

Why "next-gen games" went gray, brown, and grey. - EvilTrout
http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/archives/99

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tjic
It's long been the case that we invent tools, and then tend to do the things
that the tools make easy.

You can see that the distribution of furniture varieties changed a lot when
machine tools were introduced. Furniture got a lot cheaper, but because table
saws make straight cuts a lot easier than curved cuts, even in higher end
furniture, we ended up get a lot more style choices that utilized what was
easier.

I'm looking forward to seeing what stylistic changes happen in clothes,
furniture and more with the rise of small-lot production, CNC, and other
technologies. I expect that we'll see big changes.

~~~
george_morgan
This is something the industrial designer Ross Lovegrove has been exploring
for a while, here's the obligatory TED link:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ross_lovegrove_shares_org...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ross_lovegrove_shares_organic_designs.html)

He talks about early modernist design being dictated by the machining
processes of the time, lathes and extrusion etc. producing the characteristic
geometric work.

Tangentially linked to the OP...

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ajuc
This photorealism makes new games very boring artistic-wise.

Old games with hand-drawn graphic had some artistic value in them, they made
pepole imagine other worlds etc. Now it's just photorealism everywhere.

I wonder, when game graphic dadaism and cubism will appear.

Art is not about making more realistic copies.

~~~
Splines
I think it's not that games are becoming more realistic, it's just that the
range of possibilities for art in games is getting closer to realistic.

There are still many games that have a distinct art style that is not at all
realistic (off-hand, Castle Crashers and Braid on XBLA come to mind).

Will we have non-realistic FPS games? Maybe, but unlikely, as one of the
points of FPS games is to immerse people in a world, and making that world
look as real as possible is part of that goal. Right now, I'm having a hard
time thinking of an FPS game that is non-realistic (Madworld on Wii?)

~~~
chops
Team Fortress 2 is cartoony and not realistic at all.

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Silentio
Great article. I've always wondered why so many games this gen are boring
brown and gray. Playing through Fallout 3 makes this readily apparent.

The other thing I'd like to see change is the complete overuse of bloom shader
effects.

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LogicHoleFlaw
I like that the article mentions the game _Mirror's Edge_. It immediately
popped into my head as a counter-example when I read the article title. I
hadn't known that the game's more sophisticated lighting solution was what
allowed it to have the clean colorful look!

I've always preferred colorful games at the expense of photorealism. High
quality consistent art direction can overcome a lot of the drawbacks which can
be fudged by using the drab color palette so common currently.

I look forward to seeing the next generation of colorful titles enabled by
more powerful lighting engines.

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ChrisXYZ
Saw this on reddit the other day and the link was to:

[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PhilippeRinguetteAngrignon/20...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PhilippeRinguetteAngrignon/20090606/1708/Why_quotNextGen_Gamesquot_Went_Gray_Brown_And_Grey.php)

I can't tell if the link posted here is to the gamasutra article author's
personal blog, or if it's just ripped off content.

~~~
arakyd
Note the [Originally posted at <http://www.allegory-of-the-game.com/>] at the
bottom of that post.

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miloshh
So he says that games are becoming more realistic in most aspects, but not in
the lighting. That is probably true, but there is no reason why that should
cause the game to become grey and washed-out.

Most CG movies and effects (from Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM, ...) also do not have
anything close to photorealistic lighting (i.e. correct global illumination),
but they do not look grey.

One common mistake that leads to washed-out images is to apply gamma
correction (which is the right thing to do) but not apply inverse gamma
correction to your textures. That way your surfaces are essentially gamma-
corrected twice, which is clearly wrong. I don't know if they're really making
such a simple mistake, but who knows...

~~~
miloshh
Downvoting because of disagreement is really getting out of control at HN.

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TrevorJ
Excellent article. Good insights into the tech that has influenced the art
direction of recent games.

I do think though, that art directors should pull themselves out of that rut
and strive for more variety in upcoming titles.

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dgallagher
I wonder if art directors purposefully choose darkness, or maybe they simply
stumbled upon it by experimenting? "We this game to look realistic, and out of
all of our mock-ups, darkness wins."

Many Sega games have a very specific look to them that's colorful. Jet Set
Radio Future (Xbox) was an extremely vibrant game. Most Nintendo games are
too. Though some of those types of games tend to be more cartoonist-looking
than realistic-looking.

How about special effects in movies? They use similar technology that's used
in video games. Is there a trend here that's more into dark/brown/gray?

~~~
miloshh
Exactly,movie studios use pretty much the same lighting tricks as games -
direct illumination with some ambient occlusion and color bleeding hacks here
and there. Yet they do not look brown/gray. I think it might be because they
have armies of artists (they call them "technical directors") that tweak the
materials and lighting for thousands of man-hours until it looks good. Game
companies probably invest much less in this kind of tweaking.

~~~
elai
And aren't not limited by "must work in realtime" and can use all the
computationally expensive visual effects?

~~~
miloshh
Oh yes, absolutely, but there's no reason why real-time would imply brown/gray
color hues...

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lutorm
Immersion-wise, I find that realistic sound, a la EAX5 with accurate
direction, occlusion, reflections, etc, are much more important than the
quality of the graphics. Something about the fact that I look at a monitor
makes it clear that I'm not in the environment, but sound does not have that
limitation. (Relatedly, if you've ever seen the effect of using Fresnel lenses
to project the monitor at infinity, that makes the immersion much more deep.
Then you're essentially looking through a window, into another reality.)

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maryrosecook
Interesting that the palette of the original Quake game was browns and reds,
also for technical reasons, but different ones.

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mullr
What technical reasons are those? I remember hearing this when I was 15 or so,
as part of a "Unreal Sux"/"No Quake Sux" debate. (I was observing) It didn't
make any sense to me then, nor does it now, how a 3d graphics engine could be
limited in color palette to just, say, brown. And I distinctly remember the
color blue showing up in that game anyway...

~~~
erik
I could be mis-remembering, but I think Quake started out with a software
renderer that operated in VGA mode. So the game has a 256 color palette.

~~~
chops
You are correct. Quake was before mainstream 3d accelerators and only had a
256 color palette.

Original quake palette: <http://www.gamers.org/dEngine/images/quakepal.gif>

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michael_dorfman
I get "brown", but what's the difference between "gray" and "grey"?

~~~
thras
One means that you've got a President and the other means you have a Queen.

~~~
michael_dorfman
...and the author's point in using both? That he lives in Iceland, and is
trying to straddle the fence?

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scott_s
He probably doesn't have a point in doing so. Do you?

~~~
michael_dorfman
My point was that it was odd to repeat a word in two different spellings in
the same sentence, unless you have a point in doing so. Different strokes, I
suppose: some favor "favor"; others favour "favour".

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krakensden
Is this complaint really specific to the ps3/xbox360/wii generation? I seem to
remember people whining about this back when Quake 1 came out...

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hamai
I'm not a blog person, but I'll keep an eye on this one, very interesting...

