Hot take - everyone is hitting on nostalgia, but personally I think there’s more to it than just that.
Low-res games invite the player to use their imagination, something that gets lost in the pursuit of hyper-realism.
Unlike most modern AAA games, games like Stardew Valley, Minecraft, or BOTW/TOTK invite the player to use their creativity - not just in problem solving, but also in how they view the world.
This was just an inherent feature of older games, due to the limitations of technology, but now it’s a luxury in a world that’s increasingly trying to script or control how you think and interact at every turn.
That’s definitely a significant bit of it for me too.
I remember a while ago coming across a YouTube video on how racing games have become less interesting, as graphical fidelity has reached a point where it’s actually harder to distinguish what’s going on, and differentiating between backgrounds and obstacles.
Additionally, game worlds were smaller and easier to memorise back then. I can still navigate GTA3’s Liberty City as well as Vice City largely from memory - but there’s no chance I could do the same for GTA6 when it releases.
The other last benefit of older titles is getting to experience everything without missing out due to inaccessible DLCs, battle passes and whatnot.
I played diablo 2 remastered and it has incredibly beautiful graphics to the point I can’t tell what am I looking at. I was sneaking in a dungeon of sorts and there was si much clutter I wasn’t able to tell there was an gored corpse in the middle of the room. There’s just too much clutter
So, beyond nostalgia as a driving factor, and don’t get me wrong, it is a major one…
The other big factor is affordability of both game development and game uh, consumption, gameplay.
Yep, sure, you can develop games the AAA way with absurd levels of staff, funding, (mis)management, get those movie grade graphics on your $3000 Nvidia fucking whatever.
But less and less people can actually afford that level of hardware, the game’s price, will put up with its broken buggy bullshit and MTX.
If you’re an indie dev (team)?
Its way, way, waaay more easy and affordable to make a graphically simpler game, that is either highly stylized, intentionally emulates an old retro style, or even aims for graphical realism, but just does so to the standards of roughly a decade ago.
Good enough is in fact good enough for a huge supermajority of people, in terms of graphics.
Especially so if you take this dev time and money that would have been thrown at asset fidelity and and debugging/learning how to properly use a fancy pants engine with all the bleeding edge shit…
… and instead, i don’t know, maybe make a more interesting and fully fleshed out core game loop, or have more content, more levels, more narrative.
Also that and just uh, fuck publishers, fuck marketing, this is a video game, not an investment strategy for millionaires snd billionaires.
Now, you can charge $20 - $40 bucks for what is basically a decent game by 10 years ago standards, and yep, it ain’t guaranteed to make you into a millionaire yourself, but as long as you’re breaking even, able to pay yourself (and the rest of the dev team), you did it, you won.
…
How often do we see seemingly very basic in concept and very simple in graphics games break out and become a massive indie hit game?
How often do we see that having near infinite money to throw at a AAA super game for a fucking decade is more likely to result in a giant disappointment that gets tossed aside when the next version comes out?
My point here is, in addition to the nostalgia/style factor, there are also very grounded, practical, material reasons why just generally lower fidelity graphics are coming back.
…
Also obligatory Godot plug.
Its basically Unity, but free, and open source, at this point.
it’s not hard to relate to their frustration either, as they are basically seeing the unintentional “flaws” they failed to iron out celebrated as “signature” characteristics of the games they created
They are signature, and that’s why they’re an aesthetic choice. I’ve heard people refer to the N64 as a “blur factory”, because it was low res with even worse textures, if it had any at all. Likewise, the PS1 looked like everything was under water. If your stealth game has a secret agent and a PS1 aesthetic, we know you’re trying to take a shot at MGS1. If your horror game has a PS1 aesthetic, we know it’s your spin on Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That signature look conveys to its target audience what kind of game they’re making, and it conveys it very quickly. As a bonus, it can often be cheaper than trying to make a modern art style with fewer “flaws”.
It’s not just nostalgia. Things were less enshittified in that era. The writing, story telling, world building, and creative direction were far superior and games were weirder. That’s why I like the style anyways
The writing, story telling, world building, and creative direction were far superior and games were weirder…
But what haves nothing to do with the art style.
It reminds me of a time where things were better. They focused less on shiny, soulless graphics and more on the heart of the game. Our minds filled in more details and it was fine. Games today are much more likely to have glittery graphics and be not fun or even predatory. Then you have indie games, they might not be technically perfect but they’re much more likely to have that heart.
gameplay > graphics
Nostalgia turns it into an art style and aesthetic. The same thing happened with pixel graphics. We’re going through the ages of video game graphics again as people that grew up with those games are now the ones creating the games. In a few years i bet we’ll start seeing games with the aesthetic of GameCube and the PS2 games.
Personally I think it’s a good thing. When it turns into an aesthetic it never truly dies and it makes the style timeless. We’ll be seeing pixel graphics and PS1 style graphics in games until people get bored of it, which they never will.
I do agree that it’s nostalgia-powered and fuelled by millennials with disposable income being a fertile market, but to me here’s the weird thing: I think pixel art can look incredibly beautiful while the old early 3D game style looks like absolute ass (such as the OG FF7 screenshot above).
But I grew up much more on the latter than the former. There has to be more to it than just nostalgia.
I think it’s because there were more limitations than just resolution that we can ignore nowadays while still considering it pixel art. Things like limited color pallettes, sprite counts, having little memory to store graphics, low framerates, analog video, CRTs…
I still see the fifth generation as a lost one for pixel art. The games that do it really well in that era are few and far between (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Suikoden, Breath of Fire IV) and even those still had 3D elements in them that have aged like milk.
I too grew up more on pixel art, but the problem I always had with 3D in the 90’s was that–on an objective, technical level–it was already being done so much better elsewhere than it was on PlayStation and the others. Both PC and arcades were consistently driving much higher framerates, and by the late 90’s, far better picture quality. It wasn’t even four years after the PSX that the Dreamcast launched and completely outclassed it in graphics potential. I feel the move to 3D in the console market was just too early. I guess I can sort of see why some would be nostalgic for it, but to me this trend is the equivalent of being nostalgic for 19th century movies.
What I don’t get is why this trend is happening now. The tech’s been there for indies and the like to do this for a while. The demo for people old enough to grow up with these games has also long been in disposable income territory. Maybe we’re just oversaturated with pixel art at this point?
And some people just like ass more than others. I personally think the PS1 aesthetic is charming when done right. But that’s just my opinion, totally fair to disagree.
I personally like both ass and tits
People just be having fun man.
Not to mention 3D modeling is pretty hard, it’s no wonder indie devs who are often self-taught artists/modelers/coders/everything-ers are doing it.Props to this article for actually attempting to explain about how 3d graphics worked
A programmer not understanding aesthetics. That tracks. Does this dude not understand that these modern nostalgiacore games don’t have 150 people working on it like FF7. Devs choose these aesthetics in part because they are cheaper to make.
Well there’s still new movies made in black and white
The lighthouse and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color
Really? You don’t understand why people might look back fondly on the hardware limitations of early games that they now feel nostalgic for? There are still people making Game Boy games and physically releasing them, to the point that there’s now third-party handhelds that can play GB/GBC cartridges. There’s still a thriving Commodore 64 gaming community.
Edited for tone, I was having a bad day earlier.
Some people love the pop and hiss of records.
Some people love the ‘warm’ but inaccurate sound of tube amplifiers
People loved polaroid photos too. They were an objectively ‘bad’ media even when first introduced. But they were instant and through the miscellanea they captured, eventually a polaroid aesthetic appeared, something people want - where originally they cared about the instant photo part.
There are some things that are still weird to bring back. Like in comparison with pixel art: pixel art was a limitation but also a medium and the best art was created by masterfully utilizing it to its limits, but the PS1-style polygon z-fighting and weird texture warping were not seen as a medium, I can’t really think of a game that would utilize them for any artistic purpose, the most masterful use for them was to make them as invisible to end users as possible, and the whole art was in getting them to a minimum.
Introducing them purposefully and setting them center-stage feels weird, like building a new car out of rusty parts and making sure the seats properly smell of old farts. It is an aesthetic, for sure, but not an attractive one.
It’s not really meant to be beautiful or functional or push boundaries, it’s meant to create (or recreate) a certain atmosphere or aesthetic sense. And you can’t forget that Puppet Combo’s games got really popular on YouTube and Twitch, so their style inspired and was iterated on by others. Mouthwashing was also really influential.
Sometimes things are intentionally ugly or weird or messy or technologically outdated. Sometimes people think it’s cool to make a car out of rusty parts.
Well said. I don’t think people genuinely understand the technical difficulties this problem posed and how it only produced negatives- it’s like having a serious movie scene and then the main character randomly has chihuahua legs because of perspective warping. When it happens during gameplay it can be confusing, too. There’s no charm at all and it’s not the fun kind of jank like with physics ragdolls.
I have a Commodore 64 with a Commodore 64 monitor in my storage. I’m more than willing to parr with it if you can find someone who is interested
“Back in the day, we used to put in painstaking work and made many futile efforts to avoid texture warping, only for it to be called ‘charming’ nowadays.”
I like the look of Carrier Command 2, and that doesn’t even have much by way of textures; it uses mostly untextured polygons, with some low-resolution nearest-neighbor-scaled textures for things like displays.
Ah, that ol “Papa-Lucas-Syndrome” sadly there appears to be no cure :(
I recently started Shenmue 3, and I’m a little sad it’s so sharp and high res. It’s still excellent so far, but it’s missing some of the charm.
Nostalgia is a helluva drug.
