Game Noir?

dfacto

Thought this was an interesting article, talking about film noir vs the games industries big budget bonanzas.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16591

Personally I think it's a mixed bag. On the one hand it's nowhere near as simple as the author makes it sound, while on the other hand games like Portal prove that fresh and simple ideas can still make a big impact (though portal probably cost a million or so too).

I personally think the art side of the game is too intensive right now to really allow "game noir" to go places. Film noir may have been done on a shoestring budget, but it still allowed for extremely atmospheric stories to be told, even outdoing the big budget dance numbers of other movies of the time. Games on the other hand suffer terribly in almost all cases if they are forced to use older tech, and this is something which fans have been proven to shun. If it isn't shiny and bloomy then it gets passed over for the most part.

What do you guys think?

gauss

briefly i think that a clever re-appropriation of assets might allow for the kind of the savvy low budget creation that's being talked about here. That's one of those things that's always helped the underdog in the film business, is the availability of re-used (or found) props and locations, which we don't really have in games. But then again, we're also quite stubborn about creating virtually all art assets from scratch with every non-sequel title, which is why you see such gains creatively speaking with titles like the HL2 episodes. But they're still creating a lot of new material in those games, that's not what i'm talking about.
what looks worth at least an attempt would be to take a game with a robust editor and art assets and subvert or spin the original game's atmosphere and character.
take GoW: if a mod team could even create just a few assets to compete with that game, they're probably better off with a real job. but for such a visually well fleshed out game (that should hold up for a few years) with robust, if not somewhat genre-limited character styles, you could do a very different game without creating much of anything in the way of new assets. especially with different lighting/post control.

now i'm just blabbering on stupidly but the key idea is, if we're actually going to model after film's model on this one, re-use of assets for modders and pro game devs is a smart idea, particularly as we start to plateau on graphical fidelity. there's not a whole lot of room for genius when you spend three years rebuilding the wheel from the hub out for every project.

Toomas

The trick would be not to use the old assets but you the source of the old assets to create ones that are current gen. I bet there are like hundreds of high poly barrels and boxes and trashcans and what not created that all pretty much look the same. Same goes with realistic weapons and veichles.
Also there are good quality morphable human models, that you could use to do all the characters in your game (check www.daz3d.com for example). Now some people will say OMFG poser art LOLZ! But guess what, the 'poser' assets nowadays are better than your average game assets...