Hell yeah, so neat! Given that we are entering/have entered the age of nostalgia for early 3d, it would be so interesting to me to see someone making a commercial project off of this (obviously sans assets from the original games)
I assumed that the appeal of pixel-arty games was the reduced engine and art requirements more-so than any aesthetic. I do not know anything about game programming, but I could deduce how to layer a bunch of 2d assets on top of each other to produce visuals. I could even sketch out some quasi-decent art in paint.
I would have to hit the books on how to work with a 3d world. Incorporating passable 3d art assets is well beyond my artistic ability.
Why do we need to move on from the SNES aesthetic? Can’t it coexist with other styles? To me, it feels like someone saying “maybe we’ll finally move on from classical music.”
Now if there’s some other retro style you want to support then I fully embrace that. I love the look and feel of HOMM3 and would love to see new games done in that style. But there’s no reason to abandon a style like 8-bit or 16-bit pixel art if there’s plenty of people who enjoy it.
Sorry that was poorly worded - I love the SNES aesthetic and of course hope it’s here to stay. I meant “moving on” as in chronologically to the styles that came afterwards. As though we gradually iterate through the past, marking each era as “retro vintage cool” instead of just “old”.
I think some periods have more lasting appeal than others. For example, the grainy low-polygon, low-colour, dithered look of early 3D PlayStation games has, to my mind, much less appeal than the 2D games of late SNES era (and PlayStation era, viz. Castlevania: SOTN).
Lots of people are nostalgic for Final Fantasy 7, for example, but I think most prefer the remake over the original.
Early 2D games have the same issue. I think very few people are fans of the Atari 2600 and its extremely crude graphics. To me, that machine is more interesting from the technical perspective than the visual or gameplay perspective.
There’s definitely a sweet spot for me that overlaps with when games became “really good” to my taste.
I was playing Civ6. And honestly, why the 3D and all the animations? It’s just slow and consumes power that it doesn’t need to. The Civ2, MOO2, MOM, X-Com era is still to my mind the best. I just want the quality of life improvements and some of the newer mechanics from the new games.
Yes. I completely agree. I refuse to play new 3D games like Civ6 because they feel incredibly "heavy" without any benefit. A skilled team of 2D artists and graphic designers could run circles around Civ6 with incredibly beautiful and detailed art and user interface design without any of the power consumption or heaviness.
I am a huge fan of Civ2, MOO2, MOM, SMACX, and X-Com as well. Bringing those games forward with updated 2D designs, clean user interfaces, and high quality of life would be incredible!
I'd take up master of orion 2 again only with a heavy automation toolbox. Love the game, but bhe middle to end game was so click-click painful especially on big maps. Played it recently with Autohotkey and it was so much better.
In case of Civ6, the thing that consumes most resources doesn't seem to be the rendering so much so as all the game logic written in Lua. On very large maps late into the game, AI turns can sometimes take minutes.
That aside, I broadly agree that 3D graphics in 4X strategy games is, at best, a useless distraction. And sometimes it's actually harmful when it results in fewer noticeable details.
It still depends very much on the game. For example, Battlezone (1998) on PC was from that early / awkward 3D era. But the visual design of the game was very conscious of hardware limitations at the time, making it look surprisingly well back then, and tolerable even today with some minor tweaks like resolution:
