In my mid-30s but didn’t grow up with video games.
When I started playing them on my own PC, it was NFS, Half Life, Rise of Nations, and Call of Duty that got me hooked.
Now that I’m looking for games to play on my Deck, most of the games perfect for portable gaming appear to be with pixel art aesthetic.
Just why? Is this nostalgia? In the 90s, deveopers were using every trick possible to squeeze performance out of hardware (been watching videos about old games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Prince of Persia, Doom etc) and I can’t even get indie games with some eye candy?
Never have I been so disappointed to find out that Balatro and Vampire Survivors are pixel art games. My interest disappeared faster than a Lamborghini.
Whatever happened to other art styles? Why don’t we see games with vector or pseudo-3D (or 2.5D) art?
Anyway, that’s my unpopular opinion I guess.
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Whatever happened to other art styles? Why don’t we see games with vector or pseudo-3D (or 2.5D) art?
Plenty of those around, you just have to look. I’ve been playing a bunch of Synthetik lately and it’s glorious
it’s a stylistic choice, not a performance one. This post is as if you’re going to an art musem, complaining about cubism art when you like impressionalism. Effort is still needed to make good pixel art, especially because of the smaller resolutions.
As others said, just don’t play pixel games. There are literally thousands of games out there that use a different art style
Pixel art is just a stylistic choice. Development of such textures is usually more accessible, but not necessarily easier. There’s a real art to making pixel art look good.
Like, does this look bad or lazy to you?
If so I strongly recommend trying to make some pixel art yourself, you’ll quickly find it’s not all that easy.
What’s the second screenshot game’s name? I need to play that yesterday! It’s so beautiful!
Not OP but I think its Forge of the Fae.
You’re right! Just went to check and it obviously is on my wishlist, waiting for it to be released.
Thanks!
Half Life, Rise of Nations, and Call of Duty
None of these are indie games. While the teams were a lot smaller than modern AAA, they weren’t one or two people making a game in their spare time the way many indie games get made.
Pixel art games are popular for reasons including being much easier for solo devs or small teams to create. It cuts out a ton of work like rigging models, in many cases dealing with physics, complex lighting, and all sorts of those things. Depends on the game of course, but in many cases a lot of that stuff is either a non-isssue or way simplified. All art assets can have a unified look and quality without taking forever to make.
Games can also be lightweight on needed specs to run. Again helpful for solo devs or small teams which might not be optimization experts, and it means much less of having to figure out how to help people having issues on all sorts of hardware combos.
Pixel art can be easily readable on small screens pretty easily, which is good for things like playing on a Steamdeck. Again, plenty of non-pixelart games are readable on screens, but it is certainly easy to do it in that style.
This isn’t to say non-pixel art indie games don’t exist. There’s tons and tons of them. I’m pretty sure something like 50 trillion indie games are released on Steam every picosecond. There’s plenty that do the late 90s-early 2000s aesthetic. Or you can just play old games on Steam, especially ones that have gotten official or unofficial quality of life improvements since their release.
None of these are indie games.
That’s a bit fuzzy. Half-Life had a budget of around $1M back in 1998 under its original publisher Sierra On-Line. It had to be saved by Gabe Newell, who went out of pocket to keep it afloat.
This, compared to peer AAA titles like FF7 ($145M), Shenmu ($47M), and Wing Commander 4 ($12M) made it significantly underweight. Even Game Freak’s break out title “Pokemon” is estimated to cost north of $10M. As Sierra On-line was a historically famous publisher on the brink of bankruptcy, it’s debatable whether their dying gasp constitutes a “legit” indie title or not.
But whatever you can say about the original, the sandbox of second-tier mod games that it spawned - Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Day of Defeat, Natural Selection - certainly qualify.
OK but would it have killed Balatro devs use vector graphics like many modern card games on Linux? The game doesn’t have any animated protagonist traversing the world.
Isn’t there a happy medium between pixeleted art and highly detailed animation? Hades doesn’t have graphical fidelity (?) of AAA games like Assassin’s Creed but it’s still pleasing to look at. Or look at mobile game like Monument Valley or Hitman Go.
Balatro is, as far as I know, a single person dev team and this is their first game as far as I know.
Hades was made by an established studio that has been around for 17 years and has 25 employees.
Again, a lot of people pick pixel art because they can make all the assets look unified relatively easily. If you’ve ever come across a game with lots of storebought assets made by different artists you’ll know how jarring it is to have wildly inconsistent assets.
They could pick something else, but if it has an extra layer of complexity to getting the assets looking right and unified they may choose not to. You might think “Oh how much art can there be.” and the answer for a solo dev is “Oh no too much.” especially when they are also designing and programming.
And if you don’t care for pixel art there’s tons and tons and tons of games without it, so you can go play them instead without it affecting you.
OK but would it have killed Balatro devs use vector graphics like many modern card games on Linux?
Why should they change their art style just for you? This is nothing more than a you problem.
Then don’t play them…?
Disclaimer: I know this is unpopular opinions, just paying my 2 cents.
This is less unpopular and more uninformed opinion.
OP clearly knows nothing about making games and only wants every dev to cater to their likings without even considering that pixel art can be a forced choice to keep costs and dev times bearable to small or one-man teams (stardew valley). It can also be an aesthethical choice because it goes well with the game’s concept (sea of stars) or even a way to keep the game cheap (vampire survivors).
Also, saying the pixel art is lazy shows OP has probably never seen a detailed pixel art game. See Chained Echoes or the aforementioned Sea of Stars as examples.
Just because a game doesn’t have shiny 3d graphics doesn’t mean it’s bad or lazy.
Its simple (the art, not the concept). An indie game dev can get a lot of pixel art for the same amount as a single highly detailed and accurately animated protagonist. It’s cost efficient, and it looks good most of the time. That’s enough for most people.
Counter-point: Slay The Spire
I don’t think it’s a counter point to point at a non-pixel art game. Obviously non-pixel art indie games exist, but the person above was explaining what makes pixel are desirable for the devs that go that direction.
I was addressing the ‘highly detailed and accurately animated protagonist’ part. Slay The Spire doesn’t have either. It still looks good.
Yes there are multiple ways to approach art style for games. For many small devs pixel art is a good fit.
I think this boils down to you just not liking pixel art, which is fine, but you’re going a step further after getting answers and just acting like the answers aren’t good enough. Pixel art is efficient to make and many people find it aesthetically pleasing.
i love the gameplay of slay the spire, but i personally do not like the graphics at all, it looks like bad clip art to me, but like any opinion about the look of a creative work, its a matter of taste, and what you think is good is a matter of your personal experience of it. Similarly some people have a taste of pixel art. There is no such thing as objevtive good or bad in creative works, and other peoples taste and experiences dont have to make sense to you or accomidate your sensabilitys.
I don’t much like pixel art games, either; tho not because of the pixel art. I simply like 3D environments better, and most pixel art games are 2D. 3D pixel art games get the best of both worlds.
I am fine with 2D games (Mini Metro is addictive af) but I think pixel art is just lazy.
This is an uneducated take, pixel art is hard to do well. It’s fine if you don’t like it but if you insist on calling it lazy I insist you look into what it takes.
pixel art is a stylistic choice many people find novel, you can dislike it all you want, but the take that it is lazy is in itself intellectually lazy
This comment to me just settles that you absolutely don’t know the effort that goes into making pixel art look good.
I agree. I grow up watching graphics get better and better, I saved money for a faster PC, was so excited when the 3Dfx VooDoo came out. It’s amazing how far game graphics have come (and how immersive and massive they can be, including the stories). I have nothing against people enjoying the indie games, but it’s not for me.
I don’t like to play 99.999% of existing or yet to be released games.
