[POLL] 16-BIT(PIXEL GRAPHICS) VS HD

I'm assuming you mean high-res 2D graphics vs low-res pixel graphics.

In a perfect world I would say HD graphics, but I've yet to see a high-res 2D game with the visual consistency and quality of animation that rivals games like Metal Slug or Yoshi's Island. Something like Muramasa: The Demon Blade comes close, but the tweened animations are rather awkward looking sometimes.

More often than not, though, HD 2D game artists make the assumption that what looks good at 4000x4000 pixels will still look good when shrunk down to 150x150 pixels. Look at some of the enemies in Braid - they're pretty much a mess of thin, shrunken lines. Then there's the frequent issue of foreground objects being a completely different style from backgrounds. Serious Sam DD XXL is the worst offender in recent memory, or at least what I can remember of some of the screenshots.
There's also the animation, where tweening is unfortunately used in ways it was never intended, creating the ugly paper-doll animation that seems almost inescapable now, with Ducktales Remastered and Skullgirls being the only recent games I can think of right now to have large amounts of actual animation. I know this technique was also frequently used in older videogames, but from what I can tell, this was largely because it would've been literally impossible for the systems to handle a fullscreen, fluidly animated sprite without breaking it up into parts.

tl;dr HD graphics require a lot of work to execute properly, so they tend to get a bit bungled.

For me, I tend to choose games based on the aestetic of hand draw feeling.

You can pick a 3d program and emulate hand drawn or add a pixel feeling to it (look at games like the latest atelier or minecraft, even bravely default try to do this with those chibi character models). Of course is not the same as the old classic ones, but it is much cheaper and convenient for developers that doing photorealistic graphics.

Now I haven't read anyone point out this, but my current phone is dual core, and supports 480x800 resolution on a 4 inch ips screen. That's a lot for a cheap android device, but i'll just point out that the future of games seems less related about resolution and more about how will the player watch it, in a future standard screen size (be it 4 inch, the size of a smartphone or 7 inch, 10 inch tablets, if they survive)

How much detail can you include in this tinny screen size? forget resolution... i'm sure they will end up making some models with 4k crazy resolutions.

I'm pretty sure asking this question here is like asking which out of hamburgers and salad tastes best to an average American.

I played the demo, and I was impressed by the main character's animations. In fact, for a few moments I swore he was just a touched-up KOF sprite. That being said, all the enemies seemed to be the usual paper-doll stuff, though given that it was apparently one guy doing it, I guess I can't really blame him too much.

EDIT: lol its on sale right now for $3 on XBLA. So's Bastion, which looks like pure, ocular sex from its screenshots. I don't remember either of these games really impressing me with their demos, but at that price I might as well give them a second chance!

The same could be said of all religions pixels, though. Arguing over a medium is silly, because it's all about the execution. It's like asking whether colored pencils or carved marble is better.

I'm not big on 3D because the creator spends all their time and money on the look of things instead of focussing some of that on the rest of the bloody game. Besides, 2D is freakin' charming as fuck.

And lastly, fuck photo-realism in games. It's the very worst offender of all my hates.
-shitty story
-shitty characters
-shitty world design
-shitty gameplay
-shitty shit on a shit stick
-shitty focusing on the pores in a face instead of everything else in the fucking game
-shitty not letting us fucking escape or imagine the characters/world/etc at least a little

I've yet to play a great (or even good (or even decent)) RPG that was photo-realistic. So, yeah, fuck that shit.

author=Liberty
I'm not big on 3D because the creator spends all their time and money on the look of things instead of focussing some of that on the rest of the bloody game. Besides, 2D is freakin' charming as fuck.

And lastly, fuck photo-realism in games. It's the very worst offender of all my hates.
-shitty story
-shitty characters
-shitty world design
-shitty gameplay
-shitty shit on a shit stick
-shitty focusing on the pores in a face instead of everything else in the fucking game
-shitty not letting us fucking escape or imagine the characters/world/etc at least a little

I've yet to play a great (or even good (or even decent)) game that was photo-realistic. So, yeah, fuck that shit.

I take massive issue with this. I mean proper massive. In fact the sentiment that seems to be all over this topic is that of "modern graphics suck". Now I don't know yet if this reply is going to be rambly and long or if it'll be something else but I just want to say just how much of a massive issue I take with all of this... pixelhugging.

First of all 3d isn't all that much more difficult these days. Sure you need a bit of a know-how how to do those 3d-things but once you have a decent basis you can modify and animate things a lot easier than in a pixel environment. How many 3d games haven't you seen with character creators where you can switch the appearance of a character just with a slider. Changing the size of just about every attribute in a character. All of this on the fly. Now how many 2d games have you seen with the same feature that can create as much variety? Then consider that a creator of game also can switch these sliders around and retexture things fairly easily to make a world that has a decent amount of variety in character for a fraction of the workload of pixeling a bunch of similarly different characters.

I essentially don't see the argument where for some reason 3d spends more time focusing on how something looks than 2d does. Looking at how many spriters in this community tend to take insane pride in making something just right I can't see how that somehow is focusing less on graphics. Just because someone makes something in 2d or 3d doesn't suddenly mean they put more or less effort into their graphics or that they take more or less time. 3d isn't just a graphical element it's an actual extra dimension that a player can explore in.

Of course there are 2.5D games that use 3d models in 2d gameplay and the reason they do this is NOT so that they can increase the graphics workload and make everything more expensive and HD. It's so that they can DECREASE the graphics workload, focusing on gameplay aspects while being allowed to dynamically animate a character instead of having to completely redraw animations whenever something changes. I would bet it's a lot easier to implement ragdoll physics to a 3d model than it is to sprite a bunch of death animations that depend on scenery within the level.

I don't know what counts as photorealism these days. I remember a time when Resident Evil 2 and Final Fantasy 8 were considered photorealistic. I guess they clearly aren't anymore. But it's just a design choice like any other. A game deciding to model something realistically doesn't mean it doesn't care about other aspects. Car games is probably the genre where photorealism has been pushed the most over the years. Fans of racing games want the experience of actually sitting in the car of their choice so there's loads of detail put into the way the car looks and sounds. But also the way it drives. In a modern car game the (sometimes subtle) difference between two types of cars is incredibly important for a fan of racing games. If a certain car with certain tires doesn't handle in a certain way on certain roads the illusion is broken.

A nonrealistic racing game can be wacky and fun but you could argue that's a whole different genre, a whole different audience. There's no reason why top-down pixel cars are better than the latest car porn game where they could only fit ten different cars into a blu-ray disc.


I guess I just wanted to vent. Because despite being an incredibly nostalgic person I just hate it when people just wank all over pixel graphics. A game is not better just because it uses pixels.

I can understand that the games that push the boundaries on graphics put a lot of resources into those things. But that's the case of all things that push on the edge of what is possible. Sometimes other things suffer as a result and sometimes the results aren't all that great. But the games that push graphics forward are like one in a hundred and they are usually in genres that are fairly limited in scope.

But if that's what photo-realism is then it's not like there's an oversaturation of photo-realistic games out there. Not to mention RPGs.

When it comes to regular not-pushing-the-boundaries photorealism it seems it's mostly in environments. I played the STALKER series (maybe not RPG but I would argue it has a lot of RPG in it) and I remember the environments there being mind-bogglingly realistic and it reall y added to the game being able to sneak around in high grass and look at the soviet-style apartment buildings. If these things had been more abstracted I'm not sure I would have enjoyed the game in the same way.

Similarly I've not played Skyrim, but the little I've seen of it the environments are just incredible.

The character models often seem not to be though. Some answer to it might be in those pores (that thankfully developers are working on and making technology that are easier and cheaper for others to use. And making a profit off said technology of course) some might be in the new fad of motion capture. Many "realistic" games tend to have characters that talk like they're doing something but then act like they're doing something else.


And on the topic of FF8 not being photo-realistic. Now granted I've not played that game in over ten years, but in that way I'm almost better at judging its photorealism since I'm judging it from the perspective of over ten years ago. FF8 clearly went in the direction of more realism. The characters were more proportional, as was the environments. The whole scale was more realistic and you can't argue that it at least tried to move toward photo-realism. (for which it got its fair share of flak. It's not like the debate "photo-realism is ruining gaming" hasn't been going on for quite some time)

Honestly, I think modern 3D graphics have gotten to the point that they're finally as good as the pixel graphics of yesteryear. Stuff like Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3(and the new Strider game on the same engine) and Sine Mora look fantastic. Higher resolutions, textures, and ploygon counts, paired with vastly improved lighting engines means that they can finally have the clarity and contrast of quality 2D sprites, though maybe not as much "style".

For comparison, consider 2.5D games on the PS2~Wii such as Contra: Shattered Soldier or Castle of Shikigami III, or lower-quality graphics on more recent games like 1942 Joint Strike.


This is one of the better-looking screenshots. Some of them are just a mess of brown.


(Admittedly, not the best looking shooter of its time)

Compared to their earlier pixel-art entries, they're kinda muddy and indistinct looking (doesn't helpt that they're going for the whole "real is brown thing") due to a lack of contrast, not simply because they're 3D. Also, while texture usage has contributed to Contra:SS's muddy appearance, games of this time that didn't use many textures would often instead have a very bland, plastic look to them.

Really, I think we'd have a lot more good-looking games if we could regard the subject as an objective comparison of light information and animation principles rather than just devolving into "newfag vs retrofag" all the time.

- - -

Anyways, anyone have any idea how the character graphics in Bastion were made? When they stand still, they look like 2D drawings, but when they move around, they rotate in a very 3D way. If its cell-shaded models, then I'm surprised that a model that small could still have things like facial features, and if its 2D, then I'm surprised that computerized deformations could actually achieve such a convincing 3D effect!