The idea to thes realism part of this thread came to my while posting in the Games that resonated with you-Thread. anandxxx made a similiar thread earlier this year about how modern games are to clustered graphically which lead to the brown part.

So first things first. There seem to be two major trends in modern gaming. A graphical push towards more realism and a spin of the colourpalette towards brown/grey. This is further strengthened by the common consensus that colourful and non-realistic graphics (be it cel-shaded, cartoony or something completely different) are only for kiddy games.
What irkes me about this trends is that, to me videogames always were great because they were NOT like real life.

Running around as a neanderthal man riding dinosaurs that spit energy balls to defeat a huge one eyed brain/plant thing after riding a skateboard seems perfectly normal in a videogame despite the sheer absurdity of it all.

Running around as a soldier shooting terrorist/evil guys/civilians in a realistic setting seems more like watching the news than playing a videogame. (this is even moreso due to the trend of making video games movie like which sucks by itself)

Sometimes this fad with realism is taken quit a bit too far. Some may have heard of Morgan Webb and her problems with Super Mario Galaxy. She said it is too cartoony. And I really don't know what to say to that because, it is a MARIO game. Does she really want Mario to go all out on realistic graphics with a nice touch of brown on everything?
But I'm jumping to conclusions I cannot really draw so let's start from another point of view.

I think the only reason you can play Mario games without being disgusted is because they are in a comic style. Mario would be one of the most visually brutal games ever created if you put it in realistic graphics.
Mario games only work in cartoony graphics (deBlob, the Katamari series or the Kirby series are also such games). Furthermore cartoony/cel-shaded graphics allow for much more absurd gameplay ideas because the developer can create everything he wants without the fear of it looking weird or out of place(like the scene in Heavy Rain where you climb through the maze of electroluted cables or the scene where you can cut of your fingers, or where you crawl through the tunnel full of broken glass. Also the "hey I almost was electrified and have severe burnings but no problem I can always have sex with you idiotic codependent woman!"-scene. A wolf with a burning wheel on his back who also happens to poop flowers would be kind of weird in a realistic setting.

So to some extent I think the trend towards realism holds back the creative possibilities of developers while on the other side open a window for new stuff. For example the (now canceled) game "Six Days In Fallujah". It was set in a real war situation and maybe could have been able to transport the terrors of war without looking kind of goofy over the top like the Call Of Duty Series.

So to tackle the topic of brown greyness. This trend that brought us beautiful views like Killzone 2, Resident Evil 4, Gears Of War and many more.
This trend is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just bad for the diversity in games. Maybe it's just me but when I see random pics/gameplay footage of modern ego-shooters I have problems to seperate one from another. Maybe a slide turn of the colour palette once in a while would make it easier to actually make your game stand out. Crysis and Far Cry2 did this with greeniness (if that is even a word). So maybe to change up the look that has been sticking with first-person shooters especially try out some other colours (there are quiet a few of them!) Mr.Gamedeveloper!



I don't know if this is a somewhat structured entry but nonetheless. What do you think about the focus on realism and brown stuff in the gaming world today?

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Actually no.

carlosrox said:

@Feierabend
but what colors do you hope to see in War-Torn Iraq, or WW2 Normandy? What colors are we supposed to find in an office building? In a hospital?

From that I assumed that you think hospitals look like war torn Iraq and they sure as hell don't :D

I never doubted that the Iraqy desert looks pretty brown, because well it's a dessert.
But, as you mentioned yourself, there are a lot of games set in paces that require the use of a lot of brown because they are set in Iraq or the desert or run down cities. And that's exactly the point I tried to make.
If you say that a lot of FPS share the same atmosphere and have therefore the same colour palette, which you do, the it's justified to ask for more diversity. FPSes don't have to be set in wartime on earth with naturallistic artstyle. Simbabbad mentioned Prime 3 and Elebits and he's right, I would even add the Halo series and Team Fortress and Borderlands don't use naturallistic artstyles.But the Band Of Brothers games and Gears Of War games and the COD games and the Killone games do so.
What annoys me personaly (and was actually the reason I opened this thread) is the natruallistic artstyle (which is why that got like...80% of the OP) and that topic kind of went under the radar

carlosrox said:

Gimme some backup.

Can't let you have that... Carlosrox.

I don't have much to say here, other than the fact that genres/themes tend to dictate the coloring of a game doesn't negate the fact that I'm sick of so many grey/brown games. Maybe developers need to think up some more creative genres/themes if they feel constrained to make their games so dull looking all of the time.

StarWolf said:

carlosrox said:

Gimme some backup.

Can't let you have that... Carlosrox.

Rofl, well played, well played.

@Simbabbad
Uhm why does it matter if no one's talking about Silent Hill? I'm talking about Silent Hill. Those are some very selective screens and Shattered Memories happens to be the most colorful of all the games (and the only one with a Frozen/Blue color scheme) so that makes it even more selected. Find some screens from 1-5 and see how colorful they are. Those Wii Screens must have some jacked up colors too cuz I don't recall SHSM being that retina burning when I played it.

The op's point is just flawed cuz you can't fault games for following an art style that they need to send out their message. Gears of War should deserve an instant omit from this argument since it takes place on a dying earth ravaged by war with underground aliens. What colors are we gonna find? Same for Fallout. I don't expect vibrant colors or interesting schemes in a Fallout game and no one should. Is it unfortunate that it doesn't have a more interesting scheme? Sure, but what can they do to fix it short of changing the entire idea they're going for?

You can't compare Enslaved to Fallout when they're going for something different. Enslaved's look is more original, sure, but of course it's gonna be different when it's....different. It's hard to explain but it's just something that's obvious. Like why would Fallout look like Enslaved when Fallout doesn't take place in an post nuclear world that's now being overgrown by vegetation?

You guys aren't asking for unique art styles, you're asking for unique game concepts. But you can't change Gears Of War or Fallout and have the same game. The developers are trying to make the games they wanna make and the art styles suit them all. It's not like brown and grey doesn't make sense in GOW. There's also many more colors than that anyways but people like to pretend they don't exist.

Zero said:

I don't have much to say here, other than the fact that genres/themes tend to dictate the coloring of a game doesn't negate the fact that I'm sick of so many grey/brown games. Maybe developers need to think up some more creative genres/themes if they feel constrained to make their games so dull looking all of the time.

How do you define dull? All of these supposed HD Brown and Grey games are actually very beautiful.

I mean, is this dull to you? I think it's gorgeous, even when it actually IS all warm tones people complain about it's still beautiful. Gears Of War has an awesome art style, I don't even know what people complain about.

@carlosrox

So your problem are the saturated colours? Because I really don't think that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories looks "retina burning" at any moment or thought something along the lines of "OMG these colours are hurting my eyes!"
And those pics pretty much resemble my memories of how it looked.

You know how in Gears of War, when you hold one of the bumper buttons down (I forget which), and your teammates are targeted while the screen turns black & white? I didn't realize that the screen was turning black and white during that until almost my second playthrough. That is ridiculous.

I'm serious, for serious. I too had a lot of trouble telling who were my teammates and who were my enemies when I first played the game.

I've had my retina burned, and since then I don't have to wear glasses anymore.

@carlosrox Yes those are all pretty dull looking to me. This isn't:



I'd get more screenshots of other games and go into more detail but I'm on vacation at the moment and don't want to sit online all day when I only have a few days in Toronto.

I dunno. Not necessarily even downing the individual games themselves, just very bored at the very limited scope of the major games of the industry nowadays. Sure you "need" certain settings for certain themes/storylines, but it's annoying that 95% of major developers are all going the same route to begin with.

@X-pert74

Not to be that guy, but are you sure your TV is calibrated correctly? I know the color palette in Gears isn't incredibly varied but the effect on my screen in both games is very obvious with the exception of one area in the second game I can think of offhand that takes place in the dark.

Killzone 2 is about the only game I've played this generation that has really had such a terrible color pallet. Pretty much everything blends into each other and had they not given the enemies red-glowing-eyes they would be sucked into the background like everything else. It also doesn't help that since everything blends into each other finding my way around, even if it is such a linear game, has been troublesome at certain points. "Go into this building" is kind of tough when everything looks the same and "this building" has an entrance that looks like the ground.

@Simbabbad
Now try Halo!

@Kal-El814
I feel like my TV has been totally gaslighting me. I've thought games were getting darker for years, but I played on another TV, and the caves in Monster Hunter were totally visible. That TV's contrast was set at, like, 100, though.

Halo actually has pretty amazing AI and sandbox combat. The campaigns aren't really tight, like Gears of War, but fighting the AI on a decent difficulty level is always fun. I don't think that's true for many FPS games.

I'm pretty sick of first-person shooters, but Halo and Gears offer something unique and interesting in the single-player realm.

The original was $5 on Black Friday!

@Kal-El814 It could have been the TV, for all I know. I first played Gears of War on an SDTV, but nowadays my 360 is hooked up to an HDTV.

@anandxxx
I kinda know what you mean. I remember the Jungle Area in MGS4...the beginning of the stage is supposed to be at like 4am or something so it's almost turning to day but it's dark. The sky is a very very bright/white blue yet the ground and all that is very dark and almost blackish...ON MY OLD TV.

When I got my new TV it was like a different level. I couldn't believe how much brighter it was and I never changed the old settings on my TV cuz then it'd throw everything else off, right? It was completely insane though, it looked SO much better on this new TV.... Blacks on my old TV were also much muddier, they were almost greenish. I specifically remember Condemned looking pretty muddy on my last TV.