A Love-Letter to Stylized Graphics

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Recently I've been feeling a disconnect between me and other "gamers" online in terms of what I want from a game. Many people seem to care first and foremost about photo-realistic graphics; for me, it couldn't be more opposite. In this video I talk about my thoughts on photo-realistic graphics, some limitations, and some alternative art styles that I really like.
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Featuring music by Suncaster
open.spotify.com/artist/33gsY...
Chapters
00:00 - Intro
02:24 - Early 3D Revival
05:18 - Pixel Art
08:03 - Modern Styles
12:32 - Why I Love Stylized Graphics
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Опубликовано:

17 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 20

@poke_ Год назад

Honorable mention to Sable, a beautiful game that I forgot to talk about during the toon-shading section. If you enjoyed this video, please consider leaving a like and subscribing to the channel! Thanks for watching!!

@calebjulius8150 Год назад

I haven’t watched it yet, but I expect greatness

@HarrisonStuff Год назад

quintessential poke. my favorite yet 👑

@elihowe Год назад

Paired hella nicely w my shitty dining hall tater tots. Extremely common poke W😤😤

@zachmuniz9331 Год назад

Randomly came across this and wow your video is underappreciated man. Amazing stuff

@KobeGzz Год назад

This just became my favorite video, beautiful dialogue, visual examples and honesty from the heart, thanks for the experience, new sub right here! 💛

@hpinho1984 Год назад

BROOO THIS VIDEO IS SO DOPE, I LOVED IT!!

@jannagilleman550 Год назад

11/10

@Hekai Год назад

Yo this is literally what me and my friend have been discussing for the past few years. Pixel art is clearly the quintessence of video games, and since 3D appeared it has only been a downfall. I always liked to compare it to how an anime will always be a lot blander than the original manga it has been based on, despite the visual "improvements". Or just like the way a finished drawing will always look worse than the sketch. Leaving spaces for your imagination to fill in the gap is the essence of art, and i hope more people will realize it. Amazing video, seeing the number of views after watching it blew my mind, this def deserves a lot more.

@poke_ Год назад

I'm not sure I agree about the 3D or finished drawing thing in general, but I kind of know what you mean. Also I don't really watch anime, but I view live-action remakes in the same way. Part of me thinks that maybe anime could look as good as manga if that was their focus, akin to Spider-Verse and the comic-book look they achieved...? Glad you enjoyed the video!! :)

@Hekai Год назад

@@poke_ I clearly exaggerated the way i said it for the drawings, but yeah you know what i mean xD You totally got what i meant with the Spider-Verse part, but it's an original story tho. And that's why almost 95% of the animes i watch are original works that aren't based on anything, mainly all the studio Trigger and Gainax stuff ! And seeing how you kinda like Style over anything like me, you'd probably love their work, especially Hiroyuki Imaishi's stuff. The guy made Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill, and more recently Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, but his first big work was a short animated movie named "Dead Leaves", that is 50min long and probably is the most "stylistic" thing you'll ever see, i promise you that it'll literally blow your mind, and i think that you can even find it on youtube lmao ! Btw, still can't realize this video has less than a 1000 views, it's literally one of the best videos out there, gotta check out your Wii Sports video !

@jenweaver2505 Год назад

You continue to amaze me with your level of knowledge and ability to make video games a work of art 😊

@emilyisnotdead5622 Год назад

i’m currently on a computer arts course so basically doing art for games and i couldn’t agree more !

@Crash_Knight Год назад

First off, great video! I enjoyed it a lot. Now onto my long-winded thoughts lmao. One thing I find is that I see a lot of "Old = better" going around the internet lately. I see too many people conflate minimalistic and modern with soulless. In some ways it can be, but its way more complicated than that. I think the other thing is that people are very strongly bound to their nostaligic feelings. About the early 3D renaissance that we're seeing, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there are more and more game designers that grew up on PS1 and N64 games that want to be able to relive and experience the nostalgia again. Not saying its a bad thing at all. I'm excited to see where it goes. Before this, we had the SNES era renaissance, and out of that game some insanely interesting and beautiful pixel art games like Hyper Light Drifter, Owlboy, and for me, The Last Night and Octopath. When it comes to 2D hand drawn stuff, I really took note of Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight. These games, specifically ori, take advantage of modern computing and the raw power we have nowadays to really push artistic design to some new limits. Hollow Knight is quite subtle, but ori uses post processing effects and an insane amount of parallax layering to have some crazy levels of depth. I'd like to see more of this kind of thing. Pushing artistic design with modern capabilities. Now onto the 3D stuff. I really love my realistic looking games, but I'm starved for some fantastical style and world design. Breath of the Wild really scratched an itch for me. But it's still not quite where I want it. It's a beautiful game with a fantastically well realized art style, but I'd love to see its creators just have full reign of a powerful system to push that art style. As good as it is, you can still see it being held back a bit by the Switch's lack of power. There's a lot of repeated trees, some pixelated textures, limited shading and environmental blending. I'd really love to see the game spruced up more. Wider variety of foliage, grasses and plants casting shadows, mountains having a bit higher poly count, more foliage, environmental density, dynamic lights, volumetric lighting etc pushing it closer towards the concept art of the game while still retaining the fantastic art style it has. We can use all these fancy unreal engine 5 effects without forcing the game to be realistic looking. Beyond that I really just want more crazy world design. Everything still feels too grounded for me. I want to see some illogical, fantastical, physics defying stuff. Elden Ring and Zelda did have some insanely cool environments, but I feel like we can push it even farther. Floating islands, cities and villages literally built on the overhanging faces of mountains, mile deep chasms, going deep underground only to find a giant endless void, with buildings and huge islands being suspended to the ceiling by giant chains, I dunno. Just spitballing here. Think less Minas Tirith, more buildings literally hanging off a 90 degree vertical wall. More like xenoblade chronicles, gravity rush, planes of oblivion, world of warcraft type stuff. I feel like I just don't see enough of this kind of thing in games and I've been itching to see more of it for a long time.

@poke_ Год назад

Wow, what a comment! I totally agree about the world design stuff; often times concept art for fantasy games is CRAZY and then the final product ends up fairly generic as a result of the struggles of modern game development. I can't say I agree about Breath of the Wild. To me, a huge part of the game's beauty *is* its restraint. Now, how much of that restraint was a result of limitation, I don't know, but I think it really works. Personally I wouldn't want the same art style but with lens flares, crazy volumetrics, super dense environments, etc. Like at that point just make it realistic. Obviously there are some real technical flaws like the low resolution and lack of anti-aliasing, 30fps lock (and lag on top of that), etc, and maybe some of the pop-in/LODs could be better, but overall I think the experience of that game is fundamentally tied to the art style it *has now*, constraint-driven or not. Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding you haha. Also I had a line about the 3D renaissance being "the 30-year nostalgia cycle arriving right on time" that I ended up cutting. I think its definitely true that in both cases (3d/pixel art), nostalgia is what kicked it off. Thanks for the comment, super glad you enjoyed the video!!!

@Crash_Knight Год назад

@@poke_ I think you might be misunderstanding me a bit about adding more to BOTWs visuals. It's a bit difficult to explain exactly what I'm thinking but I absolutely do not want it to be super realistic looking. I mean add more small details that bring the world even more to life and sharpen things up (plus resolution, framerate and pop in and such like you mentioned). I'm sure the developers wanted to add more fancy visuals (after they settled on an art style) but had to cut back on them cause the Switch and Wii U started to slow down too much. The Korok forest runs horribly, but it's gorgeous cause of all the foliage (it actually runs way better if you cut down all the bushes lmfao) There are a lot of trees in the game that are literally the same model just copy pasted in order to keep the framerate from dropping. A lot of the textures are super detailed up close, but mountains and other things that are even a few feet off the beaten path start to look muddy and kind of pixelated, especially at a distance. You can sharpen them up without making them look hyper realistic. Stuff like lily pads floating on ponds, moss growing on stone that's been sitting in water, torches casting shadows, less blocky shadows, reflections rendering from farther away, a little more rock geometry, some more leaf geometry, instead of a brick building being a literal flat wall, maybe make a couple bricks stick out a bit. The buildings in Hateno village could have 3d shingles instead of a flat texture, the animation of foliage blowing has a lot of stretch and squash to form the illusion, rather than branches and leaves actually blowing around. That kind of stuff. The game already has a shocking amount of really nice details in it. Cloud shadows, embers and other particle effects are insane, the grass blowing animation is beautiful. I think a lot of the bits I mentioned can be added without ruining the original feel of the game. The only thing is you gotta be careful not to make it look too busy If you compare to the E3 2014 reveal, with the guardian chase, the art style is pretty much the same, but the release version looks pretty dusty if I'm to be honest. I think the bloom is a bit much on the sky on the E3 trailer, but I think the colours are nicer, and the world does look more dense with rocks, grass, and foliage. I'm talking more like... breath of the wild but more. Rather than an overhaul of the art style. Sorta like increasing the graphics settings rather than installing a bunch of mods to make it look totally different. Though I will say, creativity often emerges from limitation. I feel like an overwhelming portion of art is born from limitation. Once again, sorry for the long-winded comment, haha.

@murkywaters5502 Год назад

Great video! Video games should strive to be what reality can never be, not focused on being a subpar imitation of reality.

@kathleenquinnwild779 Год назад

Blown away by your knowledge, creativity and the way you express it all!

@hojugames8340 Год назад

Stylized graphics always age so well. Realistic graphics will be dated eventually. It depends on the game to decide art style but I always appreciate artsy looks much more than super realistic textures or lighting.