Are UGLY Games Here to STAY!?

[@OldStirlingLtd]

Let me know your thoughts, my new channel would like to grow as fast as possible

[@BlueSky-uf6oy]

All art is a reflection of the people who made it. It reveals not just their creative skills; but also the visions in their head and what they want others to see. Keep that in mind when you see these ugly games. They will stay as long as their developers do.

[@palehorse1337]

people who like all those post processing additions are the same people who have their phone screen brightness on max all the time. It's a sign of low iQ

It isnt even an 'ugliness' problem just a complete lack of style and unified vision. Big games suffer from just massive teams, smaller games suffer from trend chasing, and everyone suffers from the absurd tech demo level thing that game companies do where they are all 1tb big in order to show every pore on faces and individual strands of hair and their individual physics. Genuinely i HATE realism in games for this exact reason. It is unmanageable, most of these games release unfit for current hardware and literally just hope that next gen hardware can run them, its so absurd overall. And worst of all, it doesnt even pay off. Like wow this game looks like an iphone photo sooo cool. Well it also looks like an iphone photo namely boring forgettable and just like every other photo of real objects. If i wanted realism i would just go outside. Make games small and optimized again, make games stylized again. I cant stand any modern title because they are, without exception, all terribly optimized and too big and just look like shit. God i genuinely believe that best games come from limitation and when you let devs do literally whatever they want because they make these for supercomputers, they just make garbage. Some of the best looking video games of all time were born out of compromise with the hardware of its era. And my take with limitations makes sense since again, i just dont play modern titles at all anymore, i instead look to history when i want to find something new to play instead. And it is always a better experience because my computer actually runs it, because they are simple and effective, they look good in their unique way etc. Morrowind for example is one of the best looking games of all time and its TINY. GTA Vice City is probably THE prettiest game of all time and it is anything but realistic. Limits allow for creative devs who find workarounds and optimize and compromise and create something unique, limitless development with infinite resources and exascale computers just leads to lazy horrible game design and lazy practices and just complete lack of optimization. And i mean philosophically i dont get it either, games are escapism games are stories i dont see the point of replicating banal real world detail instead of sacrificing some of it for narrative, optimization or cost reduction purposes. Again morrowind seems so lively and lived in even though its characters stand around and thats kinda it. You dont need much, let your players fill in the gaps with imagination you dont need to show me individual sweat glands or whatever. An obviously fake world is often more lively than hyper real ones

[@gleet2677]

Similar changes have taken place in all entertainment mediums, and even beyond. Ugly society, ugly games, and so the problem and the solution both lie outside of the gaming industry... In my opinion.

[@riptmangleshank4286]

I for one, am more than happy to continue in the brown and gray until the rainbow barf finally burns itself out of existence.

[@SLRModShop]

The first victims and biggest victims of wokeness are leftists. I'm 100% with you on that. Let them yell, let them believe that an invisible force is out there to get them, that every rock hides a naz!. In the meantime, all we have to do is skip their slop, save $70 each time, while they spend and waste tens of millions on their "interactive political pamphlet" they call "video game". We can remain solvent for longer than they can remain insane. And FYI, something 99.9% of people ignore, back in late 2022, early 2023, both Vanguard and Blackrock quietly renamed ESG in order to stealthily discontinue it. They've been pulling back since then. Wokeness has lost its wallet years ago. Today's wokeness is yesterday's wokeness + inertia. Google "BlackRock quietly renames ESG" and "BlackRock dials back ESG". Wokeness died 2 years ago. Now, studios that have had their sh!tty "games" funded years ago will soon have the surprise of their life. Veilguard, Concord, etc were all funded in a different era. Now watch Bioware realise that they won't get their next game funded... Bioware will be a goner before March 31st 2025. And all we had to do is patiently wait, no consume any of their cr¤p. I don't know about you, but I found the process rather easy.

[@wobbuffet8357]

GTA IV has a special place among the games I've played from that era because in highschool I did a analysis/report on the game and its themes for a class, it was a pretty fun project for me since I got to play a game instead of reading a book haha (if curious, I commented mostly on its sad/dark take on the American Dream from the perspective of a Eastern European visiting a Post-9/11 America, the teacher liked it). Looking back at the game now as an adult, I would describe GTA IV as Doomer-kino. Thanks for this video and have a blessed day!

[@Themilkyturtle]

visually speaking game studio's need to adopt the phrase keep it simple stupid.

[@phattjohnson]

I think it's a case of the typical 'dev' these days only knowing how to use Unreal Engine.. it's way too 'pretty' (full of complex environmental effects and resource heavy) for what most games need.

[@swapbloodcell]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Kotor 1 and 2. old games but the storytelling is platinum their in my opinion

[@CordeliaWagner1999]

Me playing Ultra Cute Polly Pocket Aesthetic "Zelda - Echoes of Wisdom" : "If you say so."

[@RedFloyd469]

The point of the "gray and brown" look was almost always as a complimentary aesthetic to the worldbuilding they were going for. Say what you will of GTA 4, the creators weren't really interested in copying their homework of GTA San Andreas. GTA 4 doesn't just LOOK different, it's world IS different. Yes it still has social commentary, yes it has parodies and satire of corporate america. But that's just background noise. At the heart of the story, it's just about a man lost in a foreign land, with no money, barely any safety net, and a deep and cyclical, burning desire for revenge against the people that wronged him in a long flown by past life. This in sharp contrast to CJ, who I always felt was the weaker protagonist, as his backstory is just about neatly summed up in the opening 5 minutes and then he immediately just becomes a criminal as if nothing happened in the meantime. The game looks artistically unique, and compliments the "LA" sunny vibes, but that's about it, there is no story-related choice here. GTA 4's story is miserable, it's cynical, it's hateful, it's fatalist, but that's also the point. It gets reinforced the further we journey along with Nico and find out there's no escaping the cycle of vengeance, crime, and exploitation. This was made all the more clear with red dead redemption, which I would argue is the epitome of rockstar writing from those days, and in which the aesthetic matches the story PERFECTLY. For Skyrim, the return to the brown, gray and white look for the worldbuilding was strictly speaking a return to form, as The elder scrolls was ALWAYS a dark universe of nations genociding each other over magical doomsday devices or just plain general xenophobia. Oblivion sort of was the antithesis of what TES was in the lore. That said, this general aesthetic, while matching the fatalistic aspects of the game, doesn't imply that Tamriel is in and of itself colorless. So at the very least, it might be a problematic choice here. On the other hand, if ever there was a nation perfect for "bland, dark and hopeless", it would probaby be the frozen wastes of skyrim (retconned to look more habitable). Dragon Age Origins in the mean time takes place in rainy, muddy, backwater ferelden, a nation best known for it's dog-breeders and proximity to a huge uncharted forest, where witches, demons and other unknown horrors lurk. It's also the beginning stage of a global invasion of horrific monstrous demon-approximate "not-orcs" called darkspawn. Of course the game was going to have a grimy, dark, brown look. Ferelden IS brown, grimy, dark, and frankly, wet. Now, obviously some games do this look better than others. Sometimes it's a good choice, sometimes it's just clearly a trend. But overall, the aesthetic in this era worked because the stories worked and the aesthetics just complimented them. Contemporary so called "woke" games all share similar trends that in fact have nothing to do with their apparant "political agenda" (There is nothing progressive about corporate diversity checkmark virtue signalling. It's all in service of making you love the definitely definitely DEFINITELY moral choices that these billion dollar companies are making with their diversity hires. What I'm saying is that nobody should blame "progressives" for what are essentially corporate drones making capitalist propaganda while pretending to have some sort of message. They don't, that's just what CONSERVATIVE propaganda likes to pretend in order to get the ragebait viewers and voters on board. Anti-woke is as much a part of woke "culture" as it is it's enemy. It's all just a game of virtue signalling and invoking reactionary attitudes. And I'll prove it in a moment.) Aside from the general TECHNICAL aspects of the new aesthetic slop of contemporary gaming, what has becoming increasingly noted over the course of, I want to say, 9-ish years, is the overexposion to "retro" 80's aesthetics. If late millenials and gen z-ers would drop the fake nostalgia goggles for a moment and think back at how the 80's looked and sounded, from an art perspective, they'd realize the 80's were in fact the blandest, most corporate, most safe, shallow and vomit-inducing, in terms of general aesthetics, both in the form of visuals and music. Just about everything about the entertainment industry in the 80's was completely awful, ugly in more ways than one, exploitative, and meanspirited to boot. The visual vomit we have recently experienced in western media is almost entirely related to THAT fake nostalgia. You might have heard of the 30-year nostalgia gap, when movies, music and indeed games try and recollect the general stereotypical look or sound of an era 30 years ago. The nostalgic normies eat it up, and the new generations become curious about this sudden aesthetic shift. In reality, it's very much all pre-planned and pre-approved by some board. Recent "AAA" videogames, to which Veilguard is no exception, tend to completely rely on throwing shades of purple, blue and pink all over the screen and then call it a day. Music is no exception, "synthwave" clearly being a fake nostalgia callback to the emergence of horrid-sounding synthesizers and repetitive drum-machines replacing the humanity of an actual drummer. The success of this nostalgia-bait aesthetic is plain to see with the success of the marvel films that HEAVILY relied on it in the past 10 years. As the corporate world of entertainment just always copies a successful formula, even to death, every visual medium now had to become marvel. Marvel was 80's fake nostalgia, so all entertainment became marvel 80's fake nostalgia. It's part of the cours, It's probably dying out right about now, thank heavens. Note how this aesthetic choice is completely irrelevant to the story being told. Except, of course, when it isn't. The problem is: Visual vomit does not allow for a plethora of deep storytelling. It only allows for ONE kind: quirky. If everything has to look like one half of the rainbow, the story has to match it. And quirky, I'm sure you have all noticed, is ANNOYING. Especially when matched up with sarcastic non-wit of the marvel kind. These "characters" in these slop games aren't characters. They're not even punchlines to a joke. They're not satire or parodies. They're just all the same bland taste of quirky. Of course the dialogue writing has to match it as well. Gone are the "dark" questions of the early 2000's games, the philosophy of realism vs idealism and the search for hope in a bleak, almost fatalistic setting. If everything is quirky, everything stops being meaningful and genuine. Even ATTEMPTS at something genuine fall flat, because it's carried by a MOUNTAIN of quirkyness. The tonal shift is palpable. And unfortunately, EVERYBODY is tired of this, except for normies who after 10 years still think it's funny. Best part is? It has nothing to do with some character in some AAA game being "trans". That's irrelevant as all hell. I'm fine with different types of people being shown on screen, struggling with their struggles, so long as it matches the tone, setting and story being told. But all of it HAS to be in service of the game, the story being told, and in lieu of deepening the characters. Unfortunately, when the whole game is oversaturated with bland quirky 80's sarcastic wit, backed up by corporate capitalist propaganda pretending to be "progressive", nobody is convinced. Obviously, "woke" does exist. I'm not arguing against that. What I'm arguing here is that this is all bad aesthetic choices being made, which in turn are also reflected in the dialogue style, because they have to match the horrid energy the entertainment industry just happens to go for this decade. All stories have a message, all messages have political bias, all politics is human, and all humans are political. We should always keep that in mind. There is no such thing as a "neutral" stance when one also wants to make something meaningful. What sets these games apart from genuinely meaningful games is that the "message", if there happens to be one, is almost always mean-spirited, bland, vapid and superficial, not to mention done to death and ultimately never resolves anything with a meaningful conclusion. The idea that this is somehow in support of progressive politics is immediately countered by the simple observation that: A) The companies behind these messages are certainly not exactly anti-capitalist, are they? B) The companies behind these messages don't give two shits about their employees' safety or well-being, so why would GENUINE diversity hiring be a common practice? It's just virtue signalling and nothing more. and C) Everybody and their mother hates it. Including progressives, who immediately recognize it's fakeness and it's service to a much more dangerous, economically conservative elite who absolutely LOVE creating rage in reactionaries to profit from later at election time. If this is "propaganda", it certainly isn't very effective. Probably because that's not it's purpose in the slightest. It's purpose is virtue signalling, nothing more, and certainly nothing new. Companies have been doing this since the first guy found out you could dupe people with the image you project. Frankly, religions have been doing that for longer. So in conclusion: Hate on the gray and brown look all you want, but I'll always prefer a meaningful aesthetic choice over bland and safe rainbow vomit. And taash is not the problem with Veilguard, nor are trans people the downfall of entertainment. The problem is the dialogue, the aesthetic choices and the general lack of realistic human characters. Hell, not even the characters that are a parody are very funny, and that's is supposed to be their whole point (rockstar was probably the champion at making fun side-characters that were also satirical in nature.)

[@fredof4413]

Never rated gta 4

[@phattjohnson]

The attention to detail was second to none, and getting that fidelity on an Xbox 360 or PS3? A technical feat indeed my friend. Why would you say you don't 'rate it'?

[@fredof4413]

@ much preferred San Andreas. Could never get into gta 4 It felt too dingy

[@ahabduennschitz7670]

You cant convince me that San Andreas looks better than GTA 4. The washed out Colour's perfectly blend in with the more realistic approach and it still holds up. San Andreas on the other Hand is completely outdated and looks awful.

[@spiralofhope]

I know this is a vague suggestion: While I like the fast-paced speaking, something seems weak about it. Maybe it's an underconfident tone?

[@OldStirlingLtd]

to be improved, latest vid sounds better i feel.

[@leopalevac5257]

Did you fr at 14:35 have to throw in the slight on diversity hires? Went from a 10/10 to a 1 real quick for me. I really liked the video otherwise. Really

[@tvbeetle]

Can you not recognize that it is a problem you cannot stand rating something above a 1 if they say something apart from what you agree with. Your rating should be based on the quality and integrity of the video not how much you agree with everything said in it.

[@leopalevac5257]

@tvbeetle hella my dude?

[@Ay-xq7mj]

Oh no not the mixed race non binary transformers. So sad im sure reddit will here about this! Wahhhhh wahhhh! Sorry im white and male i do not care about peoples insecurities about having no race or gender.

[@TheWizardboy5]

@@tvbeetle Diversity hires aren't the problem you retard.

[@then35t18]

Just found your channel. Thank you for speaking the Truth.