#i juST WORDCOUNTED IT AND THERE'S NEARLY 1.3K WORDS IM SOBBING IM SO SORRY KJGHJFG

[bigweldindustries]

i just read your tags on that nintendo post and yes,,, pls post your rant about stylisation in modern games i'd really like to hear... well no,, see your thoughts on it :D

SFGFGHGF thank you Angie!! 

(popping this under a cut as I got out of hand kjghjfgkjhfg)

(alsO keep in mind this is primarily about home consoles. i don’t mention hand helds nor do i really touch on arcade games, those are topics for another day)

I’d like to open this by saying that I’m pretty childish in a whole bunch of ways, but one of my biggest is that I am very much attracted to bright colours. It shows in my art - everything I draw is very, very colourful. I love stylisation, I love colour. 

Colour, as it so happens, was vital to video games up until the late 90s - the advent of the 32-bit era. Even the fourth generation (think SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive) could typically only produce 64-256 colours on screen at a time, depending on resolution. 

(The bastard child which we do not talk about is the Neo Geo, which could display 4096 colours on screen at one time, but the Neo Geo was a super expensive ‘luxury console’ and literally a bunch of arcade level components, hence why it was so far ahead graphically.)

For this reason, palettes were bright and expressive. Add in the fact that all home consoles at the time were raster image based (except for the sole, bizarre exception of the doomed Vectrex) and stylisation is the obvious outcome - once we got the graphical output for it, of course. Third generation games began to show stylisation - Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy III may be visually similar, but the nuances in the spritework are still plain to see - and then the 16 bit era really drove it home. 

The late 90s brought home gaming into a whole new dimension - 3D! Glorious, blocky, polygon-y, 3D. And stylisation well and truly went bonkers, maybe even more so than it did back during the sprite-based 16 bit era. 

Something important to keep in mind when considering 90s to early 00s gaming however is that everyone, for whatever reason, had Sonic fever, and so was trying to whip up their own fucking furry mascot. Platforming had always been a prominent genre, ever since the early 80s when Donkey Kong debuted and was immensely successful. Suddenly, we’re platforming in 3D, and there are furry mascots everywhere. Seriously, think of as many platforming game with animal mascots as you can, and I assure you you’re not even scratching the surface. 

Even putting aside the bright and friendly animal-based platformers, there’s still a tonne of fascinating examples of styles. Tomb Raider, Metal Gear, and Silent Hill all went for closer to realism than cartoon styles, and yet were all stark and distinctly stylised in their own different ways. Graphical output still had distinct boundaries, and stylisation was the way it was overcome. 

I feel like stylisation hit it’s peak immediately before it’s decline, with the sixth generation heralding in some of what are, in my opinion, the most wonderfully stylised games out there. the original Ratchet and Clank games, Metroid Prime, Okami, Space Channel 5, the Legend Of Spyro games.....Hell, Jet Set Radio and Jet Set Radio Future come from this time period, and are some of the most famously styled games of all time. Just enough polygons to render some absolutely wonderful models, not enough to warrant photorealism. 

That was, at least, until the seventh generation. Bright and atmospheric stylisation was out, and photorealism was in. 

(Unless you happened to be Nintendo, of course. Nintendo just shrugged, gave us Miis, Super Mario Galaxy, a whole bunch of The Legend of Zelda, and some third party kids games, and carried on like that until today, where they show no sign of slowing. Thanks, Nintendo. Owe you one.)

But with everyone else, stylisation very quickly died. The rise of the FPS definitely didn’t help here, with every studio clamouring to have their slice of the pie, but very quickly studios turned to photorealism. Far Cry, Call Of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted.....Very quickly, stylisation was abandoned. There was also that god-awful period where everyone and their nan was cranking out games with gritty washed out palettes, though we seem to have finally pulled through that one. Thank god. Thanks for that one, Call Of Duty. 

My point is that graphical advancements seem to have killed a lot of the visual creativity that always went into games, and instead everyone seems to be intensely focused on how realistic a game looks. I’m personally sick of it - I don’t give a shit that you can animate every hair in generic white protagonist #897′s beard, when it looks incredibly visually similar to every other fucking game in it’s genre. 

If I were to take a screenshot of a whole bunch of the most popular games from the last 10 years and show them to someone who wasn’t into games at all, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell 90% of them apart, whereas games of literally any other generation can be told apart visually with ease. There is so little visual differentiation in modern gaming, and it frustrates the everliving fuck out of me. We have so much graphical power, and yet all anyone wants to fucking do is replicate real life visuals - why? 

Hell, the 10% of actually visually diverse games make it feel even more sparse. Take for example We Happy Few, Bioshock, and Borderlands (I haven’t actually gotten around to playing any of the Borderlands games but they’re on my to-do list) - wonderfully atmospheric and full of some absolutely fantastic visuals. They’ve found themselves art styles, all gloriously unique and notable in their own ways. Even Overwatch is notable, with it’s stylised characters and bright colours. Hell, I give Fortnite props for it’s fucking style, for crying out loud. 

Aside from that, the only people consistently pumping out games with stylised graphics? Nintendo - and small, independent studios. Small, independent studios who are constrained, much like the sixth generation - not by lack of graphical power, but instead by lack of budget. They don’t have the money to buy fancy software and pay some cunt to animate four billion hair’s on some white dude’s face, so instead they find a niche in the gameplay market and stylise to save time and money.

(Slight deviation here but Nintendo on the other hand are absolutely fascinating to me, in that a lot of their strength is in their franchising.  They’ve got gaming franchises which have been around longer than some other studios have even existed. They’re the sole survivor from the third generation, outliving Sega and Atari. Even their newer franchises, such as Bayonetta, Splatoon, and Xenoblade, still stick to a bright and stylised appearance. Each and every Nintendo property has it’s own style, but they’re still congruent enough that Smash Bros. doesn’t look particularly odd - unlike when Sony tried to do the same with their Playstation AllStars Battle Royale, which was one of the most bizarre things I think I’ve ever seen, to this day. Nintendo well and truly are the family gaming company - there’s something there for everyone, no matter how young nor old.) 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a time and a place for stylisation. One of the very few genres I still take interest in is racing games - a niche in which realism is fantastic and very often awe-inspiring. Realism can be gorgeous, and I don’t hate the style! I just hate the complete and utter bottlenecking of the industry and the fixation on making things look as realistic as possible when there’s so much potential in stylisation. There’s so, so little visual diversity in modern gaming and it’s honestly sad as hell. Also I really miss fun cartoony platformers as a genre and not just an occasional nostalgia-grab but that’s more an Axel thing than an industry thing. 

Jesus fuck I rambled on for sO FUCKIGN LONG BUT. yeah there’s my thoughts on that i guess!!!! O: