in the environment. Have you looked at any reasons why you would want to do that?
Will Wright: Oh yeah, I mean, that's that's the hard problem. I mean, simulating ants is hard enough, when you get to people there's really no hope.
There are two issues here. You can look at this as a technology. It's not a product right now. And there are a few directions this could go. I could see this becoming, let's say, a multiplayer network MUD kind of a thing. You might have a thousand people playing SimCity from the bottom up, each person building their own house in a big multi-user space. In which case that issue is a little less important, because most of the people are real people, and you're dealing with puppets.
As a standalone game, which is probably our closer target, we have to deal with the problem you're bringing up, which is how do we deal with people to people? And it's hard, I mean there's just -- I'm sure Terry can elaborate on that more than I can. But the best thing we can do is prop up a convincing illusion. We don't have to be doing a valid simulation of human personality. What we have to do is we have to put up something that's ambiguous enough to where somebody can read in what they want.
Actually in this thing what I have right now are people come up and they converse, but you don't hear what they're saying, they just gesture, and sometimes they look mad, sometimes they kind of look contemplative. It's kind of interesting how much people will read into that.
This is kind of dynamic that we've seen again and again where something happens in SimCity and they said "oh I was running my nuclear reactor near the red line, and then there was so much smoke coming out of it, this plane crashed, and because of that, this and that happened", and they'll describe this long causal chain of events that I know does not exist. I designed the simulation, I know that there's no linkage between the power output of the power plant, the planes crashing, but they're convinced it exists.
Don Hopkins: They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.
Will Wright: Yeah!
Don Hopkins: Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.
Will Wright: Yeah, that's exactly right. There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game. Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're basically, most people will attempt to understand things like this with a story. They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the simulation that they're playing inside of.
Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as a product, by propping up that illusion of people. Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be sentient things. We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can play games with them.
There was actually a really interesting doll that this company came out with. Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got a couple of them after they went out of business. It's called the Julie doll. But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it said all these things. It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it, and so it would sit there and try and have stupid conversations with you. And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal responses.
But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300 doll. Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll? So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've ever seen that appealed to grown men. Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.
But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he said they put this in focus groups with girls. And they played with it for a while, and then after about a half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing with it.
And what was happening is that the girls were propping up this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't supposed to be the fantasy. The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.
So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that path with these people. And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're sleepy. And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about what they're actually saying.
One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it would be more like Peanuts. When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa", or soft, or loud. You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you wouldn't hear what they were saying. You'd have to read that into it.
I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're not doing a research project. So that's a long winded answer, sorry. Yeah?
Likewise, there are plenty of amazing games nowadays, but the ragebait culture makes us focus on the bad ones.
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49780526 for example: it is a DIY, and there is a demo of playing Doom in apparent 3D.
Another system in which matching interactive design and art could be difficult - but surely not impossible, and, on the contrary, a good challenge.
I always was fascinated by the stages in King of fighters and Metal slug. So much detail.
keyboard arrow up x2, arrow down x2, left, right, left, right, enter
(Just suggesting.)
are we sure that its not biased with older generation that grown up with such tech and have more nostalgic feeling in their hearth ?????
no bias comment here
Go look at the 2d-hd games that Square Enix is putting out
My kids mostly play Roblox, Rocket League, Fortnite and ~FIFA~ EA whatever-it’s-called-now. But they do enjoy stuff like 2D fighters and 2D mobile/tablet games too.
Ive found it’s been less about 2D vs 3D and more about content that matches their interests.
It is a matter of aesthetics. So it is possible that the gap is not about nostalgia, but about artistic exposure.
I could give you an example of a suggestion that there has been a flood of degradation: I was exposed to a television recently tuned to a videomusic channel: the limited samples I glimpsed were about "young and fit", as if the collective visual show converged to heavily "body oriented", in a heavily basic manner. When "commercial to the median" floods the spread imagery and artistic awareness is on the contrary not encouraged, you can get - and I have witnessed them - people nodding at the ugliest things.