By “all games look the same” I’m being hyperbolic. I mean nearly all AAA games and the majority of AA games (and not an insignificant number of indies even).
Whenever I see takes like these I can’t help but think that people who like to talk about games don’t play enough games, or just think of a handful of high profile releases as all of gaming.
Lol. No. Again, I was being hyperbolic and talking mostly about the AAA and AA space. I personally almost exclusively play indies who know what they’re trying to make and use a style appropriate to it. I play probably too many games. I also occasionally make games myself, I was the officer in a game development club in college, and I have friends in the industry. I’m not just some person who doesn’t understand video games.
Well, then don’t be hyperbolic, let’s see where that takes us.
That video is still nonsensical, just eloquently nonsensical. Makes me think he hasn’t been to Bilbao, for one thing, but talking about games, not architecture, he caveats the crap out of a tautology just to end up in a tautology: AAA games look like this because a AAA game is a game that looks like this, whatever “like this” means.
For one thing, man, do I wish Detroit had never existed. It’s amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage’s games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I’ve never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It’s a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don’t) while showing clips from, if you’re keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology. None of those games look alike in any way that makes sense. Not more than Spider-Man 2, Transformers, A Quiet Place and The Northman look alike. Photographing people as a technique is not an aesthetic, and it certainly isn’t an aesthetic limitation. That’s like saying that only animation is creative while photography isn’t. It’s such a disservice to creativity.
But even from a 2020 video, things have moved in the direction he wants, if only because the games industry is unraveling, I suppose. If you peek at game awards in the interim, the games that got most attention in those five years include The Last of Us II, but also Hades, Elden Ring, Balatro, Astro Bot, Animal Crossing, It Takes Two, Baldur’s Gate III, Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent batch of first party events there was a genuine splash of discourse about which rendition of fake stop motion looked better between the Louisiana fantasy Wizard of Oz reimagining and the creepy claymation… horror FPS thing? What are we talking about again?
Let me drop the pretense for a moment and make a case for what I think we’re talking about: this narrative is part of the problem, if there is a problem. These contrarian takes are being tautological for the sake of affecting elevated taste and elitist insight others lack. The truth is games look all sorts of ways and explore wildly different art styles, scopes and concepts. But the discourse is antagonistic and narrow. People latch on to games not to praise them and explore them but to complain and wear them down, and so gaming gets reduced to whatever we don’t like, with whatever we do like being passed as a secret hidden gem or an outlier even when it’s wildly popular. It’s why there’s more discourse about Concord, which is a game that looked bad, wasn’t great and nobody played, than about Marvel Rivals, which is a game that is just as expensive but looks bright and colorful and cartoony and is extremely popular. In the games industry people sometimes refer to that look as a “mainstream look”, because so many popular games look like that. It’s the look of Fortnite and The Sims and World of Warcraft and Team Fortress, and it’s gradually going more anime as mainstream games pivot to Asia, becoming the look of Genshin Impact, and Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Rivals.
This is a talking point people like to drop to feel fancy and elevated that implies that we’re somehow still living in an industry circa 2008 when home console single player action adventure games dominated the sales charts and smaller games were a dying breed barely kept alive by a group of plucky indies. For better and worse, we haven’t lived in that world for a while. If anything, I miss the mid 2000s AAA approach to gaming. Nobody is doing it outside of Sony and a couple weirdos like Sam Lake, and it was a comforting, creative, interesting approach that has unfortunately run out of runway while presumptuous commentators keep beating a dead horse because either they didn’t get the memo or because it’s perhaps too depressing to look at the real state of the industry.
Did I drop the Socratic pretense too hard? Got too real? We can go back to pretending we don’t know what we’re talking about if that makes everybody feel better.
Well, then don’t be hyperbolic, let’s see where that takes us.
Dude, we aren’t in a court room. Informal language is the expectation in a casual online forum. Get out of here.
… but talking about games, not architecture…
Are you going to come here and imply there’s no similarities between different forms of art? Should I not have used painting as an example earlier because we must only discuss video games?
I never played that game, but it’s amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage’s games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I’ve never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It’s a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
I haven’t either, but that was a tiny part of the video and doesn’t matter. However, I want to point out that you haven’t played it so have no basis to judge. Then you claim the dissent must only be to fight the defenders and not just because it was a bad game? How to you make that judgment. You’re speaking out of your ass just because you want to say something, but you don’t have anything meaningful to say about it.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don’t) while showing clips from, if you’re keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology.
Setting and style are two different things. They all have the same style, though different settings. Compare Monet to Van Gogh to Corbet. Even when they’re painting similar settings their styles are wildly different. If you take the style of Horizon and plug it into the Indiana Jones game it’d look almost identical.
I don’t think you’re understanding this distinction. You’re constantly on the offense saying I’m the one who doesn’t understand, but it’s you who isn’t getting it. Look at the game Sable as an example. They could have rendered it realistically, but the style they chose turns it into something totally unique while also supporting the game and improving usage of development resources. The style is not realistic, even if the setting could be. These are very different things, and I’m speaking about style and have been the entire time.
Those quotes are all asides or insubstantial to the point being made. I have nothing to add beyond pointing you back to my previous post. Except perhaps that the points about Detroit and architecture are both directly responding to statements on the video you linked (he mentions Detroit defenders and gets super stuck on using the Bilbao Guggenheim as a proxy for samey architecture as a proxy for game visuals).
Oh, and that I’m not confusing setting and style, I’m saying that you can take the idea of leaning towards a photoreal treatment of light transfer to go along with leaning into performance capture and still have style around that choice. The statement that the retrofuturistic aesthetic of Horizon is somehow “almost identical” to the 80s movie homage of Indiana Jones is baffling. I will keep repeating this until it lands: nobody would argue that Raiders of the Lost Ark looks “almost identical” to… I don’t even know anything that looks like Horizon… let’s go Conan the Barbarian just because they both point cameras at people. Technique does not dictate style (or what in movies you’d call production design). That is a purely videogame-y hangup from the historical misunderstanding that technology is the main driver for aesthetics. If that ever made sense, it certainly stopped fifteen years ago.
I suppose that’s at the core of the meme in the OP. Growing up in an era where going from beautiful pixel art to ugly lo-fi 3D was seen as the natural evolution of game aesthetics and never having figured out to distinguish the tech from the art as separate concepts.
By “all games look the same” I’m being hyperbolic. I mean nearly all AAA games and the majority of AA games (and not an insignificant number of indies even).
Watch this video. Maybe it’ll help you understand what I’m saying.
Lol. No. Again, I was being hyperbolic and talking mostly about the AAA and AA space. I personally almost exclusively play indies who know what they’re trying to make and use a style appropriate to it. I play probably too many games. I also occasionally make games myself, I was the officer in a game development club in college, and I have friends in the industry. I’m not just some person who doesn’t understand video games.
Well, then don’t be hyperbolic, let’s see where that takes us.
That video is still nonsensical, just eloquently nonsensical. Makes me think he hasn’t been to Bilbao, for one thing, but talking about games, not architecture, he caveats the crap out of a tautology just to end up in a tautology: AAA games look like this because a AAA game is a game that looks like this, whatever “like this” means.
For one thing, man, do I wish Detroit had never existed. It’s amazing that for a while there we had this little cottage industry of doomsters that used Detroit to show how bad anything ranging from David Cage’s games to Sony to graphics, apparently turn out to be. To such a degree that I have very rarely seen a defense of Detroit, I’ve never played Detroit, the game seems to not have done that well and Cage has never published another game. It’s a consensus entirely predicated on opposing a fanbase of defenders that seemingly never existed.
All the while this guy argues that AAA games have a look (then caveats that some don’t) while showing clips from, if you’re keeping track, a game about robot dinosaurs set in a lush jungle full of red plants (which is shocking imagery pulling inspiration from super nerdy, niche illustration work), a bleak but beautiful zombie apocalypse made out of grungy rural clothing, a superhero game and a gorgeousely unique take on norse mythology. None of those games look alike in any way that makes sense. Not more than Spider-Man 2, Transformers, A Quiet Place and The Northman look alike. Photographing people as a technique is not an aesthetic, and it certainly isn’t an aesthetic limitation. That’s like saying that only animation is creative while photography isn’t. It’s such a disservice to creativity.
But even from a 2020 video, things have moved in the direction he wants, if only because the games industry is unraveling, I suppose. If you peek at game awards in the interim, the games that got most attention in those five years include The Last of Us II, but also Hades, Elden Ring, Balatro, Astro Bot, Animal Crossing, It Takes Two, Baldur’s Gate III, Alan Wake 2 and Tears of the Kingdom. In the recent batch of first party events there was a genuine splash of discourse about which rendition of fake stop motion looked better between the Louisiana fantasy Wizard of Oz reimagining and the creepy claymation… horror FPS thing? What are we talking about again?
Let me drop the pretense for a moment and make a case for what I think we’re talking about: this narrative is part of the problem, if there is a problem. These contrarian takes are being tautological for the sake of affecting elevated taste and elitist insight others lack. The truth is games look all sorts of ways and explore wildly different art styles, scopes and concepts. But the discourse is antagonistic and narrow. People latch on to games not to praise them and explore them but to complain and wear them down, and so gaming gets reduced to whatever we don’t like, with whatever we do like being passed as a secret hidden gem or an outlier even when it’s wildly popular. It’s why there’s more discourse about Concord, which is a game that looked bad, wasn’t great and nobody played, than about Marvel Rivals, which is a game that is just as expensive but looks bright and colorful and cartoony and is extremely popular. In the games industry people sometimes refer to that look as a “mainstream look”, because so many popular games look like that. It’s the look of Fortnite and The Sims and World of Warcraft and Team Fortress, and it’s gradually going more anime as mainstream games pivot to Asia, becoming the look of Genshin Impact, and Zenless Zone Zero and Marvel Rivals.
This is a talking point people like to drop to feel fancy and elevated that implies that we’re somehow still living in an industry circa 2008 when home console single player action adventure games dominated the sales charts and smaller games were a dying breed barely kept alive by a group of plucky indies. For better and worse, we haven’t lived in that world for a while. If anything, I miss the mid 2000s AAA approach to gaming. Nobody is doing it outside of Sony and a couple weirdos like Sam Lake, and it was a comforting, creative, interesting approach that has unfortunately run out of runway while presumptuous commentators keep beating a dead horse because either they didn’t get the memo or because it’s perhaps too depressing to look at the real state of the industry.
Did I drop the Socratic pretense too hard? Got too real? We can go back to pretending we don’t know what we’re talking about if that makes everybody feel better.
Dude, we aren’t in a court room. Informal language is the expectation in a casual online forum. Get out of here.
Are you going to come here and imply there’s no similarities between different forms of art? Should I not have used painting as an example earlier because we must only discuss video games?
I haven’t either, but that was a tiny part of the video and doesn’t matter. However, I want to point out that you haven’t played it so have no basis to judge. Then you claim the dissent must only be to fight the defenders and not just because it was a bad game? How to you make that judgment. You’re speaking out of your ass just because you want to say something, but you don’t have anything meaningful to say about it.
Setting and style are two different things. They all have the same style, though different settings. Compare Monet to Van Gogh to Corbet. Even when they’re painting similar settings their styles are wildly different. If you take the style of Horizon and plug it into the Indiana Jones game it’d look almost identical.
I don’t think you’re understanding this distinction. You’re constantly on the offense saying I’m the one who doesn’t understand, but it’s you who isn’t getting it. Look at the game Sable as an example. They could have rendered it realistically, but the style they chose turns it into something totally unique while also supporting the game and improving usage of development resources. The style is not realistic, even if the setting could be. These are very different things, and I’m speaking about style and have been the entire time.
Those quotes are all asides or insubstantial to the point being made. I have nothing to add beyond pointing you back to my previous post. Except perhaps that the points about Detroit and architecture are both directly responding to statements on the video you linked (he mentions Detroit defenders and gets super stuck on using the Bilbao Guggenheim as a proxy for samey architecture as a proxy for game visuals).
Oh, and that I’m not confusing setting and style, I’m saying that you can take the idea of leaning towards a photoreal treatment of light transfer to go along with leaning into performance capture and still have style around that choice. The statement that the retrofuturistic aesthetic of Horizon is somehow “almost identical” to the 80s movie homage of Indiana Jones is baffling. I will keep repeating this until it lands: nobody would argue that Raiders of the Lost Ark looks “almost identical” to… I don’t even know anything that looks like Horizon… let’s go Conan the Barbarian just because they both point cameras at people. Technique does not dictate style (or what in movies you’d call production design). That is a purely videogame-y hangup from the historical misunderstanding that technology is the main driver for aesthetics. If that ever made sense, it certainly stopped fifteen years ago.
I suppose that’s at the core of the meme in the OP. Growing up in an era where going from beautiful pixel art to ugly lo-fi 3D was seen as the natural evolution of game aesthetics and never having figured out to distinguish the tech from the art as separate concepts.