''Military shooters are too brown and grey''

[Maes]

8 hours ago, MetroidJunkie said:

"There's splotches of other colors" do people just selectively ignore parts of my posts? :D

That'd be unheard of, since Doomworld is well-known as being a locus of scholarly debate and objective looking at the facts since its inception.

[Baratus]

I feel like "brown and grey" isn't really the issue here. If every game was a lifeless haze of completely different colours then we would be complaining about some other arbitrary colour combination instead of "brown and grey".

 

The issue, I feel, is with contrast. Modern games are colorised with a haze of shit brown and piss yellow to "convey a sense of realism" when really it's just using fog and limited palette effects to save time making interesting, fleshed out, and eye-catching environments. Resolution and graphic fidelity are not as important as creating interesting and compelling game worlds. That's why every game that sets out to push the boundaries of video game graphic fidelity actually date the quickest, look at console launch titles like Gears of War, Call of Duty and Knack. Nice graphics and hardware requirements, but where's the game?

 

I think that big budget games are just more concerned with making money than creating memorable hand-crafted experiences and are just falling in with old aesthetic styles established in other games that got popular. Many people blame Quake 2 for instating this aesthetic of entire games taking place within the inside of a cardboard box. Yeah the game looks terrible, dark and covered in piss, but I think the gameplay still holds up pretty well and the game is a valid entry in the Quake series with its level design and very satisfying weapon roster and varied enemy roster.

 

As making games is such a huge undertaking, people might just be paying less attention on how to render decent looking environments, but the excuses of "realism" and "creating a dark, post-apocalyptic tone" are definitely worn far into the ground by now. Hell, RAGE had some gorgeous environments AND some dingy ugly environments which were at least appropriate for the setting and narrative.

 

Anyway, my point is that games with a limited palette can still look good. Look at the NES Mega Man games! That's how it's done. As for the classic 90s games, there was definitely plenty of colour, contrast and the added flavour of the gameplay and general experience, and I do not think the colour palettes used in those games are particularly offensive. Nowhere near as bad as titles that came later, striving for "realism" and "immersion".

[VGamingJunkie]

Perhaps the biggest issue with modern shooters, especially Call of Duty, is linearity. I don't expect every game to be Fallout 4 but is it really that hard to give the player a few extra paths or at least more than one way to go through an area? That outdoor area in Black Ops is especially infamous, literally a straight line with no deviation whatsoever. Quake may be mostly brown but at least it still plays like a classic shooter so it's easy to overlook.

[Tetzlaff]

On 6.12.2017 at 7:42 AM, MetroidJunkie said:

Quake tends to be one of the main examples people use of an early brown shooter and, it's kind of true. There's splotches of other colors but it's definitely a little more brown than other fpses of that era.

There is a simple reason for this: Quake embraces a weathered aesthetic with rust everywhere. And rust is brown.

 

Though as you say, there are other prominent colors as well, and they even are quite unusual: that purple gloomy sky for instance. The main reason why Quake seems so brown is that the HUD and menues are rusted as well and therefore brown.

[DANZA]

Oh, Quake is a brownfest no doubt, it's part of the depressing/oppressing mood it tries to achieve. But most other FPSsss from the era, while having their tonal preferences, weren't afraid of embracing contrast, red and blue cacodemons over gray bases, shiny energy balls, colourful futuristic armours (quake 3,ut), etc.

A lot of modern games use ambient occlusion and bloom to tint the scene in a single tone, wich to some extent it's realistic. Under a red light, surfaces get a little bit of red, depending on the strength of the light itself. The problem comes when the textures of the surfaces, characters and everything in the scene is previously gray or muted, so it can easily get overpowered by the ambient light. An extreme and not so modern example is Doom 3, where the enemies were mostly gray or white.

In the real world, under a dominant ambient light, like an orange overcast sky, you don't see people using orange or white clothes to facilitate a mood, so the clash of colours, while being mostly orange it's still interesting. I understand the artistic decision behind the "gray shooters" though, but I think the developers got overexcited with the technique, and the games ended looking less realistic while trying to be ultra realistic... and honestly, visually boring.

Edited December 20, 2017 by DANZA

[Da Werecat]

Colorful armors in Quake were only really seen in multiplayer, and there was no colored lighting, so the situation wasn't better than in Doom 3. If anything, I believe they didn't go far enough in Doom 3 for what they were trying to achieve, but I think I've said that recently.