ultrayoba

It actually does. This is how argumentation is: you present your arguments with some basis you can build upon. If your argumentation is based on just pure personal emotion like that other guy, or on statements like "everything is art!" - this is not productive, nor is it argumentive. Coding, design, and concept art, are all done by specialists with skills. These skills are acquired and require education and understanding. Some people might right away go scrub their deviantart sonic OCs and call themselves "artists" with bombastic smugness, but those people will forever stay in "amateur" or "outsider art" categories. And making those people and actually educated people as equal is just an ignorance towards people with specialty and education. Fallout 3 and Skyrim have personalities and artistic direction. Denying this is just ignorance. But if you have managed to read my post, I mentioned in one of them how dynamic filter lighting and staging were used in og PS2 version of GTA San Anders, and how the absence of it. You would be surprised, but colored filters and dynamic global lights were important parts of graphics when developers managed to code them in. Have you seen Skyrim and Fallout 3 concept art? Adam Adamoviz art is near-monochromatic. Those filters and contrast were actual honest attempts at converting this vision. Like, do you know that Fallout games are about post-apocalypse? And good ones are pretty grim? Have you seen Fallout 1? Fallout 2? Fallout Tactics even? They are 80% brown or rust metal. The color palette is washed out to the maximum like this is the intent, this is what those games are about. While this "lots of colors good! Happy! Positive" "not many colors bad!" - is the mentality of a kindergartener, I am sorry. Yes, there are movies, and there are games, and there are paintings and books which exist to have off-putting, or strong uncanny atmospheres. There are things that communicate feelings with viewers besides the sheer "happiness" of the caramel world of Mario games. And yes, what a surprise, Gothic is one of them. All gothic textures are dark, it is really all this rocky dead muddy place where all characters are bastards in one way or another. It is bordering on the edge of "dirty realism" direction. Ross managed to find here some small batches of forest that remain and call it a "fairy tale" game which is questionable at best.

No. The foundations of art are always based on the mix of reality and understanding of human perception and then - twist them, modify, amplify to deliver a message, idea or feeling. This feeling or idea should not nessecery be "pleasant". However, you took two random quotes from random places and mashed them together, one of which was a comment on a purely technical thing, with cross reference of basic academic principles and technology. If you have any technical comments on techniques of baked-in lighting, vertex color, vertex shadow, normalmaps and so on, to actually answer what was written - I am ready to hear. There is nothing to answer when a person solely sees something as an object of escapism for their personal taste which said person can not even explain, thus using his personal basic emotions/reflections as "ugly/good/bad" as the description. "Game ugly bad me don't like" - those words mean absoluetly nothing. No technical description, no academic art description, not even some kind of explanation. And same time you said that "nobody likes the art of Skyrim and Fallout 3", eh? If you wish to play the contradiction. To make a popular and beloved by many thing, you don't need to follow the demands of the audience and lower yourself to a common denominator (which Skyrim still did in its writing and world-building, but this is a different topic). This is how things are done which creates trends, create later imitation: not by giving the audience what they think they want, but by creating something interesting out of yourself, with a vision. Not just base all your creative process onto a checklist of "what the audience wants" and create something for everyone and same time for nobody. I can defend my opinions. With facts - technical, historical, or ones from academic art. Yes, Fallout 3 and Skyrim and Morrowind had the strongest art direction teams out of most Bethesda games. Simple by the fact that Oblivion barely had proper concept art, besides a handful of basic images - they didn't have a big concept art department during the development and some of the things they just failed to carry. The same goes for Tribunal addon for TES3 for example, there is no proper concept art for this at all, and part of it was assembled from leftover ideas. Daggerfall from the old Bethesda team had more than a dozen artists but they got in and left so many things unfinished and inconsistent, and about Daggerfall and later Battlespire and in part Morrowind you can read about in lots of Mark Jones interviews and old articles. This is not the place for giant walls of text on the history of the development of multiple 25 years old games, so this was shortened in the idea that the person I am talking with is familiar with the context, or, at least, will go and read about all this himself, without this attempt at "gotcha". Basically all this topic, if simplified, comes from the brainless repetition of some older late 00s-10s perception of graphics without understanding of them: there was a point where games tried to be cinematic and had any kind of personality in terms of visuals, but there was a simultaneous wave of games which or overdid bloom, or overdid color correction. Combined with lower resolution, PS3 and Xbox 360 also had problems with texture resolution and they liked to put some overlay effects to hide it. And from this was born this narrative of "PC games of old were so sharp and awesome! Color - bad, lighting - bad, blur and bloom effects - bad! We need absolutely flat render of idTech3 with maximum size textures and no post effects!" And then those "piss filter" and "soap graphics" become repeated without any meaning to them from people who can't explain their taste properly or can see something wrong, but can't say what and leaning into braindead absolutism and then to just "me like - me don't like". It is sad that real life is ugly for you tho, that I can say for sure.

That's a.. statement. "everyone says it is bad", quite argumentive. And from Bethesda games which probably, excluding Morrowind, have the strongest and most awesome art direction. Adam Adamowicz was perhaps one of the best creatives Beth ever hired, with an actual strong vision and core ideas that he carried through all his concept art, and surprisingly, a large part of it was actually implemented - far from fully, because of sad Xbox360-PS3 limitations on detail and geometry, but his world of stylized post-industrial horror, where the world consumed by uncanny, cold and unfriendly "machine". In a way, his Atompunk vision was not just an interpretation of the "future as was seen by the 1950s", but a twist on it, clashing reality, a dream turned nightmare, inspired by classics like the movie "Brazil". And then, this dying world was annihilated and we are in the post-purgatory state, where all remains of life, all remains of hope were turned into eternal piles of mud with remains of rusted sharp metal. You don't like it? Were you off-put by it? Great! Since this is the goal. From the first minutes of the Iron Zhur's music which heavied general orchestra theme heavied by clashing sounds of scratching metal and industrial machinery to the view of the earth from space where you can see that it is all "brown" - this game was conceived to be about nightmare, about death, about inescapable lack of hope. And despite all the limitations, or laziness of Todd's team in writing and presentation, sole atmosphere and artwork carry it. This is why games are not art. In actual art, the artist has the power to be uncompromised, to be free to make strong statements and expressions of his ideas. To choose the audience with which it resonates or not. But this is not the case with the big game market, or often, big movie market: they need to be "attractive" to as much audience as they can. So they create "consumables" where you can't have any kind of strong visions or to deliver some statements. Everything should be equalized, simplified, and made conventionally "attractive" to the "average person". And what the average person wants is the dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product. Because "everyone" should be your audience to sell the "product". You can't just say "this guy is not my audience". And it goes for everything - art, gameplay, design, plot, presentation.

Real-life color "tints" are the result of the atmosphere or liquids playing with the light source, be it the sun. And actual atmospheric filters and other post-effects were the way we went in video games: this is how we represent things in paintings, and this is how we used them in movies for almost hundreds of years. More than that, in art-media form we can stylize it, force it and twist it to communicate information with the viewer most effectively, which in the end, is the goal of all art. What you describe is not some "ground-breaking technology that requires an SSD" but an old, archaic way it was done - with texture color tints and baked in-light, in the form of vertex lights etc. other stuff you can see in some PC late 90s games, PS1 and sometimes on Dreamcast (this Sonic Adventure 1 "lantern" engine). This worked to a degree on low resolutions and CRT monitors, but thats about it. PC and Dreamcast (which had a graphics chip from then a PC 3d accelerator card manufacturer) games from the era looked notoriously flat and cardboard with clashing photo textures and any kind of lighting, and it continued throughout 00s, when games from gamecube or PS2 were ported lazily. PC GTA San Anders looks like flat garbage precisely because emotion engine dynamic color filters and reflections and some baked-in lights and light transitions were not ported to the PC, so you need now to install mods to make GTA SA not look like some techdemo in the editor render.

Regarding the remake of Gothic there is a thing where I feel like modern gamers (and modern cinema viewers to a degree) are allergic to any kind of strong artistic vision. When the game has any kind of strong stylized visual narrative some people scream from the start "piss filter!" or "much post effects!" and all they want is empty, flat late90s-early00s PC graphics which most often look like just flat render in Blender without anything. Because of this instead of attempting to implement Adam Adamoviz's concept art in Fallout 3 with artistic representation of absolute monochromatic postapocalyptic industrial horror we good "just colorful autumn forest" in most of Fallout 4. The same goes with Skyrim which you so disliked for "Tinted filters" which actually help to distinguish regions, set the mood, and the artistic atmosphere. And Gothic remake actually attempts this: the original game already presents this: this is a drab, dying rocky landscape somewhere in rocky mountains fully cut into canyons and mines. Covered under a magical dome where dwellers probably cut lots of trees and hunted a good chunk of animals and wildlife. And this is the dark, edgy and grim world with to-the-face presentation. Being more brutal and grotesque in its visual stylization will actually help a lot to portray its story and its world, and communicate feelings. Would you want for example Sin City, 300, Terminator 2, and Blade Runner 2049 will be filmed without any monochromatic color grading and with just plane flat "realistic" lights and depth? Be a "fairtylate"? Anyway, I know lots of people have no respect for academic art, and they will need "realism and logic" only in their settings - so here it is, a place where I've been irl - those are former forests around soviet Monchegorsk metallurgy plant. After throwing lots of dust, mining and other mineral pollution it becomes a rocky hellscape with dead trees. Can this happen in a place covered by a magic dome where people mine MAGIC ORE? I freely can believe it. And it looks more hooking and striking and memorable than just "green forest". Especially since the original gothic game already had it partially in its colors, landscapes and weird bird-lizard animals. It was never a sonic's green hill to begin with.

Regarding the games that "have this look" from Modern Indies, I can from the top of my head say Call of Sargnar. It started as a game tribute to older Betrayal at Krondor and Might & Magic 6 The Mandate of Heaven, but the author over time pushed the graphics into partially being more modern, ie something Gothic2-like. (It is always like this with the indies, they lean into inconsistency) Still, a nice game, but I don't know how much you will be interested in what is basically a blobber with tactical turn-based combat. I feel like those are outside of your scope of interest, otherwise, you would've played or mentioned Wizards and Warriors 2000 or Wizardry 8 or even Might and Magic 9 (even tho this one is raw..) as kind of RPG games from the age with interesting/relatable mechanics and looks. So you probably better search among "action adventure" games from the era, to avoid old-school RPGing and abstractions like "miss chances". Have you played Drakan Order of the Flame, perchance?

I can't really say why Gothic is compared to Elder Scrolls really, as it has a fundamentally lower scope and a different approach to Morrowind and later games, but I guess a part of it is the fact that previous Elder Scrolls titles have fallen into relative obscurity, because in the end, Gothic is an evolution of those third-person action adventure-RPG hybrid games that started to pop out once Tomb Rader become popular. And one of those games was... 1998 The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard. Do you want a more handmade limited-size world? Do you want no respawning enemies, unique encounters and landmarks of interest? Do you want a hero who can climb ledges, slide from the hills etc.? Do you want a janky combat and loose collision detection? Do you want a fast travel as more late option that was immersively inserted into the game? And even a compass and a map. Do you want to pleasure your eyes with cozy late90s-early00s low poly landscapes? Yeah, basically Redguard does all this and I always felt that Ultima 9 and TESA Redguard are two major influences on what gothic has become. I enjoyed Redguard more than Gothic, but in part, because it has a really interesting world and backstory. It was the first game for which Kirkbride wrote, so it can be combined with Morrowind in kind of a "blob" in this sense, tho I always felt like Redguard in places does a better job than TES3 with those ideas. But you at the start of the video said that you are "not interested in fantasy backstory" so I will give it a 50/50 in terms will you potentially care to read the included manual/lore book/comic or will just pass it by. Same as it has no level or character progression besides gear and items, so you might be bored of it, even tho I think that it is more pleasing to the eyes than Gothic and its dungeons are a bit more "unique" in this sence.

Hey Ross, you brought up one interesting topic regarding modern attempts at stylization in indie games. What you called "low poly" characters - they are not low poly themselves. If you look at the polycount of 3d beards, 3d eyes, 3d eyelids, 3d polygonal glasses - they probably have more polygons than Half-Life 2 characters. But they lack any kind of smooth polygons and textures. The first two images are examples of (almost) the same model in Floppy and CD versions of X-wing. One is flat-shaded, while the other, the same, has Gourand shading applied, which makes it look smooth with the same polygon count. So your typical late 90s game or early 00s game has much less polycount than this indie game, but it was "smoothed" and had bitmap texture applied. Later games in the 00s also had other texture post effects to fake "detail" without using a billion polygons. So there was a modern trend for some time when high poly models (or even just overlay filters) just without texture or shading were called "low poly". And it is still something you get first in google. And I kind of hated it, it reminded me of overall idk "corporate logo style" stuff. But this game takes it to the next level an inserts such characters into a textured world.

Hope you will do Lands of Lore 1 one day. The humor and art and world here feel very close to Kyrandia. Hell, even engines are related! And music... peak westwood for me.

Jak games IIRC close engine to Ratchet and Clank so probably similar, but polished a bit more. Need to try, I never get past Jak 1 yet in this series sadly.

I'm in but not post or even look much on the discord server. But, ehh, this is off topic.

Am I that ugly? Well, maybe will draw something different later

Also, I managed to beat all hoverboard races in 2002 PS2 Ratchet and Clank First one was quite annoying

I can recomend sonic riders. It actually has requred tricks (sort of), actual AIR mechanics where air is your FUEL and Sonic Riders 1 has AWESOME 2d intro made by some professional anime studio. Really nice game, I think you'll find it interesting. https://youtu.be/3dYgTNOjsI8

Oh, so it is a native Win9x game Well, weird, maybe bad compression from 3DO same as with FMV components. PC codecs were really bad back then. Good to know, thanks