Sulphur on 27/3/2023 at 06:53
This is deeply, unappealingly lo-fi to me aesthetically, and at the same time very intriguing.
[video=youtube;oDnCjHZxlTY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDnCjHZxlTY[/video]
nicked on 27/3/2023 at 07:20
It's a fine line between authentically retro and affectedly ugly. This definitely falls on the wrong side.
Thirith on 27/3/2023 at 09:30
Based on that comment, I was expecting something like Cruelty Squad, but Brush Burial barely rates 0.3 Cruelty Squads, judging from that trailer.
nicked on 27/3/2023 at 19:25
It's not awful, but there's a real lack of cohesive art direction. Nothing's visually distinctive. It's pixellated to the point of simulating visual impairment, but the character models have enough polygons and animations to make a 90s PC explode.
Nameless Voice on 27/3/2023 at 20:14
I really don't like the artificially-retro look, where they go out of their way to make a game look worse than it needs to be.
I'm not talking about choosing a low level of fidelity and sticking to it, which is often done because more detail would need prohibitively more work. I'm talking about when they put in extra work to make the game look worse on purpose. Things like using unreasonably low-res textures or low-poly models, when it would be easier to make slightly higher-quality ones. Or special shaders to make all the textures look more pixelated.
But, eh, a lot of people seem to really love that kind of thing.
Twist on 27/3/2023 at 22:14
I don't think it's easy or fair to call a deliberate retro or lo-fi style good or bad just for being retro or lo-fi. It depends on the art direction and intention of the designer.
A lo-fi pixelated look can be a medium of art like any other, like drawing with charcoal instead of pencils or painting with watercolor instead of oil, or even photographing in black and white instead of color.
But it does sometimes feel like people over-stylize in a way that suggests they're hiding something, or they're just conforming to a trend without thoughtful intention.
Aja on 27/3/2023 at 22:34
I like the PS1 aesthetic but there's no lighting in that trailer.
nicked on 28/3/2023 at 07:26
Consistency is key. You can't claim you're going for a low-fi look but then just slap a 64x64 pixel texture on a 10,000 poly model.
henke on 22/7/2023 at 10:40
So I'm playing Far Cry 6 right now and sneaking and shooting my way through enemy camps and Playing It My Way™ yada yada but the most Imm Simmy thing so far was when the game gave me the choice to impact the story in a significant way just a few hours in. Our hero, Dani Rojas, just wants to escape to America and "work shit jobs until he she can open a body shop". That's the dream. Then she gets caught up in all this rebellion stuff, right? She only signs up on condition that if she helps out on a big mission, then the rebels will give her a boat and let her sail off an find her dream. After the mission, the rebels, true to their word, gives her a boat but lets her know that someone with her skills would be very useful to the cause. The game leaves you standing on the pier next to your new boat, looking back at the camp where the rebels plan their next mission. This is the part in the story where the protagonist realizes that there are things more important than her little dreams, right? And in a movie, and indeed in most AAA games, this story only goes one way. But Ubisoft, to their credit, realized that this is a VIDEO GAME dammit! Let's just make both scenarios and let the player choose. So I hopped in the boat, pointed it north, and hit the gas. Soon I was treated to a cutscene of Dani sitting on a Miami beach, drinking a mojito, while listening to the radio report of the rebellion being crushed in her homeland. Roll credits. Reminds me of the crab rangoon ending in FC4, but this being set a bit further into the game gives it a bit more weight. Of course I reloaded right afterwards and got back to helping the rebellion.
Anyway, it made me think there should be some kinda Imm Sim Calculator, where you could check boxes like "First Person" and "Multiple Playstyles" and "Story Choices" and it'd calculate a game's Imm Sim-ranking. Someone make this plz.
Sulphur on 23/7/2023 at 04:34
A) On any immersive sim scale, that would be about 3.1415% or much less. And B) that gimmick is a joke tradition they started with FC4. Yeah, you can end FC4 and 5 about ten minutes or thereabouts in, which is honestly probably the better decision to make, except that most of us must have paid money for these games.
I get that the Far Cry games started borrowing mechanics from immersive sims around the time of FC2, but that just makes them very slightly cross-genre, and the half-bakedness of the gameplay from FC3 onwards because of Ubi's need to make things 'accessible' has that unique compounding effect of all Ubisoft Map Games, which is to make something miles wide and a millimetre deep.