Posted March 31, 2021
I'm not a fan of western cartoonish 3D style - like Tales of Arcadia in movies, Torchlight, Warcraft 3 onwards... especially if there is supposedly a serious and dramatic plot...
For me this always looks half-baked - give me either "realistic" (Witcher) or "art" (Little Nightmares).
As for pixel art... there are two problems:
1. There's too much of it.
2. Too many devs don't understand what makes pixel art work: It's a way of abstraction (see the Bit-Trip games), and it's a means to an end: convey to the player in one glance what is going on.
In the old days abstraction was a thing of necessity. Mario evolved this way from the limitations of early arcade machines and consoles. Nowadays it's a choice, so at least some artistic understanding is needed to actually say something with it. Otherwise it's just a filler. Something makeshift that never got a proper replacement.
It's the same with low-poly (possibly untextured) 3D - there's just not that much of it. A skilled artist can make it impactful, a good designer can make it work, but a lot can go wrong along the way.
What I see as "none-functional" is low-res fonts in a game with lots of text and/or numbers. I find them really hard to read. Old games like Champions of Krynn had an excuse - it was the best they had. And also screen sizes were much smaller. Nowadays a single short sentence spaces out over 40cm in huge blocky "ornate" letters of 8x8 pixels - that's just shit.
For me this always looks half-baked - give me either "realistic" (Witcher) or "art" (Little Nightmares).
As for pixel art... there are two problems:
1. There's too much of it.
2. Too many devs don't understand what makes pixel art work: It's a way of abstraction (see the Bit-Trip games), and it's a means to an end: convey to the player in one glance what is going on.
In the old days abstraction was a thing of necessity. Mario evolved this way from the limitations of early arcade machines and consoles. Nowadays it's a choice, so at least some artistic understanding is needed to actually say something with it. Otherwise it's just a filler. Something makeshift that never got a proper replacement.
It's the same with low-poly (possibly untextured) 3D - there's just not that much of it. A skilled artist can make it impactful, a good designer can make it work, but a lot can go wrong along the way.
What I see as "none-functional" is low-res fonts in a game with lots of text and/or numbers. I find them really hard to read. Old games like Champions of Krynn had an excuse - it was the best they had. And also screen sizes were much smaller. Nowadays a single short sentence spaces out over 40cm in huge blocky "ornate" letters of 8x8 pixels - that's just shit.