WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT RIGHT NOW?

author=Liberty
Saw the new Fallout 4 trailer. I quite liked what I saw. People are already complaining about the graphics - go figure. People are too invested in graphics over gameplay. I don't want to see the beads of sweat on my characters' chin. I just want a game where I can tell what is what and that plays well with a lot of cool content and interesting story.

They're complaining about the graphics for good reason: it looks worse than most decent indie games do nowadays. But the real issue is that it made it clear that they're still using the exact same buggy, broken engine that they've been using since Morrowind. It's an ancient pile of hacks that has made their games increasingly unstable and poses significant limitations on the kinds of content and stories they can author due to needing to work around its massive bugs and hacks.

After Skyrim made boatloads of cash, they're still phoning it in and delivering the same broken garbage they always have because they know their fans will eat it up. After the huge windfall they got from Skyrim, there's no excuse for them to not reinvest it into their games and produce something better than merely par.

Worse still, the fact that they went to all the effort of porting this engine over to the new generation of consoles means that a new engine probably isn't even in the cards for them, so you can be confident we'll see them use it for TES6, too.

author=Pizza

Sailerius
They're complaining about the graphics for good reason: it looks worse than most decent indie games do nowadays.

I don't really think it's fair to say that. Sure, it's not as hyper-photorealistic as it probably could be nowadays, but the colour palette and artistic design is pretty gorgeous. It's very reminiscent of an old school comic book with all the primaries going on, which while different for Fallout is practically spot on with the whole theme of the series and the retro-future aesthetic.

This is all my own take of course, as a guy who still thinks that (while definitely aged) FF7/9 still look great. I've never been much of a snob about graphical quality.

The art design is fine but the assets themselves look very amateurish and early 360 quality. It could easily run on a smartphone. Just imagine how much better that art direction could have looked if they actually invested any of the money from Skyrim into it instead of pocketing it.

I don't know what that has to do with anything I've said, but it bears mentioning that the number of colours the NES was capable of displaying didn't even reach triple digits. NES games are ugly, generally, because people had only a few limited palettes to work from. there has been no such excuse for games since the Game Boy Colour happened.

author=m
and like, before that everything was really idyllic and fifties-style and you should be sad that things aren't like that anymore?

To be fair though, the series has been pretty good about exploring that the Pre-War era was actually pretty shitty and shady!

author=m
particularly since it's being written by Bethesda and not Obsidian.

This, more than anything else.

I really like the brown. When I see it in games like Wild ARMs 3, Bloodborne or Twilight Princess I feel like the coloration is really atmospheric and draws me into the world.

I think I'm part of the problem.

author=Corfaisus
The point is, we should have learned this lesson back in the 80s that dull, washed-over color combinations (like brown on brown) are boring when the core purpose of a video game is to grab your attention and hold it.

This is a pretty simplistic view on colour theory. Sometimes washed out colours are dramatic and pull you in. Heck, just look at This War of Mine.



Very small spectrum of colour, but very effective.



Desaturation or "brown on brown" isn't a bad thing, it's just a stylistic choice sometimes used to make things moody. Colour palettes serve their place, and colourful can create vibrancy, others desaturate things to evoke a certain mood.

author=CashmereCat

author=Corfaisus
The point is, we should have learned this lesson back in the 80s that dull, washed-over color combinations (like brown on brown) are boring when the core purpose of a video game is to grab your attention and hold it.

This is a pretty simplistic view on colour theory. Sometimes washed out colours are dramatic and pull you in. Heck, just look at This War of Mine.

Very small spectrum of colour, but very effective.

Show

Desaturation or "brown on brown" isn't a bad thing, it's just a stylistic choice sometimes used to make things moody. Colour palettes serve their place, and colourful can create vibrancy, others desaturate things to evoke a certain mood.

Dramatic or bleak? Both of those screens just screamed "empty" to me. "Please, put down the weapon...", I feel no pressure here. If the game is "dramatic", it's the themes and the music, not necessarily wherever on the slider of bland the graphics fall on. There's a filter in PaperArtist (a free app) that looks exactly like that screenshot. Hell, I used it here.

Death is cold and grey, while the world is alive. If the world is dead, I... I really can't bring myself to give a damn. That's why I had a problem with FF6's overworld and overall aesthetic; it was just dead. Even if that's what you were going for, it doesn't make it good.


For a second, I seriously thought the soldier was just part of the building. It all just blends together into nothing after a while.

Show me color before tearing it away.

I think the dislike has more to do with many sub-par shooters trying to copy CoD to the bone, including the brownish color plate for the sake of money. Since, you know, CoD makes a lot of it.
And adding anything for the pure sake of pleasing an imaginary audience (which already has games), and not for the sake of the actual game, is usually a bad idea.

As always, can be used well, can be used badly.

author=Corfaisus
Death is cold and grey, while the world is alive. If the world is dead, I... I really can't bring myself to give a damn.

Death is cold and fricking dramatic. Heck, one of the most popular fears is the fear of death, of possibly annihilating into nothing. Obviously the line "please, put down the weapon" means nothing to you because that's a story point. Desaturation does not equal bland.

author=Corfaisus
Death is cold and grey, while the world is alive.

That's a really asinine, straw argument, broad, and pretty much untrue statement. The world is full of death and conflict and coldness and greyness as well as vibrancy.

author=Corfaisus
not necessarily wherever on the slider of bland the graphics fall on.

You're even implying that colour choice affects how bland a game is. I hope you don't mean that "make everything colourful" is the solution to everything, because it really isn't. Do you hate black and white films because they're black and white?

Or would you rather everything be a colourful rainbow like your favourite kiddie shows?

author=Corfaisus
<image of self with filter>

You even just showed with this image that the colour choice drastically changes the mood of the photo. Without the colour desaturation, it would appear normal, whereas with this filter, it has a kind of cold, calculated look to it.