Modern Games - Dark Grimey Cluttered Boring Crap

[directhex]

my top best-looking games ever include Rez (dreamcast, xbox live arcade) and Okami (wii, ps2)

in their own ways, both are gorgeous. rez is a visual extravaganza, whose complexity comes from the simple shapes and colors - like playing a shooter inside a winamp visualization. okami succeeds in a breathtaking representation not only of medieval japanese watercolor painting, but in bringing it to life through form and motion. i get that shutter of joy typically reserved for finishing a game, every time i manage to bring one of the cherry trees back to life, purely because the accompanying animations convey that sensation so well through color and light.

of course, many pc gamers are only interested in photorealism and the chance to push their graphics card to the grey-and-brown limit. many of the most bold moves happen on consoles these days

oh, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, which did a fantastic job of making a game look like a real cartoon, in the way old Don Bluth games like Space Ace and Dragon's Lair tried to

[Whiternoise]

See my post on Mirrors Edge.

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-gaming...ink-again.html

[Ciber]

cartoon games are really good, artwork has much more potential for humour and unreality and stylised worlds than trying to show off an engine without a plot, and cartoon games can be pretty dark like "another world"

the whole concept of cartoons is trying to capture and crystallyse atmosphere without getting caught up in formlessness and blandness...

games are at best a kind of caricature of a world with a sense of space and tension, silence and events, not necessarily all out combat and masses of shader effects and cream pie on every wall. i prefer clearingout a level of bad guys than besically being pray to lots of guly monsters jumping out of corners on top of me, at least for 50 percent of games.

I think I'm pretty much reapeating what others have said. I do agree with you on UT3, the previous incarnation Unreal Tournament 2004 had better more open outdoor maps and felt better all round to me. In fact UT2K4 is a modern game I would point to as being what you feel you are missing. I feel games being made for consoles as well as PCs is somewhat to blame for this, as the consoles have less power to deal with large environments, though oblivion does put the lie to that somewhat lol.

You might like crysis, call of duty 4 or oblivion, all mostly outdoors and with good looking outdoor landscapes and atmosphere. Yes, if you havent tried oblivion yet it has exactly the sort of scenery you talk about. Also look forward to Fallout 3

[prehensile]

i bought ut2k3 and was gutted the new finished version came out a few months after. good point, great games, will have to try most of them!

here is a screenie of Grimm... american mcgee did sound and level design for ID up untill quake 2... released july
IGN: American McGee's Grimm Screenshots (Web) Full Size 2292859

[prehensile]

[prehensile]

obviously a forum bug

[acrobat]

.

Hmm, I'm all for slagging off modern games (cause I hate most of them), and praising old games (cause I love most of them), but I'm having a hard time joining your thoughts on it really. I was expecting to join in and start laying into all that's wrong in modern gaming, but you went off on a completely different angle to where I'd go. In fact, you went off on about dozen different angles so it's hard to nail down exactly what bugs you. You mention: hidden rooms (or lack of), grimy graphics, cluttered areas, lack of atmosphere, bad artistic styles, characters that don't really seem realistic, lack of epic scenery (giant citadels / huge archaic statues / etc), sounds, etc...

It's a lot of stuff.

The trouble is, I find most modern games lacking in some way or another, but they are so many examples of games that DO offer everything you crave, and games that do a great job of those things. I could go on all day about it. For example, the hugely popular WoW is all about cartoony pretty graphics. It's the opposite of high tech really, and not filled with bumpmapping and cluttered over detailed textures. It's more like a waterpainting than anything else. And there are other games like that - even games that take it to the extreme like the new Team Fortress 2, or the dozen or so games that came out a few years ago during the cell shading craze. For atmosphere there are loads of games that are menacing and scary. Then you say you like clearing out a level of monsters instead of monsters jumping out of dark corners, well really... 90% of FPS's are about clearing out areas of monsters/enemies. There are only a few games that did the dark corridor thing. As for beautiful big open areas with huge architecture and stuff, there are quite a few games that do an amazing job of that. Vanguard:SOH was one of my favourites. Oblivion was like that too. Also graphically, Crysis just has to be respected imo. The game wasn't amazing, but those graphics on maximum settings, are just as close to real life as it gets. And it's not dark grimy corridors, it's big open spaces with a tropical theme. Pretty stuff.

I think there are just a few that look fugly. The entire Unreal 3 engine is crap imo. Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War just don't look right to me. And the explosions are just plain wrong. Big red and orange splodges. I was probably the only person who, when that new Unreal game was released, was saying how crappy it was when everyone else liked it. But these few games that don't do things well aren't really a fair indication of all modern games. Modern games do some great things. You have games with amazing gameplay, amazing environmental graphics, amazing animation, amazing sound and music, amazing atmosphere and mood etc.. My issue with modern gaming is that it's almost unheard of that all this happens in the same game It's usually one or the other.

There are definitely things wrong with modern gaming imo. I think they are gradually getting easier and easier, and also more simplified too. They are also increasingly putting more into the graphics at the expense of everything else. And it's rare to see really unique and creative ideas, and games with lots of imagination - it's all mostly rehashing previous games with a few new features. There is also a big emphasis on FPS's, RTS's, RPG's, and some other stuff, and it has taken away from some of the older genres like Adventure Games, Beat Em Ups, and Flight Sims. That bugs me a bit, but there are some good ones that slip through. I made an entire thread about an amazing new flight sim that is due soon, and nobody replied, so I won't bother linking it again. But I was looking at movies of that recently, and it looks as good as anything anyone here will have ever played. It has more complexity than any of the Microsoft Flight Sim games if you crank the realism, but it can also be played as an arcade game too, and looks as fun as Strike Commander or any of those old greats.

Also, if you want some help getting excited about games again, (particularly PC games), check this out
games of 2008 « reasons why it’s worth to be a pcgamer
note: There are links at the top right of that page which show games of the past few years, and also next year.

[prehensile]

marvellous lineup there.

Yeah it's the graphics and the re-hashing that sucks, monsters have to have lots of atmosphere and a sense of humour, they have to introduce themselves and get splatted...the sound effects are improtant, it's nice to pickup powerups and get a spine tingling noize and the same goes for killing the monsters, you should have to master loads of techniques to outsmart their movements and dodge thir attacks, nowadays you get stuck in corridors and they basically smash you and and the dual is like fire at them really precisely and shoot the living crap out of them but there isnt loads of strafing and out witting them.

the graphics capabilities nowadays are almost obsolete, you will still think graphics are brilliant if they are done very prettily in 10 years time, the developers just seem to have trouble making true artwork that is abit hypnotic and like ZONES that really make you feel somewhere real and epic. there is zero limitation with angles and all that which was when the 3d graphics games actually became obsolete fast. quake 3 still looks pretty amazing compared to ut3. not ut2k4 that rocks.

lots of games are about getting a rythm and knocking out all kinds of tactics to dodge monsters and reach new places... i like clearing out levels like i'm the one hunting them, seeing some power ups and doorways high up on the other edge of a breach and wondering how the heck to get it, being in a zone where your concentration on tactics and skills are paced constantly and progressively over long spans...to have a monster that has a really complicated tactic and having to observe it and then slowly pound it down. it has to have more animal in it that horror film, or at least equal of moth, like a spider can be a funky alien spider rather than a hellraiser one