Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey. | Hacker News Reader

Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey.

allegory-of-the-game.com

91 pointsEvilTrout39 comments

It's long been the case that we invent tools, and then tend to do the things that the tools make easy.

You can see that the distribution of furniture varieties changed a lot when machine tools were introduced. Furniture got a lot cheaper, but because table saws make straight cuts a lot easier than curved cuts, even in higher end furniture, we ended up get a lot more style choices that utilized what was easier.

I'm looking forward to seeing what stylistic changes happen in clothes, furniture and more with the rise of small-lot production, CNC, and other technologies. I expect that we'll see big changes.

This is something the industrial designer Ross Lovegrove has been exploring for a while, here's the obligatory TED link: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ross_lovegrove_shares_org...

He talks about early modernist design being dictated by the machining processes of the time, lathes and extrusion etc. producing the characteristic geometric work.

Tangentially linked to the OP...

This photorealism makes new games very boring artistic-wise.

Old games with hand-drawn graphic had some artistic value in them, they made pepole imagine other worlds etc. Now it's just photorealism everywhere.

I wonder, when game graphic dadaism and cubism will appear.

Art is not about making more realistic copies.

He mentions Okami in the comments -- I don't think that's quite dadaist but it's certainly not photorealistic.

> Art is not about making more realistic copies.

Indeed, but maybe it's just that (certain) games and film are getting closer. Films use realistic special effects to get you to suspend disbelief when the setting includes magic or aliens. We have sci-fi and horror games that try to evoke emotions and senses of otherness/horror, and I think the photorealistic approach does that more effectively.

Fez is made out of cubes; does that count? :-)

I think it's not that games are becoming more realistic, it's just that the range of possibilities for art in games is getting closer to realistic.

There are still many games that have a distinct art style that is not at all realistic (off-hand, Castle Crashers and Braid on XBLA come to mind).

Will we have non-realistic FPS games? Maybe, but unlikely, as one of the points of FPS games is to immerse people in a world, and making that world look as real as possible is part of that goal. Right now, I'm having a hard time thinking of an FPS game that is non-realistic (Madworld on Wii?)

Team Fortress 2 is cartoony and not realistic at all.

Video games have reached a technological milestone/inflection point similar to those reached in other mediums in the past-- the transition from painting to photography, or from expensive digital photography to inexpensive digital photography, or CGI in movies:

Past a certain point of fidelity, the art direction/production design (what you actually choose to put in the frame) becomes much more important than raw technique.

(related: amidst a flood of crap, curation becomes essential)

"Art is not about making more realistic copies."

True, but video games aren't simply visual art, like a painting. Photorealism can help immerse you into the game's fiction, which can definitely make the game less boring.

I don't think most games are intended as "art" in any high sense, but only as "entertainment". Personally, I'd find it awesome if WoW looked more realistic. (If you're not familiar with the graphic style of World of Warcraft, it's very cartoony, even crayony).

"Art is not about making more realistic copies."

No, but entertainment is about creating a convincing, immersive experience.

Great article. I've always wondered why so many games this gen are boring brown and gray. Playing through Fallout 3 makes this readily apparent.

The other thing I'd like to see change is the complete overuse of bloom shader effects.

I like that the article mentions the game Mirror's Edge. It immediately popped into my head as a counter-example when I read the article title. I hadn't known that the game's more sophisticated lighting solution was what allowed it to have the clean colorful look!

I've always preferred colorful games at the expense of photorealism. High quality consistent art direction can overcome a lot of the drawbacks which can be fudged by using the drab color palette so common currently.

I look forward to seeing the next generation of colorful titles enabled by more powerful lighting engines.

Saw this on reddit the other day and the link was to:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PhilippeRinguetteAngrignon/20...

I can't tell if the link posted here is to the gamasutra article author's personal blog, or if it's just ripped off content.

Note the [Originally posted at http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/] at the bottom of that post.

So he says that games are becoming more realistic in most aspects, but not in the lighting. That is probably true, but there is no reason why that should cause the game to become grey and washed-out.

Most CG movies and effects (from Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM, ...) also do not have anything close to photorealistic lighting (i.e. correct global illumination), but they do not look grey.

One common mistake that leads to washed-out images is to apply gamma correction (which is the right thing to do) but not apply inverse gamma correction to your textures. That way your surfaces are essentially gamma-corrected twice, which is clearly wrong. I don't know if they're really making such a simple mistake, but who knows...

Downvoting because of disagreement is really getting out of control at HN.

Excellent article. Good insights into the tech that has influenced the art direction of recent games.

I do think though, that art directors should pull themselves out of that rut and strive for more variety in upcoming titles.

I wonder if art directors purposefully choose darkness, or maybe they simply stumbled upon it by experimenting? "We this game to look realistic, and out of all of our mock-ups, darkness wins."

Many Sega games have a very specific look to them that's colorful. Jet Set Radio Future (Xbox) was an extremely vibrant game. Most Nintendo games are too. Though some of those types of games tend to be more cartoonist-looking than realistic-looking.

How about special effects in movies? They use similar technology that's used in video games. Is there a trend here that's more into dark/brown/gray?

Cell Shading makes colors easier cause its not trying to be realistic.

Exactly,movie studios use pretty much the same lighting tricks as games - direct illumination with some ambient occlusion and color bleeding hacks here and there. Yet they do not look brown/gray. I think it might be because they have armies of artists (they call them "technical directors") that tweak the materials and lighting for thousands of man-hours until it looks good. Game companies probably invest much less in this kind of tweaking.

And aren't not limited by "must work in realtime" and can use all the computationally expensive visual effects?

Oh yes, absolutely, but there's no reason why real-time would imply brown/gray color hues...

Nevertheless, I've gotten so bored by the sight of movie CGI. There's just too much texture or not enough light or something. Please, someone, make a physical model, shine some lights on it, and do some stop motion.

Immersion-wise, I find that realistic sound, a la EAX5 with accurate direction, occlusion, reflections, etc, are much more important than the quality of the graphics. Something about the fact that I look at a monitor makes it clear that I'm not in the environment, but sound does not have that limitation. (Relatedly, if you've ever seen the effect of using Fresnel lenses to project the monitor at infinity, that makes the immersion much more deep. Then you're essentially looking through a window, into another reality.)

Interesting that the palette of the original Quake game was browns and reds, also for technical reasons, but different ones.

What technical reasons are those? I remember hearing this when I was 15 or so, as part of a "Unreal Sux"/"No Quake Sux" debate. (I was observing) It didn't make any sense to me then, nor does it now, how a 3d graphics engine could be limited in color palette to just, say, brown. And I distinctly remember the color blue showing up in that game anyway...

I could be mis-remembering, but I think Quake started out with a software renderer that operated in VGA mode. So the game has a 256 color palette.

You are correct. Quake was before mainstream 3d accelerators and only had a 256 color palette.

Original quake palette: http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/images/quakepal.gif

I get "brown", but what's the difference between "gray" and "grey"?

One means that you've got a President and the other means you have a Queen.

...and the author's point in using both? That he lives in Iceland, and is trying to straddle the fence?

He probably doesn't have a point in doing so. Do you?

My point was that it was odd to repeat a word in two different spellings in the same sentence, unless you have a point in doing so. Different strokes, I suppose: some favor "favor"; others favour "favour".

Probably going for another meaning of the word, like dull or boring. Not that it's strictly correct, but in headlines, sometimes it's the thought that counts.

I think he is emphasizing how dull the modern videogame palette really is; there is no third color.

Is this complaint really specific to the ps3/xbox360/wii generation? I seem to remember people whining about this back when Quake 1 came out...

I'm not a blog person, but I'll keep an eye on this one, very interesting...

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