DISCUSSION: Is game art enough for a videogame to be "timeless"?
polycounter lvl 20
I asked this question to our Fans on Facebook (Shameless) and we're getting some great replies already (50+ in less than 10 minutes).
I wanted to ask it here, as well:
My own thoughts: I think its incredibly hard for a videogame who's art direction is 'realism' to come off as timeless. The next iteration of that game, with improved graphics, would then just become a better version of the original and therefor render the original no longer timeless. When I think in this direction of thought, I feel that can easily be applied "cartoon" or "styled' games as well. As an example, if TF2 were completely redone in 5 years. All new bells & whistles. New rendering techniques. Fabric simulations on clothing. Fancy new techniques used for visuals that just blows TF2 out of the water, does that all of a sudden make TF2 obsolete? And no longer timeless?
This way of thinking has me questioning if art is enough to make a game timeless. Luckily, thats all in the eye of the beholder.
So, Polycount, what do you think? Can artwork be enough for a videogame to be considered 'timeless'?
I wanted to ask it here, as well:
Speaking strictly from the perspective of its game art (we're Polycount, after all) what video game to you is timeless? Given how technology progresses in our industry, is it even possible for a video game to be timeless because of its art work?
My own thoughts: I think its incredibly hard for a videogame who's art direction is 'realism' to come off as timeless. The next iteration of that game, with improved graphics, would then just become a better version of the original and therefor render the original no longer timeless. When I think in this direction of thought, I feel that can easily be applied "cartoon" or "styled' games as well. As an example, if TF2 were completely redone in 5 years. All new bells & whistles. New rendering techniques. Fabric simulations on clothing. Fancy new techniques used for visuals that just blows TF2 out of the water, does that all of a sudden make TF2 obsolete? And no longer timeless?
This way of thinking has me questioning if art is enough to make a game timeless. Luckily, thats all in the eye of the beholder.
So, Polycount, what do you think? Can artwork be enough for a videogame to be considered 'timeless'?
Replies
There are certainly games who's art is the primary force behind that status, but there's a lot more elements woven into the whole game that really makes it stand the test of time.
There's the story/narrative (if there is much one) - the gameplay - and everything else. I doubt many games could really be timeless on art alone.
Also - realism is kind of a relative term. Games directed toward "realism" 10 years ago look significantly different than those of today - and have just as much potential for timelessness. The technical limitations on ANY art direction (even a realistic one) ultimately help determine its feel and style. It's just a question of what you do with the elements given.
another large part of it, IMO, is nostalgia. How deeply did that game dig itself into your being long ago. That's probably the most important part of any media's enduring nature. Some aspect of the thing, or more likely, many interconnected aspects of it dug hooks deep inside your soul long ago. Your experience with it became a part of the tapestry you weave to define yourself as a person - so you will keep coming back to it over and over again. (i've read the Dune series about 10 times.)
I'd also add that I don't think a "remake" makes a thing less timeless. If anything it proves it's timelessness in that those who loved it most are trying to bring it to a position that allows it to be enjoyed by a new generation for all the same reasons - thus continuing its presence in culture and potential for hooking new people.
..unless the remake is done poorly. then you killed it. congratulations.
TLDR; No. I don't think art alone can carry a game to that level. All the elements have to work together, even if art carries most of the load (which it surely often does).
I think art can keep a game from being timeless, though...so do it right!
It's timeless for me and I've seen people who turned noses from previous gen games devour it and adore it. I replayed freedom fighters numerously and I could still enjoy the visuals after years have passed. DMC 3 still looks super badass because the animations and the direction just brim with it. GTA:Vice City still feels great etc,etc...
The list could go on, but overall I just think that it's not about the visuals themselves but the cohesive whole of an atmosphere that they create(sound being a huge part of them). As long as they reinforce their fiction well they shouldn't take you out of the experience.
I think the requirement for visuals to be timeless is that you can look back on it and the see the way they work within their technical limitations as a wonderful thing, rather than being a shame.
For example, the original Super Mario Bros. is in no way made obsolete by its newer, far less pixelated followups. And at the same time, what Super Mario World on SNES did with higher resolution and computational power is awesome in its own right, simultaneously more advanced but no more timeless than the original NES debut. When you look beyond the nostalgia factor, the whole pixel art movement is very much about celebrating the kind of brilliant output that can result from working under severe limitations.
This kind of thing is very, very difficult to judge while you're still sitting in the middle of the upheaval that is constant progress in the complexity of our graphical models. But to take your TF2 example, one could argue that the lack of cloth sim on many modern games will add to their overall personality in a way that will be different from the fully-simulated games of the future. It's possible that people looking back on TF2 from the graphically advanced future would rather play TF2 without their fancier clothing simulation on all the player outfits because of some intangible way it affects the way the game feels.
Higher visual fidelity is often enough as much a step to the side as a step forward that many games that are technologically "obselete" can become timeless treasures in their own right, because of the unique feeling that all of their visual shortcuts impart as a whole. This is one of the reasons the whole "HD Remix" phase that the industry went through briefly didn't pan out -- more resolution (or speaking generally, more advanced graphics) doesn't mean better, even if you're trying to depict a specific thing with a specific style.
But even with that title, the art alone isn't what makes it timeless.
As a whole, games are not paintings, one's enjoyment of a game is not strictly from a visual sense. They are a combination of multiple parts, where visual and aural go hand in hand from a sensory point of view, and gameplay, narrative, and other intangibles go into our enjoyment as well. There are plenty of games that are timeless, but I don't think the art is what makes them that. Our enjoyment from a game as a whole, is not strictly from a visual sense. If it is, then it's simply the art that is timeless, not the game as a whole.
But then again, this is coming from a guy who still likes to play Quakeworld against bots. Dm3 baby
I find this problem more prevalent in 3D games than in old 2D games. I still play old pixel art games like Full Throttle.
Maybe in the future there will be a convergence of real-time and offline rendering, where real-time can achieve exactly the same things that an offline renderer can, at which point stuff may truly become timeless. But since even films with the fanciest CG still become obsolete at some point, I doubt we'll see it happen for at least several decades.
As for the latter, I would think of something like New Super Mario Bros and compared to Super Mario World. So much of the art direction is similar that the difference of sprites vs polygons is irrelevant (to me at least) as opposed to something like Super Mario 64 or Galaxy which feels like a totally different experience.
All in all I think what defines a game having art that stands the test of time is having art that has a unique and solid direction regardless of hardware limitations.
despite its rather rudimentary and unoptimal uvmaps, it still holds up artistically, so much that every attempt to remake its art in a better technical form never did it justice
Yeah there are games like that which tend to age pretty well. However they are almost always stylized in a very particular direction.
If we take games like Dishonored or Deus ex for example - they both look very good and they are both beautifully stylized. However, I'm almost certain that 8 years from now their age will be very apparent.
Even the greatest of books, such as the Count of Monte Christo fade a bit with time, due to the change in language. Greek classic statues are known for what they are -history - and not judged on the pure object. Those statues are probably among the most timeless things we have, and it is that way because they try to be as 'natural' as possible. Human physical form does not change quickly. Human culture and art do.
Some things might be considered timeless, such as cave paintings, but if we are to make them in our current time, they would still be read as "art + cavepaintings". So those are not really timeless either.
So what is timeless? A photo of a nude, unshaven human?
I think good visuals can sometimes mask a bad game though. Uncharted 3 for example is beautiful but then the gameplay was so so. Brink is another example where I played it for the visuals but its still a bad game in my eyes, a sexy game but a bad game. As said already our advancements in game art make realistic titles almost impossible to gain timeless stasis in my eyes. If our anatomical knowledge hasn't evolved then the shaders and lighting do. I remember god of war 3 being jaw dropping when it was released but now multi platform titles are doing the same stuff. Batman and mass effect have their own style which traverses this for me though.
My timeless classics hehe
Ico
Shadow of the colossus
Crazy taxi
Katamari
Jet set radio
Okami
Sword and sworcery
Super Mario world
Shenmue 2
Batman AA
Mass effect 2
I agree to some extent, but I also think there are exceptions, maybe certain structures and forms of architecture. In fact Greco-Roman values continually come back into trend as inspiration, and I think that's because they really tapped into something fundamental with their sense of aesthetic, what fundamentally makes something 'work'. The math behind structures, the order of detail and how it's used to contrast non-detail, how it all is composed together, and even just the fundamental character of the materials used, stone worked into precise and flowing shapes, the scale of it all.
There are some aspects that could go out of fashion from time to time, but I don't think the impact of these things changes. I don't think the value of proportion and the elegance of geometry, the math of the structure, really changes. That's probably as close as you get to 'timeless', either mirroring what's already timeless in nature or using mathematical order and proportion.
As far as games go, I'd say visually computer graphics can't be timeless until they're indistinguishable from reality. Then all of the qualifiers of 'timeless art' apply like they would in real life.
I think part of the reason for this is that reality has the full resolution of reality... if that makes any sense. Basically our perception is based on the physics of light and any style is just a simplification of those principles, light and shadow is how we understand everything, how we read the type of surface and what it feels like and what it's made of. You can't do that in more detail than reality, any style sacrifices fidelity in favor of having a specific feel. The problem is styles can go out of style, the only thing that never goes out of style is reality.
Legend Of Mana
Graphics progress all the time and looking back on older 3D work such as the Mind's Eye or Lawnmower Man I remember as being impressive in its day, but it's a bit crude to look at now. If you didn't appreciate it in its day, why now? (Kind of like nostalgic cartoons. Were they REALLY as good as you remember? Would you show them to your peers now?)
A case where 3D art has aged but is still timeless would be Toy Story - if you rewatch it, it can be difficult to look at. But it isn't the outdated graphics that made it memorable. It was the first of its kind and the story was excellent.
However, this is my opinion right now in this moment. Perhaps some day 3D art will have a huge breakthrough and become much more widely accepted and then timeless.
I'd say Goldeneye 007 and Super Mario 64 would fall under timeless too for your reason above. They were the first of their kind. Though Mario 64's controls were alright, Goldeneye's controls just don't hold up anymore.
Mirror's Edge stands out as a recent example
I think the art style has to work so well with the hardware that it is not apparent that the technology is a limiting factor and unfortunately I think in order to achieve that in a 3D game, it needs to be ultra stylized (much more so than TF2)
I disagree. Super Mario Bros. and its family of pixelated games have timeless visuals, almost specifically because of the highly constrained technology. It seems like most people feel like early (or even contemporary) 3D game art will somehow be different and become forever obsolete as the new hotness rolls around. But I would posit that people are going to get nostalgic about about "obsolete" 3D graphics in the same way -- not as intensely as pixel art, but as the cultural torch passes from people who grew up on pixel art games (my generation) to those who grew up on primitive 3D games, we'll see some amount of veneration for what early 3D artists achieved with the harsh limits they had to work with.
For everyone here in particular, professional 3D artists, right now most of us are so knee-deep in minimizing the appearance of technical limitations that we have no fondness for the artifacts of obsolete 3D artwork. Give it a decade and we'll have an entirely different outlook on whether the limitations of obsolete 3D art are "ugly" or, in their own way, "charming". I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see games in the future that mimic the chunky modeling and animation of early Playstation or N64 games as an intentional aesthetic choice.
As for the whole "it requires super stylized visuals" thing, Metal Gear Solid and Vagrant Story are two games that dealt with the harsh limitations of early 3D graphics brilliantly, and neither one is some wildly stylized cartoon world. They are stylized -- but in a way that works with the technology they had, not in a way that trivializes technology entirely. If those games got an "HD remix" to use the latest and greatest 3D tech, that would completely change the way the games feel to play. They exist, and should be adored, as they are.
By modern standards pixel art is considered a "retro" look which is a descriptor in itself of a specific time period. Perhaps that will change as time goes on and pixel art becomes more of a modern stylistic choice but for now it's distinctly a harkening back to older times.
You get the same thing when you look at Quake, Goldeneye or many of the other games in this thread. They look very obviously like 3D from the 90s.
The main thing about ultra stylized visuals is that it makes it difficult for the viewer to tell "things looked this way because of limitations in technology"
To put it another way, there are a lot of people who would consider many pieces of classical music, or jazz, or novels, or even black and white films "timeless" not because their source time period can't be identified, but because they are still very enjoyable, important, and relevant works.
That being said, whether or not the time period something comes from is identifiable doesn't seem like a particularly important aspect to study, since "when it came from" and "whether it's worth your attention" can be such completely unrelated things.
I agree, it's about the whole experience for me. The whole 'vision'.
About a year ago I would have confidently said that pixel art will never go out of style, but after reading lots of iOS customer reviews for games coming out with pixel art and seeing newer generation gamers who didn't grow up playing pixel games in their childhood complain that everything looks "low res" and asking "why did I bother upgrading to a retina display", I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps pixel art will eventually die out with those of us who grew up on it...
I think it's probably too early for us to tell what may continue to be relevant in the future as the game industry hasn't been around for very long (relatively to other entertainment industries)
Keep in mind we're still making pixel art games because just 4 years ago that was what was ideal for a mobile platform, but what happens to it in 10-20 years when pixel art is not necessary at all and the majority of consumers never grew up with it and so have no real nostalgia for it. 2D games will certainly live on, I just wonder if games will look more like Bastion and less like Super Mario.
I don't think the pixel art style will completely go away, however it will move away from its more 'pure' form as is often used today, and move towards something like Kentucky Route 0 or Thomas was Alone. That is, not try to replicate the technical limitation of pixel-art-era-machines, but instead focus on the aesthetic choices that thrives under those limitations. In short: pixel art will blend with a more general sense of abstraction.
Also, note that some games work better in this respect than others. Pong, for example, is exquisite because the extreme minimalism hides the fact that screens were lowres. Any modern incarnation will 'feel' exactly the same, even though the actual implementation/movement is much smoother. It feels like it was boiled down to ultimate simplicity out of choice, not out of necessity.