It's like a rewiring through new experience. Back in the day games were improving in looks and gameplay rapidly. Then the latter started deteriorating for many big studio titles.
You tell me some new AAAA Ubisoft game is coming out and my gag reflex starts to tingle.
A new pixel graphic indie title with great reviews? Sign me up.
I’m there with you, but a little worried that AI pixel slop is coming to ruin it.
Retro gaming has become my jam, but I’m also rapidly approaching 50 and have an 8y/o that likes to learn my old games with me for now. So I’m gonna enjoy that while we can.
My nieces' favorite video game of all time is dead or alive 3 on the original Xbox. There's a switch with new games and fancier graphics connected to an OLED tv but at the end of the day they just want to kick people as simply as possible. Old ass console connected to an old tv in a guest room.
Nobody is better at sniffing out what's actually fun than kids. They might get tricked by marketing here and there but once they get their hands on things it's a simple process for them. Does this spark joy?
If youre my age, then games were advancing in graphic fidelity at the same rate as getting better and more in depth. Devs were able to learn from eachother on what makes a game great. Then the horse dlc happened, and suddenly devs could only make games that could be chopped up into pieces and sold as an al a carte game instead of the 7 course meals they had been making.
I wanted photo realistic games when I was younger, and now I get to enjoy playing them. I also enjoy playing 2d games. It turns out fidelity is just an artistic choice which does little to predict the quality of a game 🙄
Also has to be said that 2D vs. 3D is basically just different genres, because it affects gameplay so much. Someone who only plays 3D games misses out on a whole bunch of variety.
Nooooooooo, you're just envious because you don't have a RTX 5090 that only costs 15k dollars and needs to generate fake frames at 400*300 to maintain a stable 60FPS
I've been playing the older Ys games. Ys seven and back. These games are great. I didn't play a single Ys game until last year. No nostalgia for them. Practically no JRPG nostalgia either as I was a Diablo/Baldurs Gate type gamer 20+ years ago. Now I'm eating up all these old JRPG games
Something about this series where the games seem budget for their era but has great polish. Good music. The stories are fun entertaining adventures. The characters are lovable. Gameplay is fun to me and iove the music. I'm impressed with how the games on PC have ultrawide support. Eventually I'll get to 8-10 where everyone hypes up 8 as best in series. And all the modern games are easy enough for pretty much anyone to run on cheap hardware. Great series
Back when 16 bit graphics were cutting edge, we thought they were getting close to photorealistic. It's crazy seeing screenshots of games that I thought looked amazing at the time.
I still stand by the whole "Glorious PC gaming master race!!!!" Circlejerk had a profoundly negative impact on video games, as for about 10 years the mainstream gaming community seemed to only give a shit about frame rates and resolutions and Devs where happy to just focus on that instead of making their games fun to play or have interesting stories.
Unfortunately, I'd have to agree with you. I recently got told by my brother that he a late thirties piss ant, thinks my 1440p 144hz monitor is shit compared to his 4k 260hz.
Piss ant plays only dota. Only game he plays is dota. FUCKING DOTA. he is fucking herald 3. It's like he is bottom 20%, he lives life in 30 fps and thinkshe can get use from 260hz.
Eh, I think that's more of a business thing. Numbers are something execs can compare on spreadsheet. Putting more budget into making number go up is something execs will do. Creativity can't be quantified as anything other than risk.
Of course anyone that likes video games knows making the same game over and over just with more pixels is boring. But how can you explain that in the form of a spreadsheet?
For me immersion depends more on sound design than on visuals.
Infra Arcana, the game that looks like this (screenshot's not mine):
It is among the most immersive horror experiences for me. I still clearly remember walking down a long empty corridor, stumbling upon a door at the end of it, and when I approached the door something behind it started banging - it was so fucking scary!
First Forza game looked so damn good at the time, like almost real for the videos (yes I know but when your peak graphics is really surpassed you think it's real). Nowadays that never happens cause I'm old and time passes so quickly. I do stop to enjoy the flowers now and then still. Sometimes quite literally in video games to check out how things are progressing I love jungle scenes and they sort of needs tons of plants.
My personal example are HD packs for ps2 games on emulator... My backlog there is really long and I loving the fact that i can play them on a higher resolution :D
In most games I find no matter how good the static assets look, the animations immediately break the illusion of 'realism'.
One recent exception to this were some of the cutscenes in Expedition 33, the facial mocap was very on-point and, even though the game isn't anywhere close to photorealistic, it felt close to watching real actors perform a scene.
Meh. Pixel graphics are fine but I prefer games that look beautiful, and most pixel-art games do not. I especially don't like it when they're "pixel art" but don't actually align everything to a pixel grid, so e.g. characters can move smoothly off the grid, or things can rotate without aliasing. That ruins what I still get from the aesthetic.
But give me something like Ori and the Blind Forest's aesthetics any day. Or Skyrim or Witcher or Deus Ex for recentish AAA titles.
Mega man is one of my favourite franchises, but man I wish we could get past the side scroller old style and get a modern ratchet and clank style open city mega man. Or a new mega man legends.
I replayed Neverwinter Nights base campaigns again not too long ago. Replayability used to be the standard, and for $20. I’m not paying $60+ for a 30hr game that lacks the compulsion to turn around and start up another play through. Granted, D&D 3.5 character builds are compelling on their own, but I digress.
Replayability was largely replaced with "content". A good modern contrast is God of War and Resident Evil. Resident Evil embraces their tradition of replayability, God of War has an insane amount of "content" on a checklist to make a playtrough be a dollar an hour.
Except with God of War you get collectibles only visible from a certain angle or "puzzles" where the puzzle is an unreasonably short time limit to execute something obvious or an inordinately tight set of jumps to bad time.
Meanwhile in Resident evil every corner actual still has a purpose, like it did before.
Content makes a game replayable. RE was always replayable. On PlayStation 1, and now, on Steam. Neverwinter Nights was unusual in that it was intended to keep going in perpetuity via player crafted modules/campaigns, like D&D tabletop, and is not comparable to anything else.
As a teenager, I warned people that at a certain point, we will reach the diminishing returns of investment on graphics. I was called a "Mario playing child" by my peers.
I started to feel validated since 2016. And the "DEI-jaw" chud gamers like to whine about is also likely created by the too much faith in how much current graphics can recreate realism accurately.
I was interested in realistic graphics more when there was rapid progress being made with every iteration, because the technology was cool and impressive, but now there seems to be increasingly diminishing returns with only marginal improvements year on year, and they just increase in bloat and can't afford to be niche. I look more for interesting and inventive gameplay these days, and indy/small budget games are where it's at. I started gaming in the 8 bit era, btw.
My expectations were far lower, without me realising it, as a child.
I remember getting Mortal Kombat 4, on the N64, and thinking "holy shit, the graphics are so good!!! SO 3D!"
Once upon a time I wanted a strong PC so badly so I could play........ Grand Theft Auto IV.
Now, I don't want anything to do with that franchise. Granted I still do play some AAA stuff, more so PS3 games, and I now want a strong PC for Cyberpunk 2077 to explore its world and give myself extra background for the TTRPG Cyberpunk RED, but other than that I mostly just want indie and retro.
Might I suggest Doom Patrol? Umbrella Academy was inspired pretty much entirely by Doom Patrol and Gerard Way dropping the ball on his run at the series.
it's not even about "worse" it's that we've always been more impressed by stylish graphics than high fidelity graphics. probably the most frustrating franchise to have forgotten this lessons is borderlands
Sometime in the past 15 years or so AAA became even more business and shareholder beholden.
Fuck off with this.
It's a lazy excuse to accept worse overall quality in a medium that desperately needs life breathed into it again from AAA studios. My nostalgia days were from the N64 but even those giants of AAA games were worse than what came after objectively. If AAA studios had fractions of the artistic integrity they had before, they'd be stomping indie games into obscurity. The only reason why indies are given a seat at the table is because AAA has priced out many and diluted what was once a rich hobby.
N64 games were worse than what came after, because the technology of 3D graphics was new.
But when I say "Games should be shorter and look worse" I'm referring to the ways older games had to work within certain constraints in order to get made, and those constraints bred so much creativity.
There's no reason why games need to be these unoptimized 200GB behemoths with photorealistic graphics. Especially when the gameplay itself is often so derivative
Somehow, I never had that first feeling.
The first console that there ever was at my house was a PS2 (my dad's), and the only game he purchased was a SNES Station. So I kinda grew up playing only pixelated games.
Turns out I got too used to it and play almost no realistic games.
I really don't see the point of the whole pixelated aesthetic. I mean, it's nostalgia, but for what? For a time when we wished we had more pixels? If you want that kind of nostalgia, why not also have a loading screen showing a cassette tape going round... for 15 fucking minutes. Hell, it isn't even accurate nostalgia, because pixelation on a hi res smartphone or monitor looks totally different from the blurry pixelation you get on a shitty CRT TV. If you can see the corners on your pixels, you're doing it wrong.
I know there is a lot to be nostalgic for, it's just that the lack of pixels isn't one of those things. Some things have simply gotten better, more pixels is one of those things. Pixelation is just a way of making a game graphically less clear and less pleasant to look at. /rant
Don't get me wrong, I love the creativity that comes from having such a limitation. And back when it was a necessity, and you could count the color palette on your fingers, some pixel art was amazing. But it was largely about trying to transcend those limitations. For example, it was very common to use antialiasing as much as possible, because you're trying to make things look good despite the pixellation.
Whereas the aesthetic of modern pixel art tends to be about making things as clunky and jaggy as can be, so you can really check out those pixels, or showcase that crappy color palette. Conspicuous pixellation is untrue to its origins. It also makes game objects less recognizable, sacrificing utility for an aesthetic.
I know there are people who like it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it can't be criticized, and so far I have seen no counterpoints to the criticisms I have raised.
I was wondering how pixelation actually adds utility to the game. But I've looked at a few screenshots and Rimworld doesn't seem particularly pixelated to me. Maybe we're talking at cross purposes here, because Rimworld does have "pixel art" in the sense that it's drawn pixel by pixel, and it does have the simplistic style that's common in pixelated games. But it's displayed at reasonably high resolution so it's not noticeably pixelated.
What I'm bitching about is games like Stardew Valley where they have committed to fewer pixels on screen. The simplistic style with higher resolution in Rimworld is clear and functional. What I'm saying is that pixelated games would be better if they did the same.
Just because you personally dislike certain art style doesn't make it objectively bad. I'm a zoomer, I don't have nostalgia for pixel graphics and yet I enjoy pixel art. I can't stand CRT filters on pixel games (modern or emulated) btw.
I've dealt with enough people who think their preferences are absolute that I just couldn't be sure whether you're one of them or not. I'm glad we agree that art is subjective.
It's like a rewiring through new experience. Back in the day games were improving in looks and gameplay rapidly. Then the latter started deteriorating for many big studio titles.
You tell me some new AAAA Ubisoft game is coming out and my gag reflex starts to tingle.
A new pixel graphic indie title with great reviews? Sign me up.
The fruit that was once sweet has become poison.
I’m there with you, but a little worried that AI pixel slop is coming to ruin it.
Retro gaming has become my jam, but I’m also rapidly approaching 50 and have an 8y/o that likes to learn my old games with me for now. So I’m gonna enjoy that while we can.
My nieces' favorite video game of all time is dead or alive 3 on the original Xbox. There's a switch with new games and fancier graphics connected to an OLED tv but at the end of the day they just want to kick people as simply as possible. Old ass console connected to an old tv in a guest room.
Nobody is better at sniffing out what's actually fun than kids. They might get tricked by marketing here and there but once they get their hands on things it's a simple process for them. Does this spark joy?
Yeah, I feel like humanity should've figured out sooner that reality does not have great gameplay... 🫠
i mean, yeah it does. you just gotta figure out not only finding and maintaing relationships with compatible partners (both tasks difficulty: S)
Really I just want one thing. The same thing every gamer wants. To escape to the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
TO...SPEEESSS!
I present to you: loot boxes. And gacha.
To escape to the ONE. PLACE. UN. CORRUPTED! BY! CAPITALISM!
You should play World of Workcraft for like 40 hours a week.
Maybe you'll be invited to heroic raids then!
Not mythic, that's for the 200 hours per week players.
hard pass. did that for 25 years i cant remember anymore before my body broke
Join the fight Komrade
The reasons for adult you playing games younger you played are:
All of the above
good graphics have replaced good art direction and style
If youre my age, then games were advancing in graphic fidelity at the same rate as getting better and more in depth. Devs were able to learn from eachother on what makes a game great. Then the horse dlc happened, and suddenly devs could only make games that could be chopped up into pieces and sold as an al a carte game instead of the 7 course meals they had been making.
And even with that chopped up BS, they're still not as in-depth as games were just kinda starting to get.
I wanted photo realistic games when I was younger, and now I get to enjoy playing them. I also enjoy playing 2d games. It turns out fidelity is just an artistic choice which does little to predict the quality of a game 🙄
Also has to be said that 2D vs. 3D is basically just different genres, because it affects gameplay so much. Someone who only plays 3D games misses out on a whole bunch of variety.
I exclusively play 2.5D, to get the best of both worlds.
Partly because games are so inefficient these days that we have no choice. Looking at you, Unity and Unreal
Nooooooooo, you're just envious because you don't have a RTX 5090 that only costs 15k dollars and needs to generate fake frames at 400*300 to maintain a stable 60FPS
/s
I've been playing the older Ys games. Ys seven and back. These games are great. I didn't play a single Ys game until last year. No nostalgia for them. Practically no JRPG nostalgia either as I was a Diablo/Baldurs Gate type gamer 20+ years ago. Now I'm eating up all these old JRPG games
Something about this series where the games seem budget for their era but has great polish. Good music. The stories are fun entertaining adventures. The characters are lovable. Gameplay is fun to me and iove the music. I'm impressed with how the games on PC have ultrawide support. Eventually I'll get to 8-10 where everyone hypes up 8 as best in series. And all the modern games are easy enough for pretty much anyone to run on cheap hardware. Great series
ASCII NetHack FTW
holy shit I feel personally identified
Imma go get drunk
@!!!!!!!!!!!
I've never ascended, only descended to my inevitable grave...
My IRL gravestone will read simply:
YASD
Mine will read "You have died of dysentery".
Back when 16 bit graphics were cutting edge, we thought they were getting close to photorealistic. It's crazy seeing screenshots of games that I thought looked amazing at the time.
I still stand by the whole "Glorious PC gaming master race!!!!" Circlejerk had a profoundly negative impact on video games, as for about 10 years the mainstream gaming community seemed to only give a shit about frame rates and resolutions and Devs where happy to just focus on that instead of making their games fun to play or have interesting stories.
Unfortunately, I'd have to agree with you. I recently got told by my brother that he a late thirties piss ant, thinks my 1440p 144hz monitor is shit compared to his 4k 260hz. Piss ant plays only dota. Only game he plays is dota. FUCKING DOTA. he is fucking herald 3. It's like he is bottom 20%, he lives life in 30 fps and thinkshe can get use from 260hz.
I don't even want to know what the price tag on his monitor / TV was.
Eh, I think that's more of a business thing. Numbers are something execs can compare on spreadsheet. Putting more budget into making number go up is something execs will do. Creativity can't be quantified as anything other than risk.
Of course anyone that likes video games knows making the same game over and over just with more pixels is boring. But how can you explain that in the form of a spreadsheet?
I wouldn't be so confident in your average video game consumer. How many "HD Remake" games sold like hotcakes?
Stories?! In MY games?! We have AI for that at home.
do you even raytrace lol
/s
Until it can be actually photo-realistic and cross the uncanny valley, it's best to just have a stylized aesthetic anyway.
No, you must be angry about "DEI-chins" and "uglified women" instead, then demand that all female characters must be like Eve from Stellar Blade! /j
I stopped being a graphics whore around the mid PS2 era, mostly because my computer couldn't run the more realistic games like GTA Vice City 😁
I unironically love seeing newer indies with PS1/N64 style 3D graphics
I love it too, Dusk being one of my favorites. My only complaints with modern PS1/PSX aesthetic 3D graphics (as I often see on reddit):
Never liked photorealistic games for some reason, my brain's perception just filters it out past the first few minutes looking at effects.
With some modern photo-realistic games I can't even discern anything on screen: it's so much detail that my brain becomes overwhelmed :P
The new Doom is literally unplayable for me because of that (and the music).
i do think that cartoon-style games (like this) are more immersive in general.
For me immersion depends more on sound design than on visuals.
Infra Arcana, the game that looks like this (screenshot's not mine):
It is among the most immersive horror experiences for me. I still clearly remember walking down a long empty corridor, stumbling upon a door at the end of it, and when I approached the door something behind it started banging - it was so fucking scary!
Well, it does just look like more of that reality, you can find outside. It's kind of inherently boring.
Adult me is making teenage me happy, because I play games which looks super realistic and state of the art in my teenage times :D
“It’s 2026. Finally, I can play Mass Effect on the highest settings!” :3
First Forza game looked so damn good at the time, like almost real for the videos (yes I know but when your peak graphics is really surpassed you think it's real). Nowadays that never happens cause I'm old and time passes so quickly. I do stop to enjoy the flowers now and then still. Sometimes quite literally in video games to check out how things are progressing I love jungle scenes and they sort of needs tons of plants.
Friend of mine thought this once we played a racing game one Dreamcast. He came into the room and thought we watch a race for a moment.
Right? I'm tearing through Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne remaster and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It's great.
Thanks for reminding me of my lold backlog :D
My personal example are HD packs for ps2 games on emulator... My backlog there is really long and I loving the fact that i can play them on a higher resolution :D
In most games I find no matter how good the static assets look, the animations immediately break the illusion of 'realism'.
One recent exception to this were some of the cutscenes in Expedition 33, the facial mocap was very on-point and, even though the game isn't anywhere close to photorealistic, it felt close to watching real actors perform a scene.
Meh. Pixel graphics are fine but I prefer games that look beautiful, and most pixel-art games do not. I especially don't like it when they're "pixel art" but don't actually align everything to a pixel grid, so e.g. characters can move smoothly off the grid, or things can rotate without aliasing. That ruins what I still get from the aesthetic.
But give me something like Ori and the Blind Forest's aesthetics any day. Or Skyrim or Witcher or Deus Ex for recentish AAA titles.
Bro, that hurts
I completely agree with this sentiment in all its writing.
If you like point & click adventures, I recommend Dark Side Detective and The Last Door (series)
Ironically, modern pixel graphic games would struggle t to run on the hardware I wanted realistic graphics from.
Mega man is one of my favourite franchises, but man I wish we could get past the side scroller old style and get a modern ratchet and clank style open city mega man. Or a new mega man legends.
Disco Elysium what?
I replayed Neverwinter Nights base campaigns again not too long ago. Replayability used to be the standard, and for $20. I’m not paying $60+ for a 30hr game that lacks the compulsion to turn around and start up another play through. Granted, D&D 3.5 character builds are compelling on their own, but I digress.
Civilizations III vs whatever VII was all about.
Replayability was largely replaced with "content". A good modern contrast is God of War and Resident Evil. Resident Evil embraces their tradition of replayability, God of War has an insane amount of "content" on a checklist to make a playtrough be a dollar an hour.
Except with God of War you get collectibles only visible from a certain angle or "puzzles" where the puzzle is an unreasonably short time limit to execute something obvious or an inordinately tight set of jumps to bad time.
Meanwhile in Resident evil every corner actual still has a purpose, like it did before.
Content makes a game replayable. RE was always replayable. On PlayStation 1, and now, on Steam. Neverwinter Nights was unusual in that it was intended to keep going in perpetuity via player crafted modules/campaigns, like D&D tabletop, and is not comparable to anything else.
As a teenager, I warned people that at a certain point, we will reach the diminishing returns of investment on graphics. I was called a "Mario playing child" by my peers.
I started to feel validated since 2016. And the "DEI-jaw" chud gamers like to whine about is also likely created by the too much faith in how much current graphics can recreate realism accurately.
I was interested in realistic graphics more when there was rapid progress being made with every iteration, because the technology was cool and impressive, but now there seems to be increasingly diminishing returns with only marginal improvements year on year, and they just increase in bloat and can't afford to be niche. I look more for interesting and inventive gameplay these days, and indy/small budget games are where it's at. I started gaming in the 8 bit era, btw.
What I wouldn't give for a true successor to beyond good and evil
Me; neither.
I'm incredibly sick and tired of videogames usually picking just two lanes:
There are plenty of video games that strive somewhere in between, like Cities Skylines, Factorio, Zelda Breath of the Wild, etc
My expectations were far lower, without me realising it, as a child.
I remember getting Mortal Kombat 4, on the N64, and thinking "holy shit, the graphics are so good!!! SO 3D!"
My gosh the graphics did not age well.
I remember Resident Evil 2 used to scare the pixels out of me!
Ghost of Yotei did a great job in gameplay and graphics.
Excuse me this is a circle jerk about why indie games are clearly superior.
Why can't we just enjoy games that are fun?
Once upon a time I wanted a strong PC so badly so I could play........ Grand Theft Auto IV.
Now, I don't want anything to do with that franchise. Granted I still do play some AAA stuff, more so PS3 games, and I now want a strong PC for Cyberpunk 2077 to explore its world and give myself extra background for the TTRPG Cyberpunk RED, but other than that I mostly just want indie and retro.
I think i have to re-watch that series. Best TV in the last decade.
What show is this from? I've always wondered
The umbrella academy
Might I suggest Doom Patrol? Umbrella Academy was inspired pretty much entirely by Doom Patrol and Gerard Way dropping the ball on his run at the series.
Never heard of it, i'll have a look, thanks :)
Games should be shorter and look worse, tbh
it's not even about "worse" it's that we've always been more impressed by stylish graphics than high fidelity graphics. probably the most frustrating franchise to have forgotten this lessons is borderlands
Sometime in the past 15 years or so AAA became even more business and shareholder beholden.
Fuck off with this.
It's a lazy excuse to accept worse overall quality in a medium that desperately needs life breathed into it again from AAA studios. My nostalgia days were from the N64 but even those giants of AAA games were worse than what came after objectively. If AAA studios had fractions of the artistic integrity they had before, they'd be stomping indie games into obscurity. The only reason why indies are given a seat at the table is because AAA has priced out many and diluted what was once a rich hobby.
N64 games were worse than what came after, because the technology of 3D graphics was new.
But when I say "Games should be shorter and look worse" I'm referring to the ways older games had to work within certain constraints in order to get made, and those constraints bred so much creativity.
There's no reason why games need to be these unoptimized 200GB behemoths with photorealistic graphics. Especially when the gameplay itself is often so derivative
I remember detesting ps2-era 3d graphics, commonly thinking I'd just prefer it if was more pixelated (think like on the ds)
I've come to really like that look tho
Somehow, I never had that first feeling. The first console that there ever was at my house was a PS2 (my dad's), and the only game he purchased was a SNES Station. So I kinda grew up playing only pixelated games. Turns out I got too used to it and play almost no realistic games.
Funny cuz it's true
I want stylized games with good lighting, like valheim, or minecraft with shaders.
I really don't see the point of the whole pixelated aesthetic. I mean, it's nostalgia, but for what? For a time when we wished we had more pixels? If you want that kind of nostalgia, why not also have a loading screen showing a cassette tape going round... for 15 fucking minutes. Hell, it isn't even accurate nostalgia, because pixelation on a hi res smartphone or monitor looks totally different from the blurry pixelation you get on a shitty CRT TV. If you can see the corners on your pixels, you're doing it wrong.
I know there is a lot to be nostalgic for, it's just that the lack of pixels isn't one of those things. Some things have simply gotten better, more pixels is one of those things. Pixelation is just a way of making a game graphically less clear and less pleasant to look at. /rant
It's an art style born out of neccessity but still distinct. You know, pixel art. Has their own ästhetics.
Don't get me wrong, I love the creativity that comes from having such a limitation. And back when it was a necessity, and you could count the color palette on your fingers, some pixel art was amazing. But it was largely about trying to transcend those limitations. For example, it was very common to use antialiasing as much as possible, because you're trying to make things look good despite the pixellation. Whereas the aesthetic of modern pixel art tends to be about making things as clunky and jaggy as can be, so you can really check out those pixels, or showcase that crappy color palette. Conspicuous pixellation is untrue to its origins. It also makes game objects less recognizable, sacrificing utility for an aesthetic. I know there are people who like it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it can't be criticized, and so far I have seen no counterpoints to the criticisms I have raised.
For example, Rimworld uses pixelart for utility before aesthetic.
Btw, aesthetic vs. ästhetik; what english volks do just to not use Umlauts.
That's interesting. I've never played Rimworld, how does that work?
I'm not sure i understand what you mean. It's a minimalistic style.
I was wondering how pixelation actually adds utility to the game. But I've looked at a few screenshots and Rimworld doesn't seem particularly pixelated to me. Maybe we're talking at cross purposes here, because Rimworld does have "pixel art" in the sense that it's drawn pixel by pixel, and it does have the simplistic style that's common in pixelated games. But it's displayed at reasonably high resolution so it's not noticeably pixelated.
What I'm bitching about is games like Stardew Valley where they have committed to fewer pixels on screen. The simplistic style with higher resolution in Rimworld is clear and functional. What I'm saying is that pixelated games would be better if they did the same.
Got it, thanks.
I think you might be falling at the first hurdle with your reasoning. Pixel art can be beautiful in of itself.
Just because you personally dislike certain art style doesn't make it objectively bad. I'm a zoomer, I don't have nostalgia for pixel graphics and yet I enjoy pixel art. I can't stand CRT filters on pixel games (modern or emulated) btw.
It's an aesthetic style! How would it be objectively bad? Of course my opinions are subjective.
I've dealt with enough people who think their preferences are absolute that I just couldn't be sure whether you're one of them or not. I'm glad we agree that art is subjective.
No I just like a good rant. 😁