It works for Demon's souls because it's a dark fantasy game and the new graphics absolutely nail that vibe.

The main consistent difference I'm seeing here is contrast. The more modern versions have darker darks and brighter brights, with less midrange.

You would find more colour in the mud at Passchendale.

I still dislike the piss filter

Yes, but also...

I would say it went from maybe moody (this might not be the right term, but something like it) and more manufactured, to now being more realistic. Better technology has allowed games to have lighting that gets very close to reality, especially with ray-tracing. It sometimes comes with the cost of creative control though.

I wouldn't say either is bad. They can both be amazing or shit depending on how they're used. It's easy to pick the best or worst offenders from either to make whichever one you want to look good though.

They all just went LOOK AT ME, I'M DOING HDR!!!! while a fuck of a lot of systems can't

Interesting video, but I disagree that it proves that the "brown thing is a myth". I was around back then and it was definitely a thing that was also being heavily criticized.

The thing is that with the methodology that guy employs, I guess it wouldn't really be visible. The "brown game" aesthetic, while definitely a trend, wasn't the only trend during that time. At the same time, you had the explosion of colorful Nintendo casual games on platforms like the Wii and DS. Many of those sold extremely well, so they'd be overrepresented when you only take the top 20 bestselling games of each year. Same with sports games, those never really change much, but they'll show up heavily on every top 20. But with games that wanted to seem more "mature" and especially genres like first-person shooters (like in the meme), the trend was very real.

This should tell you there is a flaw somewhere.

Maybe the perception of brownness comes from things that aren't supposed to be brown and grey; nobody looks at a basketball court or a sun-bathed road and says "This is abnormally brown". If Gears of War, CoD, FO3, Doom 3, GTA4 aren't coming up, you haven't calculated the thing they're talking about.

you had a flattening of video game color for sure, wether it was the brown mill sims like COD, the green of fallout 3, or the yellow of deus ex human revolution. and few very influential games ‘color’ our memories.

at the same time you have your oblivion surreal super contrast color explosion. compared to nows muted rerelease. before, the mono coloring was a stylistic choice, and now it’s a tapping into the game engines realism settings

Not really. Mid-2000s was the exact time when mainstream gamemakers discovered shaders, but the power of those was only enough for a rough filter thrown over everything. So, armed with the solution, developers looked for the problem that it would solve, and decided that making games look grittier is just what's needed. ‘Need for Speed: Most Wanted’ from 2005 was a major offender in this.

That was very much a repetition of the Great Browning of mid-late nineties, when textures got detailed enough that devs likewise sought to apply them as much as they could, and did that by using textures of dirty brown ground, scratched brown stone, and nicely looking brown wood. Particularly in FPS games like Quake 1—3. Can't really showcase the textures with smooth-looking walls in bright colors, and few people were gonna make dozens of assorted textures for a variety of environments.

I think it's interesting to attempt to analyze and chart this, but his analysis isn't the end. One notable failure, in my opinion, is he attempts to calculate the average browness (and other variables), not the percentage of games that have a lot of brown. Average browness largely measures outliers.

Also, not excluding sports games, and things like that, is ignoring a large part of what people discuss with this. The argument isn't that all games were more brown then. It's largely that shooters, or action games in general at most, were more brown than other years.

Basically, saying it's a myth (despite it being a well-recognized thing at the time) referencing one source isn't correct. At most you can make the statement that some data implies it's a myth. I highly suspect the methodology here is not accurate to what the actual understanding is. It's a good effort, but it is not the end of the discussion.

Even Elex had a brown-grey filter.

Exactly, lol.

I want my games to have very obvious in-game or UI elements showing me which way is the 'correct' storyline path to take. Not because I want it to be easy to find the correct path -- because I want to make sure I avoid the correct path while I explore elsewhere, and I don't accidentally trigger the next storyline event before collecting all the loot in this stage.

doesn't have to be steampunk, the meme was playing on the fact that games used to have really over-the-top HUDs back in the 2000s

get wooshed

I’d be interested to see a demake of a modern game on the PS1 or something that packs as many modern QoL improvements as possible into it.

The edgy DmC reboot did the same thing, though I think the DLC was included in the Definitive Edition that was released later for every platform.

The only game I can even think of that's hudless is Astroneer and it took me like 30 hours to notice. Can't imagine how hard that is to do well

No ambitions for a hudless, waypoint-less gameplay system survive playtesting. There’s friction and then there’s watching someone do the same loop around for 30 minutes. I once watched a streamer play a game I worked on. The level artists had meticulously and organically sign posted where to go - like pulled out all the stops with lighting and directionality of the environment. Stopping just short of putting any yellow paint anywhere. The streamer still fucked it up.

The only game I've played that really managed to pull of HUD-less was Dead Space. They really thought through the game design and interactions, it's just a masterfully crafted game. I believe Dead Space 2 is almost entirely in a single continuous camera shot as well, kinda bonkers.

Yeah ... can UI be overdone? Sure. But in most cases, I still want a HUD-type UI, at least a little bit.

The best games out there give the player granular options to enable or disable specific UI elements, so you can have as much or as little UI as you want, and if some particular element is annoying you, you can disable it.

Same. I want my Skyrim to be more like morrowind

It's fine so long as they don't just move it into some pause menu I'm then forced in and out of constantly to get information.

Kinda depends on if there's visual cues and how linear things are, too, I suppose. No minimaps and terrible visual cues as to where to go make for an annoying experience, but use of lighting and stuff can do just fine otherwise.

Though I'm a bit of a completionist so missing any little thing bugs me, haha. But that's a personal taste.

There's definitely a balance to it. I don't need 25 different meters and markers and quests and reminders, but I'm also one that does like just having the "go here arrow" because I can't game nearly as much as I want to and remembering all the minor details can be hard

4K monitors are a bad idea. Beyond half a million pixels, there are diminishing returns, new video games don't look that much better and it makes older games look worse. By the time you get to 8 million pixels, only eagles and fighter pilots might sorta notice a difference.

I noticed this trend when I went from 800x600 to 1024x768 to 1080p. I ain't touching 4K. It'll just ruin your life.

BioShock was 2007 /reeeee

Also it doesn’t fit because they thoroughly shit that franchise to death more than a decade ago

The whole meme is contrived to begin with, so I doesn’t merit deep analysis, but it just rubs me the wrong way when someone tries to twist the past to fit their narrative, I was there dog, you can’t fool me

Hey man, if you get your jimmies off from a bunch of roid rage NFL wannabes running around a blurry construction site full of waist high walls whilst shooting at the same half dozen bug creatures be my guest

But I draw the line at insulting my piss, I worked hard for that glorious cinereal hue

But joking aside, I just fundamentally disagree that this fascination with sucking all the color out of games is a recent thing.

My favourite gun handling mechanics are currently found in into the radius 2. Loose bullets were annoying at first but really grew on me. Also the most fun I've had with shotguns and bolt action rifles in a game. The realization I could grab 2 mags, or loose rounds for the shotguns or bolt action in one hand was one of those moments where I just stopped to play with the mechanics. Now I'm just waiting for anyone to come up with a good feeling input for quad loading.

Many mags do have a little view windows to answer this question. For pistols this generally means removing the mag, for rifles, would involve turning the rifle on it's side briefly.

This is actually an interesting debuff for pistols in a game, as the same action inherently takes longer for them.

games that don't support at least an optional torso tracker you unfortunately have to just look at what you grab

Skyrim’s user interface is done in Flash

Still true for starfield, mind you.

That's from reusing the Halo Infinite needler model, though why that one had the ammo counter is beyond me.

I wonder if there's somewhere in the design department they did that because they don't want to model the actual neddles disappearing at first, and then everyone hated it so they had to model them later but the ammo counter stayed.

Even the menu for the map and inventory was physically projected in front of Isaac, as well as all button prompts and tooltips. No HUD whatsoever. Deadspace is a masterclass of diegetic UI