[AlStrong]

bioshock. Why are people made out of shiny platic?

Heavy usage of Eve/Adam. I thought it was a decent excuse for the Phong specular model they employed. Doom 3 and Fear had the same issue.

[Mistle]

Never clicked with Okami. I do like that style, but it all kind of just felt like a blurry mess when I played it.

[sp3000]

Crysis 2. Hold on, hold on. Don't lynch me yet. I am perfectly aware of how excellent it is technically, but 2 things grate to a degree that ends up with me not liking the visuals. 1. The insistence on having to use a post process AA filter if you want to use DX11. Fuck that noise. And specifically fuck its ability to ruin any high res texture. 2. The overall picture quality. This is super hard to put my finger on. Look at the below: I think it's the way in which things lose their detail in the distance. It could be an LOD issue and partly be related to the FXAA I've applied. But it's grainy, smudgy and just looks wrong. Overall I prefer the look of Crysis. The image is more... consistent? I dunno:

This is so true. Crysis has a realistic look that is very clean. Crysis 2 looks like a transformers movie blur everywhere, useless tessellation on minor objects, and generally a total lack of artistic design. Crysis 2 is probably the most technically impressive game that still manages to have terrible image quality.

The alien threat was so much more interesting in Crysis 1 and just felt more alien


Oh, look design that just imitates a human, since obviously bipedal slow moving suits are much better than tentacled things that can attack you from the air. We obviously need the aliens to imitate dudebro marines as the standard suit of the future.



Let's also set the game in a generic recognizable city like New York, instead of any actual alien environments, because that way everyone will understand it!

[Atomski]

thats not a pineapple?

Looks like a audio speaker to me.. which it is right?

[KeeSomething]

Bayanetta, Gears of War, and Sonic games have some of the worst characters designs ever. I literally get upset when I see screenshots or character art from those games.

[watership]

It's just so ugly, the design is all strange and atrocious.

You can blame Blizzard for that.

[Dead]

You can blame Blizzard for that.

:lol the irony

[George Claw M.D.]

How don't you see an intercom?

I never knew what those were and I never really cared, but now that it's been pointed-out, it seems ridiculous(I know everything in Mario games are ridiculous.). A bunch of free-floating intercoms throughout Mario World?

"What's that smell??"

"Du-du-dooookieeee..."


Add me to the list of people who loved the look of PS2 Okami.

[PumpkinPie]

bioshock. Why are people made out of shiny platic?

Which unreal engine games aren't shiny?

I never knew what those were and I never really cared, but now that it's been pointed-out, it seems ridiculous(I know everything in Mario games are ridiculous.). A bunch of free-floating intercoms throughout Mario World?

I don't get how people wouldn't think that they were intercoms, they speak to you! Mario games quite often break the fourth wall so an intercom that acts as a guide to the player doesn't seem out of place to me.

[Bioloff]

There is a thread that already has a ton of these characters about poor design, I feel like it's deja vu

[GrumpyAlien]

The generic female NPC faces in FF XIII-2. As someone in another thread said, they look like neanderthals.

[Orayn]

With regard to Darksiders: Blizzard's art direction was influenced by Joe Madiera, not the other way around.

[EatinOlives]

Facial "animations" in inFamous 1. W. T. F.

[les papillons sexuels]

While I appreciate the art as good art, it doesn't click with me. It doesn't make want to play the game, there's just something about it which I can't put my finger on.

for me the problem was the lack of perspective. it became hard to tell what what was a platform and what wasn't. I appreciated the art too but I agree that something felt off.

[Always-honest]

Everything Bethesda

[XANDER CAGE]

Facial "animations" in inFamous 1. W. T. F.

The cutscene animations in general in that game were diabolical.

[Stabby McSter]

How? Oblivion was awesome. Sure it was really bright - but it didn't seem off at all. So far the only post I agree with is the Fire Emblem post. Those character animations are pretty awful.

Eh, I thought Oblivion was ugly in so many ways.

[Enco]

All JRPGs.

[Bomber Bob]

Which unreal engine games aren't shiny?

http://qube-game.com/

[Vire]

[Seda]

Facial "animations" in inFamous 1. W. T. F.

It was like the Sly Cooper animations, which really didn't work at all.

[backflip10019]

All JRPGs.

Agreed, I can't even look at that shit. I know it's not made for me, but damn I just hate them.

[XxSlasherMcGirkxX]

Games with characters 95% of the time are bald and or wearing hats and helmets.

Like this really bugged me watching the Uncharted 3 intro when Nate and Sully walk into the bar and there are like twenty people in there and they are all bald or wearing caps. I get that hair is hard to animate and creates a lot of clipping if it's long but I'll take originality and creativity over graphic integrity.

[FanTomasas]

Heavy Rain... Seriously, I wanted to strangle most of the characters, especially those children :D

+1 for all who hate JRPG characters. Wanted to kill entire FF13 crew. All characters there are pathetic both visually and emotionally. Only the chick with glasses and big boobs was ok :D

I feel sorry for someone who thinks Braid does not look right.

[~Devil Trigger~]

It's just so ugly, the design is all strange and atrocious.

the coloring i think ruined WAR's overall look

what he was

[Kesagiri]

General statement about an entire genre. I happen to not like that genre. Go me.

[les papillons sexuels]

for me it's pretty much any game that has a focus of drawing a lot of really complex scenes (mainly realistic ones), then loading a bunch of post processing effects on top of it.

take this bf3 pic as an example.



I understand that they're creating some kind of "cinematic realism" by trying to do this, but in the end it feels like a mix mash of we don't know what we're doing with our art-direction, but we want to show off our engine. It comes off as completely unoriginal, flat, boring and stale. In the end theres no thought put into how the visuals intereferes or inhances the games gameplay, and the games/graphics feel dated very quickly.

It screams "look at our tech" as opposed to "look how good we are at using our tech to make a good looking game".

I think it's the main reason why games with good art direction are always mentioned from prior generations over games with good tech. Like black for example, great looking game when it was released, no one talks about it now, wind waker on the other hand.

[backflip10019]

the coloring i think ruined WAR's overall look what he was

Really? All that grey on him looks boring to me.

[~Devil Trigger~]

Really? All that grey on him looks boring to me.

it looked more like a 'WAR' to me.

final War(the game overall) was colored to danm bright. Having colors does'nt have to mean....colorful.

[Kesagiri]

Star Ocean 4's Edge:

This game has way too many over-saturated colors and character animations make it look like they're creepy marionettes. It's just way too jarring.

[JaxJag]

Really? All that grey on him looks boring to me.

Yeah, the old War looks terrible. Like a Crysis reject...

[Phoenixazure]

^ UE3 game and with best hair in any video game/engine ever.

I know one of the artists that worked on it wrote a custom plugin for that hair. Any chance he ever licensed it out or released it for free. It would send character models forward a good 5 years

[sp3000]

All JRPGs.

This also.

[Übermatik]

[IMG]http://www.blisteredthumbs.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/psychonauts3.jpg[IMG]

I know exactly where you're coming from, but I largely disagree.

This is a post.

[raven777]

^ UE3 game and with best hair in any video game/engine ever.

wow it looks amazing...making me want to try out the game

[CitizenCope]

For some reason I HATED Crysis 2's visuals. I played the beta and did not like the way the game looked.

I felt the same way.
I also didn't like The Maw only because of its graphics and color palette.

[daedalius]

the coloring i think ruined WAR's overall look what he was

Nah. Gray metal future suit was cool, but I find the ancient warrior design to fit the narrative and design better.

Neogaf art threads, always entertaining.

[EatinOlives]

wow it looks amazing...making me want to try out the game

Looks even better in full motion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F86EMYW6F4

[GreggTheGrimReaper]

I generally find the low-poly-normal-map-everything-look to be very strange. This will hopefully become better in the next generation as the graphical power increases.

[Bioloff]

Really? All that grey on him looks boring to me.

Wow I never saw those old concepts of War. While his head is just way too small for his body in both designs and he is way too bulky (as most western character designs are these days) he looks so much better in his red robes. The grey would have been so typical..

[Kesagiri]

It's just so ugly, the design is all strange and atrocious.

Normally I'd try Darksiders, but the character design is too much. Did these weird proportions come out of trying to make the characters super muscular?

Skyward Sword. The characters are great and some instances the game overal looks great. But most other times the game looks terribad. Tunnel sections and the puke village most most notably.

I'm trying to picture what was bad about these particular sections. Do you have any examples?

[bachikarn]

the coloring i think ruined WAR's overall look what he was

old war looks like he is from space, not a rider of the apocalypse

[amtentori]

Don't have an image but,
The clipping in Link's model in SS.

Holy CRAP. Literally the hat is constantly clipping through the shield. Constantly. On the thing you will look at for the entire game. Why the hell was this not fixed.?????

[Angry Fork]

Painfully dull.

Also I loathed the HUD's in MAG and Socom 4, as well as that Unit 13 game. Zipper's HUDs this gen look terrible. The red/yellow/blue mixture does not work at all imo. The tiny indications for various points on the screen, the way everything is laid out, I just don't like it. It looks fine in a screenshot but in the middle of gameplay it's annoying.

And Starhawk. Warhawk's visuals are great everything clicks right but this game something is very off imo. The colors just don't mix right.





Compare this to the super clean look/feel of Warhawk:

[Littlegator]

Capcom's RE characters' legs/hips. They're bizarre, cylindrical logs with no muscles whatsoever

those are called pants

[funkystudent]

Sonic 4 ep1.

everything just seems so... amateurish.

Like someone made a Sonic advance fan game but didnt have enough time to make enough art.

[catmincer]

Star Ocean 4's Edge:

Reminds me of



*shudder*

[jonezer4]

Did these weird proportions come out of trying to make the characters super muscular?

You have to be super muscular to carry a sword that is roughly three times wider than your head and probably weighs several hundred pounds.

[-Eddman-]

For the most part of my childhood I thought the Agahnim sprite was supposed to look like this:

[Dylan]

As a general rule, trying to make characters "realistic" is a bad idea unless you're using a really advanced engine like Kojima Studio's. So don't even try! Just make them stylized or cartoony. Here we see Morrigan from Dragon Age, who has all the likeness of a Real Doll.