Graphics vs Artstyle

8/23/2023 at time of writing

NovemberHotel, a prominent old school Youtuber, lamented how graphics have had much more priority than art style in recent years, making them look very bad, bland, and straight up painful to look at. Pair that with some of the political enforcement done via Blackrock's ESG, and you have a recipe for disaster in the AAA scene. Bland characters, bland places, bland ingame culture (or downright lack of it), bland everything. The only modern games that have really avoided this are games from From Software, Wanted: Dead, indie games that aren't asset flips, BattleBit Remastered and so on.

Now THOSE don't sound like games that would see the limelight far too often, like Call of Duty, Counter Strike Global Offensive (and CS2 for that matter), Halo Infinite, modern Star Wars Battlefront or League of Legends. Want to know why? Buckle up. Time for some history lessons and crucial words.

Understanding Graphics

When it comes to graphical standards, there are two main types: vector and raster graphics. I'll talk about the differences between them. Hope you have popcorn.

Vector graphics

Vector graphics were prominently used during the early days of gaming to avert the use of (at the time) high-end expensive arcade hardware. Notable examples are Star Wars, Red Baron and Battlezone. A home console was also released to provide those vibes years later, called the Vectrex. You want to know why this succeeded? These graphics aren't even decent by today's standards, but the way these companies wrenched these lines into a good and cohesive art style that compliments the gameplay makes them stick with the ones who played these first.

The rendering method was to draw lines from one point of the CRT to the other with no real refresh rate, sidestepping the need for a raster rendering set of chips. Of course, this was WILDLY limited, making the games that DID come out that use vector graphics pretty impressive. Nab a Vectrex emulator if you're interested in this type of thing.

Raster graphics

This is what started to take things over ever since they first showed up, all the way up to modern gaming. Early examples include games on the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System/Family Computer. Raster rendering had become cheaper during the video game crash of 1983, when consoles and games were too numerous, leading to looser quality regulations and crap games flooded the market as a result. These games won people's hearts because of the artstyles employed, which complimented their respective gameplay styles. Try remaking Gradius without a similarly heartfelt attention to detail of the universe involved. Project Aces was working on a Xevious Ace Combat spinoff before going all hands on deck with Ace Combat 4, and the trailer shows the love put into improving the vibe of the original.

The rendering method for this is to put specified pixels (A set of them called a sprite, bigger ones called textures in 2D rendering) onto the play area (CRT or LCD) either in sequence or in bursts (which some classic consoles were known for) at a chosen refresh rate (wasn't constant, really. Hardware hampered the performance despite the heavy optimizations that were often done to the software to some degree, and sometimes the hardware was brought to the absolute limit in order to show what it can do.) Such examples are Atari Adventure, Gradius, Star Fox, RAGE, Apex Legends and Halo Infinite, in order of release.

Art Style

Here we're talking about art, but applied to video games. The art style is what gives your game a distinct identity. One example is when you look at Ace Combat vs Sky Rogue. Same premise with air and ground flight combat, but the artstyle is a dead giveaway. Ace Combat is all about the political intrigue and the thoughts of the fighters in the thick of it, whereas Sky Rogue is all action and arcade. Their artstyles reflect what the game developers wanted their worlds to evoke.

Now let's look at Forspoken. Ugh... This game is one of a growing number of examples as to how publishers disrespect the game developers' time and force them to cut corners. You know how I mentioned that graphics had much more priority over art style in recent years? Yeah. It looks like a cheap asset flip even though it came from a subsidiary of Square Enix. Thank god that got shut down quick. Lemme tell ya what's wrong with it: no identity, almost no color and it's nigh impossible to look at.

Games like Forspoken happen because of a lack of distinct art direction and actual artistic work. Combat might be pretty OK, but it ain't fun if your eyes got nothing to feast on. Companies like Capcom and Fromsoft know that they live and die by the execution of their chosen art direction alongside their gameplay. Cruelty Squad's developers, Consumer Softproducts, absolutely KNEW they wanted to go in the direction of "this world is utterly banjaxed because of a combination of amoral corpo and occult nonsense and it shows throughout the world", and absolutely NAILED IT.

In short. Don't pull a Forspoken. Pouring your heart and soul into a game you want to make will actually pay off in the end as you gain a loyal fanbase.

Back to main blog page.