One thought on “Elder Speak (Week of April 9 – 13)”

  1. @monday
    I think Gavin was spot on when talking about the sales of games with unusual art styles. Weird art styles are divisive and their appreciation subjective, they raise the entry level barrier and in the end they narrow its userbase. While gaming has overdone photorealism to death, it’s been taken as a default aesthetic rather than a deliberate art style, and that’s a shame too, specially because most games, despite looking realistic, take tons of licenses that open up room for actual photorealistic games. A quick example would be proportions of buildings in games. If you pay attention when playing games, you’ll notice that doors are bigger than in real life, ceilings are heigher, corridors are wide enough for 5+ people to pass by, buildings are smaller, city blocks can be walked in a few seconds, etc. In games like STALKER, this is different, buildings at time seem huge and distances vast. STALKER presents realism in varied ways, by means of its complex ecosystem, advanced AI, weather and day-night cycles, its night-time darkness, firearm handling, status ailments (bleeding, hunger), world proportions, shaders, and on and on. Like Gavin said, it’s more than just developing an art style, the game needs to be cohesive in all aspects and that’s hard to do and hard to sell. The development team of STALKER evidently worked extra hard to bring realism -in pretty much every meaning of the word- to their game. Others just default to realistic graphics, which in my experience tends to leave the game impact-hampered.

    By the way, super stoked about Dark Souls PC (I don’t think you’re right, Randy, the whole point of the game, based on my Demon’s experience, is that you’re left to scavenging every piece of information you can find, from the manual to the artbook to item descriptions, to make out what really happened in the game…it’s what I like to call anthropological narrative, and it’s one of my favorite storytelling mechanics-narrative schemes). It’s never been discounted a single peso in freaking Argieland so preordering it for 45-55USD on Steam will be huge savings for me (like 30USDs or something…).

    And last but not least, I really liked that small bit you did about STALKER, Randy :3

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