Do older games sometimes look better from being less cluttered? (Minimalism?)

[Inec0rn]

This is another 'muh realism' problem, you know, it just doesn't look real enough in those darn old games, gotta add more random bullshit to the area.
Here's the perfect example:

lol - that mod is a total abomination.

 

[cretin]

When 3d art had to be built from the ground up, I think they probably employed a lot more actual artists . Now any dickhead can make a 3d "scene" that approximates some real space but it's all a fucking eyesore and it's terribly hard to make anything out because no art direction.

 

[dbx]

And it doens't help to have art departments with 300 peoples in 4 different world locations working on the same game...

 

[JC'sBarber]

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage still looks fantastic and runs like butter, even in 4K and on an APU. Compared to it's successors like Wreckfest and Trail Out, which are far more demanding hardware-wise and don't look much better.

 

[Storyfag]

When 3d art had to be built from the ground up, I think they probably employed a lot more actual artists . Now any dickhead can make a 3d "scene" that approximates some real space but it's all a fucking eyesore and it's terribly hard to make anything out because no art direction.

Yes. It is all in the art direction. Which, of course, does connect to the amount of detail. But that in itself isn't bad. It turns bad when overused.

 

[Damned Registrations]

When a 40-polygon human walks in, that's when you want to gouge out your eyes.

I don't think Quake models look that bad, luv me shambler.

Also, this thread suddenly reminded me of that famous comparison pic between Warcraft 3 original graphics and reforged.
View attachment 55958

Reminds me of the restoration of 'The last supper.' I saw it side by side with the pre-restoration version in a museum recently, I thought they had the signs switched. Forget art direction- you could drag a random drunk hobo off the street and he could do a better job managing this shit. It's like someone was doing a 'how to draw' tutorial and got bored half way through.

 

[Kabas]

Reminds me of the restoration of 'The last supper.' I saw it side by side with the pre-restoration version in a museum recently, I thought they had the signs switched. Forget art direction- you could drag a random drunk hobo off the street and he could do a better job managing this shit. It's like someone was doing a 'how to draw' tutorial and got bored half way through.

Further proof that new doesn't necessary means better. A 2002 game everyone bashes for looking cartoony has a more realistic and detailed graphics than a remake that was released 18 years later.
Character models themselves are actually the perfect example of "older games sometimes look better from being less cluttered".

Don't necessary hate "busy" graphics but whoever did the work on reforged clearly didn't nail it all and i also absolutely despise how unexpressive the character portraits look.

 

[Alienman]

Reminds me of the restoration of 'The last supper.'

Seems they "diversified" it too.

 

[Humanophage]

I don't fully agree. Older 3D was prohibitively ugly - not just the models, but also the blocky, geometric, headache-inducing environments. 2D had the baroque detail at the time and was beautiful. In fact, early 3D was so ugly and was overwhelming 2D at such a rapid pace at one point that I almost lost enthusiasm for gaming because everything was turning so irritatingly fugly. It's untrue that games didn't care about presentation back then. There was a huge graphics race.

Intermediate 3D was a bit more tolerable, but it suffered from more invisible walls such that the baroque bush is actually an impenetrable rock. I think the annoyance comes from there being so many elements which appear interactable or having uneven texture, but in fact are not and the underlying structure is still as blocky as it was before. Whereas old 3D might feel more alive because the shapes are meaningful (e.g., you can jump on a ledge in Gothic if it looks like a ledge). That said, I still think modern 3D like Witcher 3 or Jagged Alliance 3 looks fairly attractive while something like NWN1, Warcraft 3 or Quake 2 looks ugly.

It might be a little different for highly action-packed games like shooters because it's easier to understand what's going on in Unreal Tournament than in something like Hunt. But in truth it's probably an unfair advantage and actual combat is more like Hunt. But then UT is more pleasant.

The bottom line is that 3D is usually either ugly or uncanny, or incomprehensible. 2D > 3D.

Original Spyro looks better. All that detail in the remake makes it gaudier and less dreamlike.

It was rather ugly in 1998 and it is still rather ugly later. The later iteration just has a specific cartoonish style that we associate with mobile games. I wouldn't actually call it very detailed.

The early 2000s were graphically quite sad (although good gameplay-wise). It was this whole transformation of 2D into 3D for the sake of technical progress and because "you need to move on with the times". It's especially sad because 2D at the time was getting truly beautiful.

Left looks amazing, like a real cartoon. Right looks ugly even if it has a dreamlike quality:

Left looks good, both detailed and readable. Right looks simplified, cluttered, and fugly at once:

Left looks sweet with precise little details and diverse images. Right looks ugly, with incomprehensible buildings - and it's actually not as bad as most as you at least have cute textures on roads:

Attractive if low res on the left, horrifying on the right (even if it has a nostalgic vaporwave aspect):

Left also invariably looks much more detailed, so it is not the issue. If anything, the cartoonish simplification on the right is the issue. Maybe for action games it's less problematic as it makes them more readable, but that's not the case for other genres. In fact, even budget 2D games look sweet and aged dramatically better.

The problem is that it was already ugly back then and it was graphical decline. It is important that it isn't retroactively ugly from the modern vantage point, but it was ugly in the moment too. When I was e.g. playing M&M6 shortly after it was released I was just wincing how ugly it was and how I must tolerate it because the gameplay is nice (a contrast made all the sharper by the great cover art). After some time I got a bit of a Stockholm syndrome and even started appreciating the vistas. But it really isn't the norm. The 2D games just looked straight up great.

 

[JoacoN]

I think the minimalism aspect can also benefit certain 2D games, I think there's sometimes an overboard on the usage of sprites.
I don't mean the size or the complexity of the art itself, but rather the amount of sprites and the layers of the background thrown at the player to fill in space and trying to make the game be a little more "lively" or "active".
Happens a lot to me with games that started on the NES and then made the jump to the SNES. Games like mario, contra, or castlevania look more appealing to me on the NES and have clearer gameplay thanks to the easier to distinguish sprites and the empty space inbetween allows to know distances much better.

 

[Maxie]

I have a hard rule when it comes to games.... unless all UI / HUD elements can be completely disabled then I don't bother playing it.

but is your PENIS as hard as your hard RULE?

 

[Tehdagah]

Reminds me of the restoration of 'The last supper.' I saw it side by side with the pre-restoration version in a museum recently, I thought they had the signs switched. Forget art direction- you could drag a random drunk hobo off the street and he could do a better job managing this shit. It's like someone was doing a 'how to draw' tutorial and got bored half way through.

Further proof that new doesn't necessary means better. A 2002 game everyone bashes for looking cartoony has a more realistic and detailed graphics than a remake that was released 18 years later.
Character models themselves are actually the perfect example of "older games sometimes look better from being less cluttered".

Don't necessary hate "busy" graphics but whoever did the work on reforged clearly didn't nail it all and i also absolutely despise how unexpressive the character portraits look.

Remake looks better.

 

[Necrensha]

Remake looks better.

The most wrong comment of 2024

 

[Damned Registrations]

One could make the argument some of the models look better- while zoomed in so much they fill the entire screen. At full zoom out though, where you actually play the game, they're indecipherable static. It's like the difference between a good paintjob on a car and one covered in a million decals you can't make out.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Graphics, 3D graphics especially have grown very tiresome in the past 10 years to the point that they made themselves irrelevant.

It reminds me of this clip:


Take a new 3090 AI Nvidia gfx card with 3000 cores. But all that really translates to is more annoying shader effects and heaps of vegetation. Its grown beyond boring at this point and its just tiresome. I mean they aren't even doing meaningful stuff like increasing draw distance.

Most games don't really even need to be 3D. I think now its just even an easier and lazier to make 3D isometric games. Unless you are making a fast paced shooter or something that really needs 3D I think its best avoided at this point until things cool off a bit anyway.

But I also groan when I see that chunky fake retro 2D pixel stuff, with fake CRT lines, yuck. Thats taking it too far the other way. So I'm not a fan of just 2D hand drawn stuff but theres really no substitute for crafting with taste. Serve the story, serve the game.

 

[deama]

Here's some more:


I think my favourite one would be sacrifice though, very interesting look and atmosphere:

 

[Lyric Suite]

Yes, most modern games are visually cluttered, especially realistic games.

It's because the developers are retards though.

I mentioned this before but i remember trying Battlefield 4 once and i found the game impossible to look at. Everything was hard to see or make out for me, a combination of the game vomiting post-processing effects indiscriminatly while the whole screen was behind some kind of shit filter.

In some cases, some games look better just by disabling that shit. Dirt Rally suddenly looks ten times better just by turning the post-processing effects slider to the lowest setting.

And then, you get games like the nu-Dooms which are perfectly clear and everything is easy to make out despite the game having post-processing effects up the wazoo not to mention everything being dark as shit.

I would say in general it's probably true that older graphics were easier to grasp but in many cases the issue with modern games being difficult to look at is mostly a matter of the developers messing it up.

A recent case in point is Bioshock. Compared to System Shock 2, everything was much harder to grasp and see. However, Bioshock is also quite old in itself and there were games released the same year that had perfectly crystal clear graphics, like Stalker.

 

[Lyric Suite]

FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage still looks fantastic and runs like butter, even in 4K and on an APU. Compared to it's successors like Wreckfest and Trail Out, which are far more demanding hardware-wise and don't look much better.

The filter ruins it.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I recently fired up 'Severance: Blade of Darkness'. During the opening, from about 1 minute 20 seconds below (should play from there), there is a valley or gorge that is just very visually and audibly satisfying. It struck me as another example of how late 1990s and early 2000s games captured the feel of mysterious worlds, in very few polygons, often constructed from simple shapes representing flat rock planes or pillars of unadorned rock. I was enjoying the scenery of a game that I never played upon release, despite it technically being 20 years old, from a time ostensibly primitive compared to current capabilities, more than I do in many modern games. Perhaps level designers had a good sense for placement of terrain, and could translate it into game design. The sound design sells the scene, and the whole thing gives a cool vibe:



There is almost no actual detail beyond the textures. No grass. No twigs. No bushes. No random rocks. Yet it feels like a real place, full of shallow pools, cascading from one section of a river to another, and one that is inviting to explore. These days we have the technology to place shrubs everywhere, fill it with sand, put decorations everywhere, make the rocks realistic, or fill an internal man-made space with candles and baroque furnishings. I personally find that the eye can slide off too much detail. The suggestion of what is there, the impression, is more important than the detail.

Dark Souls I in general used a lot of interesting architecture, from studying European ruins and churches, had lots well placed architectural features, mysterious stairs, and nice walls or coblestones of undressed stone. Resembling Dunluce Castle, Klis Fortress, or Heidelberg Castle. The way that people sometimes prefer an ancient ruin, to the actual living colours that temples in Greece or South Asia were sometimes painted in, it shows a aesthetically interesting world pretty devoid of ornamentation in many areas, as if the Undead Parish has been long cleared of any objects by human scavengers, wind and elements.

Is that actually preferable to say tons of baroque details in a video game level? I find my eye sometimes just slides off environments that are packed with objects, depending of course on how tastefully it's done.

I was looking at some screenshots and footage from 'Enotria: The Last Song', which looks great even if it's apparently not a game on par with some other Soulslikes. It has quite beautiful architecture, presumbly inspired by medieval Italian hill towns. I would say I much prefer say the bare bridge or whatever pictured above as a playing area, when compared to something absolutely loaded with objects.

What counts is aesthetics and presentation.
Not everything has to be ultra realistic, and games back in the day were not concerned with that. What really mattered was the gameplay.

Utter nonsense i'm afraid. Games always strived for realism, it's just that by realism they actually meant realism.

In real life for instance, there's no such thing as blurriness everywhere and no photographic effects impairing your vision. Modern "realism" is not actually realistic at all. Even movies are no longer realistic. When i go outside for instance i don't happen to see yellow everywhere:



And if i did it would probably be a good time to go see a doctor.

BTW, nowadays we have games that focus on "style" over "realism" and the results are utter garbage:

 

[Damned Registrations]

In real life for instance, there's no such thing as blurriness everywhere

To be fair, that's pretty much exactly how eyes work actually. The brain just tricks you into thinking you're seeing more than you actually are by filling in the gaps. Anyone who wears glasses constantly would be familiar with the 'holy fuck how did I not realize how filthy these were?' moment when you remember to clean them. Ditto for light sources, prespectives and colours. Hence why optical illusions are a thing.

Of course, it's a retarded thing to try replicate with graphics because YOUR EYES ALREADY DO THAT. Replacing actual visual information with blurry garbage is like making a copy of a copy when both copies were shit to begin with.

And of course, shit like lens flare is just a whole new level of retardation unless you're supposed to be looking through a camera.

 

[The people of Duckburg]

Of course, it's a retarded thing to try replicate with graphics because YOUR EYES ALREADY DO THAT. Replacing actual visual information with blurry garbage is like making a copy of a copy when both copies were shit to begin with.

I don't know how many times I've tried to explain this to retards. Similarly, depth of field blur is a bunch of horseshit. It makes no sense unless you're looking through a camera in-game. Your eyes naturally blur things you aren't looking at, or I guess I should say sharpen the things you are looking at, so you're never going to encounter a situation where you're focusing on something but it's still blurry. Well, you will, but for unrelated reasons. Point is, blurring things that your character isn't focusing on is a double does of blur that wouldn't occur in reality.

Anyway, another reason why newer games feel so cluttered is that they have little contrast. In, say, Deus Ex you can clearly tell whenever there's something on the ground, provided it isn't pitch black of course. That's not the case in most games now. I recall seeing a discussion many years ago, about weapons occasionally doing that glinting effect. It was one of the early Uncharted games, I believe. Someone was complaining about it, saying that it's insulting and that he can obviously see the weapon anyway. Well, the thing is, you really can't when it's camouflaged in some grass or in a pile of rubble. Not in the middle of action and reliably. For all the faults of those games, I think that was the right decision. The gameplay in them is closer to arcade action than simulation, and making pickups easier to spot fits that. In something like Grimrock, a slower game where being observant and finding secrets is part of the gameplay and challenge, it's another matter. Though I think Grimrock's items are fairly easy to see relative to the total visual noise that is modern games, as long as you have a good light source, regardless. Too many effects with no concern for how it affects visibility.

 

[Inec0rn]

Fortunately this can be disabled in the vast bulk of games, why would you want two camera lenses strapped to my head when playing a game?

just disable chromatic, vignette, lens flare, dof, motion blur (the most retarded).. pretty easy.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Often it is not so easy and the game still looks like shit even after you do that.

 

[SixDead]

Low-detailed graphics automatically makes your imagination work and add missing details, and you see game as something ideal (because your imagination is ideal personal world).

In my dreams I sometimes visit Daggerfall and Morrowind, but never Oblivon and Skyrim, because former games I saw with my inner eye, by imagination, and later was just a graphics at monitor
(I'm drunk and my english is bad, sorry if I posted nonesense)

 

[The people of Duckburg]

Right, forgot to mention something related to that mini-rant about misguided realism. One of the worst offenders isn't blur, but head bobbing. How often do you notice your view bobbing up and down as you walk or run? Essentially never. Our brains have learned to ignore it. It isn't strictly related to cluttered environments, but that your screen shakes violently from the slightest movement is a large part of why some games look so busy and unclear.