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Visuals that just don't quite click

AlStrong

Member
bioshock. Why are people made out of shiny platic?
640px-Bioshock_PoorJohnny.jpg

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

Member
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

Member
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:

ibjsFIUBtRe92X.png


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:

iN1ezHZVppxfo.png

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
crysis-alien.jpg


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.

standard_c2e3screen1_jpg.jpg


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!
 
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.
 
bioshock. Why are people made out of shiny platic?
640px-Bioshock_PoorJohnny.jpg

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.
 

Orayn

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

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.

bf3%202011-10-28%2002-27-14-91.png


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.
 
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

Neo Member
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

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

darksiders.010510-580px.png

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?
 

boiled goose

good with gravy
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

Member
resistance-fall-of-man-20061019114909136.jpg


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.

RHZG41.jpg

StarhawkBetaexclusivity.jpg

Starhawk-Third-Person.jpg


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

Dylan

Member
943189024d1255528473-demo-dragon-age-origins-character-creator-tn_565_74.jpg



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.

cj-real-doll-pic.jpg
 
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