Why don't more developers make a game with, say, PS1 or PS2 graphics that's very stylised and rammed with content?Is there some brainlet reason as to why we couldn't have some sort of giga-massive crazy ambitious game because it isn't really demanding for assets or performance
the indie low poly trend has just begun, wait a little more for it
Rayman or Manray
Rayman 2 is the most atmospheric game of all time.The fact that it clearly inspired both BG&E and Psychonauts makes it even better.
>>739060842I feel like lots of people (for example) will want:>big open world fantasy rpg>HUGE world that's fun to explore and full of cool shit>massive enemy variety>content content contentand if they just went back to using shitty low poly stuff that'd be very doable
>>739060717What are you on about?The trend for ps1 nostalgia indie games is blooming.Picrel is very short game, though.
>>739060717They don't look good on screenshots and trailers, so the average consumer cattle won't buy it.>>739060842Indie games almost always end up being shallow and primitive built around one single gimmick, with minimum amount of content due to their small budget. We need AA games back.
>>739060717Bottlenecks. Content is hard at every generation, that's why the MMO & live-service became a thing. You create an entire company solely dedicated to filling the game with content, but doing that is very energy inefficient so unfortunately you get several transactions funneled into things that don't necessarily make the game better.
>>739061065Considering how most indie RPGs go for the japanese style, I have a guess there is an untapped market for western style ones. By that I mean the character customization and dialogue trees and multiple story routes.
>>739060717'cause artists either do 256poly "more retro than the actual retro" stuff, or 60 000 000poly sculpts to inflate their portfolio.In between require actual talent & technique so they stay the fuck away from it, unless it's to shit an endless stream of VRChat/Vtuber avatars, since those are mostly copypasted.
>>739060717>Is there some brainlet reasonThere are corpo reasons. Stylized graphics lack scalability and replaceability. You can't use outsourcing and assets packs and still fit everything together as easily as with realistic graphics. And you need lead artists to keep the style consistent, and people like that can't be replaced by anyone whenever
>>739061220yeah but they're all quite short games.I'm talking about someone making a HUGE game that blows everyone away because they aren't constrained by muh grafix.>>739061287Yeah, feels like the window for when this could have happened has maybe passed.>>739061289My thoughts exactly. Imagine if they gave us a comfy fantasy world to explore in the style of a tolkienesque setting?
>>739061921>My thoughts exactly. Imagine if they gave us a comfy fantasy world to explore in the style of a tolkienesque setting?Too bad that's not really my style, but someone might get rich with this idea, specially with how hard Bethesda has been shitting the bed.
>>739060717>>739061921Biggest problem with that is actually giving you a reason to engage with all of the content
>>739060717Cattle won't like old graphicsThey want shiny new graphics on their shiny new things to show off to other cattle of how much wealth they have for few minutes and never touch it again
>>739061714This is true
>>739061027Rayman 2 is the best platformer on the N64
>>739060717Speaking of old graphics, I'm surprised it's become an artistic choice instead of people doing it because I guess it's easier/cheaper? I don't exactly demand cutting edge innovation as far as graphics and I really wouldn't give a shit if we went back to like 2005-2007 graphical fidelity.
>>739062806Play the PC or Dreamcast version instead (I'd just pick Dreamcast if they hadn't ruined the Hall of Doors).
they cant make gamesthe purpose of graphics is to distract from the fact that they cant make games
>>739060717Just because it has old graphics doesn't mean development speeds up drastically.
>>739063243Then how come old games were made in 1 to 3 years while modern games are made in 5 to 10 years, despite they have the same complexity of gameplay?
>>739063775>the same complexityTry one or two thirds at best.
>>739060717
>>739062806I prefer Mario 64, and think Dreamcast is the best version of Rayman 2 that I've played (admittedly only N64 and DC) but Rayman 2 is my second favorite N64 platformer
>>739064403If Mario 64 came out today everyone would laugh at how shitty it looked and the primitive level design. Rayman 2 would actually fit in with modern platformers.
>>739060717retarded game companies started the hardware arms race and put all their eggs into that basket.now they trained an audience of retarded shiteaters who will cry when muh grafics arent up to par.these companies also all have ties to hardware manufacturers who want to push the newest dogshit buzzword tech.the games industry is smothering itself because of this and it might reach a tipping point.
>>739064595But Silksong was a massive hit. Couldn't companies learn something from that?
>>739064530A lot of my love for Mario 64 is nostalgia since I played the DS remake a lot as a kid before moving on to the original, so yeah. Rayman 2 has moments that are jank but it's few and far between and I didn't play it until after Banjo Kazooie and Kirby 64 which speaks volumes for how much I enjoyed it
>>739060842They are bloated and run like shit though
>>739060717Graphics are processed on the GPU. Gameplay is processed on the CPU.Just because you free up the GPU, doesn't mean suddenly you can do shit with the gameplay that you couldn't before.Yes, technically graphics stuff does use up some CPU as well, and technically you could do some gameplay stuff with compute shaders running on the GPU (AI/physics) but my point still stands.
>>739061245not true
>>739064712AAA is so shit and stuck in its ways that it legit cannot pull off a Silksong.If you were to tell a manager from gaming school to adjust the workflow towards something like that his head would explode.You do see some attempts of AAA trying to indie wash themselves by pumping cash into indie publishing I guess.
Rayman 3 still mog """modern""" 3D plateformer.
>>739060717Always through this was a good idea. Make the visuals intentionally simple so you can do way more with actual content.I still play mount and blade napoleonic warfare and still find the look of everything charming and I would love a more crafted world with that look.Maybe it just takes a lot more actual effort to make big engaging things, while making things graphicly intense takes work, but it is more mindless, idk.
>>739063968This was just a 2006 god of war clone that got cancelled late and then rereleased laterit's not that big
>>739064910Never finished it even though I love 1 and 2. It's just missing something, and I really hate the generic gem collectables that give you points. I played the fan-made UE5 remake of the first level and it was crazy good. I wish you could play the whole game like that.
>>739060717are you suggesting that something like ff ix is easy to make because the graphics are stylized? making levels is the most labour intensive part of game development btw
>>739064906probably this. things like metroid dread I beat were a stretch to greenlight from nintendo corporate, and thats more of a AA project rather than AAA at least in terms of expense.
>>739060842>2017>just begun
>>739065190FF 9 took 2-3 years to develop, FF 15 took 10 and a half year.
>>739065209>Yo Noid 2actual genuine real masterpiece BY THE WAY
>>739060717That is like asking why the heck are """""""""" open"""""""""" world in fact still bubble-around-the-player world.Why is nobody trying to build a living world that can evolve on its own and the player is just a cog in the machine?I will have you know that I was there 2000 years ago, and back then, in Cossacks there were some experimental scenarios where you would just play a group of cavalrymen trying to recruit more troops while the AIs were trying to kill each other, and your objective was to influence the battleground. It is very depressing that no game had the ambition of doing this at scale.
>>739060717Big companies prefer tasks that can be brute forced by many low skill employees to tasks that ultimately require a skilled one some time to smooth it all out. Old fashioned graphics might be quicker, but making them look decent kind of can't be brute forced.
>>739065126>>739065005>>739064910I like Rayman 3, but I do think some of your enjoyment comes from how much you tolerate Globox and Andre and the humor for the first few stages, it makes a bad first impression. But Desert of the Knaaren on is pretty good shit, big fan of the stage where you have to use the reflections to see the platforms
They should of done this for Shenmue 3.
Dave the diver is that?
>>739065929Dave the Diver doesn't look "old", it looks like crap.And I have never even seen anyone talk about it outside the context that it clearly didn't even belong in the indie GOTY category that it somehow won over Pizza fucking Tower.
I've been thinking about doing something exactly like that for years at this point but I just have no time for it with work and other hobbies. Plus I know jack shit about modeling. I threw together a game in Pygame in a couple weeks (it was similar to Battle City on the nintendo) and I quite liked it. Except doing the pixel """art""" lol.
>>739063775Old games were only 32mb-650mb cartridges compared to multiple Blu-rays
>>739066094>Except doing the pixel """art""" lol.... why did you put art in three quotation marks? Art you feel you made poorly is still art. Or are you thinking pixel art as a whole isn't art, somehow?
>>739063775Just because a dev is using directx8 or directx9 doesn't mean they are faster than a DirectX11 or Vulkan dev
The reason is very simple, a game with a fuck ton of content and a game with a shiny next gen HD realistic style cost the same to make, but the one with lots of content is harder to make and doesn't sell as much, that's literally all there is to it
>>739066343Source?
>>739065467>mfw I realized it had analog dabbing
>>739066437APIs are a thing anon. It's industry standard. The work doesn't change.
>>739060842But the indie low poly trend is about nostalgia. It's not about utilizing the fact that it's low poly to make a game rammed with content and features by deprioritizing focus on the graphics. It's always designed to be nostalgic to millennials like me and have PS1 style graphics or something, instead of putting more effort into other things and more features which can run at the same time now that there's hardly any polygons on screen. The low poly games are always made by like two autistic guys and a troon. There's no big teams working on them.
>>739066343Silksong outsold all AAA slop
>>739066540>game rammed with content"Crammed". The word you're looking for is "crammed". It's sort of synonymous with "packed" or "filled" but more aggressive. "Rammed" is synonymous with "impacted".
>>739066205because it's kinda ass, I like pixel art
>>739066624Silksong won the lottery, it's not something you can reliably do on every investment If someone had 1M to invest in a game, telling them to invest in a game like Silksong would be like telling them to buy lottery tickets for 1M for a potential 100x return that also has a 99% chance of going up in flames, meanwhile telling them to invest into a HD next game is like telling them to invest into real estate for a guaranteed 3-4x return over the next couple of years
>>739066884Silksong didn't even win the lottery because of anything about the game itself, it just happened to have a bunch of people who could barely play the first game deeply invested in its hype cycle for some fucking reason.
>>739066971True, it's still something you can't replicate reliably, there's tons of games of HK/Silksong quality that barely covered their dev costs out there
>>739064870I think your point doesn't stand because of your spoilered portion. You can do a lot more with GPUs than just graphics. You're also not considering development time. All the development time you are not spending and all the money you are not spending on getting a complicated shader system to work right is time and money that can be spend hiring more people to add content.
>>739066692No, rammed is just as legitimate as crammed. Learn to slang. I literally want content to be crashed into the game.
>>739066884Silksong's success wasn't due to luck. That's just pure cope. It was a success because it is a good game with lots of content, and tight balance. It succeeded due to it's own (and it's predecessor's) merits. Hollow Knight did not have a huge multimillion dollar advertising campaign. People discovered it and it slowly spread thanks to it being fun. That's all there is to it.
>>739067121Spending more money on people who add "content" doesn't even work, sadly. That just results in games like Skyrim filled with close variations of its first couple bits of "content" all made by different people. Good content is tightly designed and interwoven, not just plentiful.
>>739060717I'm really looking forward to picrel (The Big Catch) personally but it feels like it's taking forever to come out.
>>739067252They're not bad games, but there are dozens upon dozens of better games out there that didn't have the same luck and sold much worse as a result, its success has literally nothing to do with quality and everything to do with luck and hopping on the right trends at the right time
>>739067050No there really isn't. There are many decent ones, but nothing is quite as good in every aspect, and I played almost all of them.
>>739067381No it's true, I played every game ever released, HK and Silksong are nothing special
>>739060717>PS1 or PS2 graphics that's very stylisedThis type of graphics is more expensive than using generic hi-poly slop from marketplace
>>739067252Most of the people who "liked" Hollow Knight and went on to hype Silksong were able to play neither. There's a reason Silksong was memed as this ultra hard impossible game on release, because it wasn't as "accessible" as Hollow Knight.
>>739060717AA and aaa can't make games with ps2 graphics because gamers are retard and will start crying if they see low poly graphics
>>739067353>>739067438Most of the other good ones like Nine Sols also made a ton of money. Name one that's similar quality and was a financial failure.
>>739067351Looks like another one of those generic shitty indie platformers where the developers think jumping around and doing tricks to skip half of the level makes a platformer good like Penny's Big Breakaway, Bubsy 4D, and Demon Tides. Truly the slop of the genre. Only one I'm looking forward to is Kero Quest, BroDute makes some good shit.
>>739067526>what is zelda>what is mario>what is nintendo
>>739067641I dunno, I might think skipping half the level is kind of played out but I think platformers that give you a fair bit of wiggle room in the air are pretty fun aside from that. I loved Spark 2 and 3, those had some fucking massive skips if you built up the right speed.
I had a lot of fun with abiotic factor
>>739067641That's the gist of it but the game is really built around and expects you to abuse the physics just to beat the level, let alone skip it. There's a free demo on Steam if you're interested. It's actually pretty difficult in case you enjoy a challenge.
>>739067714Nintendo main target audience are children
>>739067351Standard indie scope creep. Their kickstarter did well but they over-promised on backer rewards and hired too many people, and now they're floundering. Tacklebox was interesting but it's not clear to what degree it's a demo and to what degree it's a standalone thing.
>>739060717Some doEdf6 is basically that whereas helldiver 2 is all graphics no content
>>739060717You guys understand that the entire world doesn't have to be rendered at once, right?>but a higher poly count means more time spent per asset Just throw more jeets at it.
>>739068205I think OP is talking about budget + dev time instead of real time rendering cost, games used to be cranked out in a year or two with reasonable budgets, the only reason they take 5+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars these days are ridiculous graphics standards that are still being applied to games that are mechanically and scope wise on the level of the PS3 era
>>739069025While you're definitely correct, there's no getting around the fact that the 12-month turnaround PS2 games came from absurd levels of crunch and short games full of glitchy jank. The other bit that people forget is that having a cohesive team that's familiar with their tools and environment can work much faster than a sprawling network of mercenary contractors who have no history with the engine/product/team/series.
>>739069876I mean Square put out a dozen all time classics in the late 90s and none of them are jank, they had a huge team for back then but these days they'd be almost quaint
>>739066061pizza fucking kino tower... how I miss you...
>>739071219I'm sure Woon will be great too when it comes out.I'm going to miss the energy that resulted in the toppin girls mod, regardless.
>>739069025>mechanically, scopewise and graphically on the level of the PS3 eraFTFY
>>739067351>models are like sixth gen polycounts at worst>PS1 pixel-y textures>modern lighting and shadingThis is a mess
>>739069025>the only reason they take 5+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars these days are ridiculous graphics standards that are still being applied to games that are mechanically and scope wise on the level of the PS3 eraYou're also ignoring a lot of the red tape nowadays. You can't simply put something in a game because you feel like it or you think it might be fun or cool. Every single addition, change, line of code, etc. has to be approved by higher-ups and then their higher-ups, etc.
>>739060717economy of scale stuff, >>739065848This is part of it, but its also just easier to distribute the work with this flow. Level design is simultaneously the hardest and easiest part of making a game. Sometimes you throw a bunch of guys in a circular room with 0 fancy scripting and its great. Other times you pour hours into making the sun pan just right as the player character walks over a bridge, and scattering birds and other atmospheric items. A sequence that a player might not even acknowledge. There isn't an easy way to build a giant content packed world with hundreds of cooks chipping away at small parts. individual assets though are easy. Your job is to make a lamp, you will put the full 8 hours allocated to the lamp into making the lamp.
>>739068163>implyingContent in EDF6 is "replay this short mission for 50 times", except there's like 100 missions, same as previous games.Also it's a $60 ($120) game with 99% of assets reused from the previous games.
