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Game Developers: Pay more attention to color, please [NSF56k]
Tzen
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Registered User regular
Meh.
Tzen on
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Those screenshots look like they are from a game with a lot of different genres in one game. When's it out?
Can you not see the artistic difference between Fallout 3 and Oblivion? Even these two games made by the same developers on the same engine have a huge stylish difference.
Fallout has a very dry color set going for it. Everything from the people to the old jukebox in the corner looks like its had the life sucked out of it.
Oblivion on the other hand looks more colorized. Like everything is one step beyond normal. It looks more like a dream then a life picture.
Just cause something has a spot of realism to it doesn't make it with out style or artistic qualities.
I never asked for this!
I still say Viva Pinata is the best looking 360 game, but colours are only for kids games, so meh
And whoever decided that bloom was a good idea is a bad person. That shit is worse than lens flare.
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Apocalyptic wastelands aren't full of rainbows and spring flowers you know.
Says you. Don't get me wrong, I love the shit out of Super Mario Galaxy and all, but I also adore the sort of games you feel 'have no place' in the gaming world.
Yeah that wouldn't be TRUE TO THE SPIRIT OF FALLOUT!
I never asked for this!
I don't know. There are times when it looks okay, but I'd say most of the time it looks off, unnatural and washed out. Too bland in some areas, especially the cities (the capital in particular).
And I LOVE realistic looking graphics. Look at Project Gotham or something. I am not saying I want everything to look like Fable 2.
Every one of those screenshots are unflattering to the game in question
I'll agree that Gears of War and Fallout 3 are drab, but that's kind of the style they were going for to fit the atmosphere
I have no artistic ability what-so-ever. But I mean, I think that looks better...?
Isn't that the opposite of what you want? Because, you know, sunsets are orange and your OP says you hate sunsets.
These games that strive for realism typically end up looking extremely fake.
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Edit: I'm not only speaking about color here, but also the abuse of haze/blur/bloom. And some game are over-saturated (Grid) while other games are undersaturated (Fallout 3). And some games are just a bit too gray/brown/whatever.
needs more characters that have grizzled shaved heads
I DEMANDE MORE GRIZZLED SHAVED HEADS
e: Oh, and the dinosaur ones too.
edit: Tav, those are from Fallout 3.
To be slightly more constructive, I just don't see the issue here. The Oblivion shots, as others pointed out, are from when the sun is setting in game. I'm not sure if you just haven't seen a nice sunset in a while or what, but generally, sunsets tend to involve lots of oranges and pinks and other such colors. Fallout 3 is more muted and toned down because that suits the game's environment. If you look outside on a dreary, sun-soaked afternoon, you get the same sort of washed out colors.
As for most of the other games, I dunno, the colors seem appropriate given the setting. You could argue that Rainbow Six and such things could be set somewhere more colorful, but for where a given location is meant to be, I think it looks fine, and fairly realistic. It's not like we don't have plenty of bright, colorful games this generation as well.
I didn't agree until he posted those.
But now, yeah, the pics in the OP look too bright. Like someone fucked with my monitor settings or something.
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Actually. GR2 (if that's what that is) looks better color-wise than GRAW1/2, IMO.
Battlefield 1942 - that's not fair. The newer Battlefield games look damned good, colorwise.
And my point was, things weren't magically better before.
BF2 had some pretty damn colorful spots.
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I guess I should have phrased that differently. What I mean is that realism shouldn't trump either balance or fun, and that happens. It's a video game, a fantasy, there should be no limits placed on it because of the real world.
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too shiny
too dull
too colorful
too much bloom
too much HDR
not enough of any of the above
too brown and realistic
Once they fix something there will be something else to complain about.
I prefer the gameplay of western games, but I have to give credit to Japanese devs that really take things like color into consideration as a whole game "vision" is concerned. You have the ultra-realism of Gran Turismo, and then you have the ridiculous but beautiful color palettes in Final Fantasy. Then you have stuff that's somewhere in between like Metal Gear Solid. But some western devs do really well with colors: Project Gotham, Fable 2, etc.
I just think lots of Western devs don't pay enough attention to color. Fallout 3 I think is just very poorly colored. I understand it's a post-nuclear world, but all they needed to do was stick more closely to the concept art where the color palette is concerned.
Other times, particularly this generation, they seem to be abusing bloom/HDR like it's a bad clothing fad. Grid could look really nice, but when I watch videos of it, I find it to be just visually annoying. It's too bright, it's too blurry, it's too "glowy" etc.
It is not by any means a matter of REALISM. It's a matter of logic, artistic integrity, and CONSISTENCY.
Edit: And I also think western devs are too concerned with poly-counts, having a billion real-time lightsources, superduperultrabumpmapped whatever. I guess you can call me a graphics whore, but it's not in a technological way - rather an artistic way.
I think that about sums up this thread.
Don't get me wrong. I hate overused, I'm-on-the-surface-of-the-sun bloom or HDR abuse as much as the next guy.
But some of that looks really good. Sunsets really can be orange. Golden hour is called so for a reason. A lot of games use film, not real life as inspiration for their lighting model. GTAIV is the perfect example of this and has done the best job that I've seen.
Maybe I'm saying games need the equivalent cinematographers or something.
Yeah, you can just tell me that this is just a matter of taste, or that I'm just plain wrong, but I think there are big budget titles out there and that if they were just tweaked color-wise a little bit, ALMOST everyone would agree that it was a huge improvement.
Sometimes bloom fits!
But then, other times I wonder why the bartender is so luminous:
See, I completely agree, but I don't want my call of duty 5/fallout 3 looking that way, y'know? :P
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