This is something that I thought with Baldur's Gate 3 as well even with the race customisation and everything. People were noting in the character creation how the male/female characters look exactly the same. That's not really the worse of it though. When you start examining them in a bit more detail you realise for the most part, they really do look generic. Sure, they've got horns or tails on them, but that's about it, the artists haven't really spent any time trying to edit their curves and features beyond that and it shows.
I'm also going to throw some shade at Starfield now since I hadn't realised thankfully but that's going to be releasing in about 3 weeks since September is coming up. Sorry guys because I know some people are looking forward to it, I was willing to give Baldur's Gate 3 a chance too and it failed hard.
https://youtu.be/OtXlygBDX4M?t=755
If you advertise customisation as one of your biggest features, this is not what I want to see. Even No Man's Sky with their aliens and everything has so much more variety than this. If you asked me a few weeks ago whether graphics matter I would have said no and really, it still doesn't. I think though art design matters and what is surprising me is that this is yet another heavily hyped big studio title all the normies are looking forward to but I'm just not impressed.
I would rather see something like 6 unique and interesting companions that the artists took their time with designing rather than whatever generic NPC customiser this is supposed to be because even the characters they're giving you brief glimpses of in their trailers don't look remotely interesting.
Well, there are probably multiple reasons why the art goes more and more generic, one of them is the idea of trying to emulate the reality rather than the ideal, the other is we know the corpo culture does not incentive risk taking and the globohomo culture ensure that all risk goes in the wrong way.
This is precisely why I despise realism in games. I play games to go to fantastic places, do interesting things, and become something different then I already am. They're so obsessed with recreating the real world, when I'm here to go anywhere else.
That's not to say you can't have realistic games that do interesting things and have interesting places. But it definitely makes the developers have to work that much harder on the setting and characters.
Exactly, I'm the same now, if I see realism and open world being advertised to me I immediately assume it's going to be shit and I'm almost always right to think this way.
Realism is fine, when it truly means "internal consistencyism", which is what a lot of people mean by it when, in example, they're talking about a universe with magic in it. Unfortunately, others do actually mean real-ism, that magic shouldn't exist in a high-magic setting.
I mean "Trying their hardest to make the art style look as true to life as possible." That is what I'm decrying here. And again, I'm not saying it's all bad, but the more "grounded" you make the game, the more effort goes into all the nitty-gritty detail, and the less goes into making something that's actually fun to play.
Modern shooters are the place for realism.
Fantasy/SciFi are the places for some degree of stylization, even if its minor. Even BDO is stylized, and they went for realism in their human/elf models+environment more than not.
I think they do it because either their artists suck and the company is now filled with diversity hires so they don't even have 'gud graphics' going for them or they do it as a cost cutting measure so they can rapidly churn out characters.
There's also projects becoming so distended in AAA studios that it becomes hard to create a cohesive product, let alone stylized art direction, without really good leadership/organization.
Did 2000+ people need to work on D4, as an example? Probably not.
globohomo can't deal with women who are remotely attractive.
It's a bethesda game so modding will fix this. Within a month of release there will be a breast enlargement / body enhancement mod just like Fallout 4 and Skyrim's CBBE. There are 8K texture mods for Skyrim that enhance the areola on a female mesh let alone the rest of the body.
I'm not excusing Beth's laziness but it's not like they have ever been known to create high quality human character models.
The boring photo-realism look is due in part because everyone uses the same photo-scanned assets now. It looks real and good but is boring
Then run it through an AI once or twice! Even consumer-available AI photo editors have a decent library.
Oh my god how could I ever compete? /s
I think the simple answer here is that our current government promoted culture doesn't allow deviations from the acceptable position. Everyone is scared of taking risks for fear of not aligning with the government promoted position.
If I was a game designer, would why I care about creating something amazing when I run the risk of ruining my entire life if what I come out with is offensive to the government promoted culture? I'd just want to collect my paycheck and then go home. Minimal risk. Minimal creativity. Minimal effort.
That's a fair point, ESG presents a low risk high reward situation and I do believe the money gained plays a big part in it. The reason being is unless they run the risk of pissing off the normies who don't know any better, people are going to buy these games regardless. The ESG offsets any gamers that might see what they're doing and refuse to support them any further.
I think one of the issues is that they put visuals into the games that they want. And they want people to look ugly in order to break the shackles of beauty standards, or whatever the hell excuse they use. (It's like intentionally looking ugly, then get mad when people are repulsed. You did that to yourself, knowingly. What did you expect? I won't get into that rant though, we only get 12k letters.)
Completely missing the fact that fantasy isn't real, it's fantasy, and you want those 11/10 girls and guys walking around in video games. Forbidden fruit and all. They know this is true, too. All you have to do is glance at the covers of romance novels and see the one in a million male physiques on display. Even those that work out and make themselves look good, there's a chance that the symmetry will be off by a lot, or that the abs just aren't visible without life threateningly low body fat %, and other factors that might be disappointing to discover.
A lot of them are just not good at using the software that creates the shapes and appearances of people. So you get the muddy textured strange facial shapes. As you said, graphics might not matter, but art design does.
Think back to the memorable games from yesteryear. Games with unique styles that were fun and enchanting when you first ran through them. Games like Jet Grind Radio, Sly Cooper, Psychonauts, Jak and Daxter, Crash Bandicoot, Mario 64. They all have fun art styles with distinct looks. Hell, even Borderlands has a unique look. As much flack as the series rightfully got, it was early on the stylized cell shading look back in '09 when it first came out.
Point is, there's a collective effort to make things unattractive, and that fucking sucks.
IIRC they usually get that effect by dehydrating themselves for 3 days or something before a photoshoot or shirtless scene.
Do you mean Jet Set Radio?
It was actually called Jrt Grind Radio for its original dreamcast release in America.
Ah, I think it was the original Japanese "Jet Set Radio" for the port/remake in the Nintendo Marketplace or whatever.
I saw Henry Cavill talking about that. He said by day 3 of that you could almost smell water from the dehydration you put yourself through to look that way.
Technically, the same game. Jet Set Radio was the Japanese name, it was Jet Grind Radio over here. I'm not entirely sure why they changed it.
No idea. When I played it in America, albeit it was a wii port or something, it was Jet Set Radio.
The original Dreamcast release was Jet Grind Radio. They abandoned the name after awhile because the sequel on the Xbox is called Jet Set Radio Future.
Usually mods will fix these kinds of things (not giving it an excuse mind you, I don't support any of these things, but I'm just saying)
For example last year I played Dragon Age Origins for the first time, pirated ofc, and I basically made all the chicks in the game (down to the lowliest village maid) way hotter, revealing, and bustier, and gave myself enough customization options to turn my character into a gigachad with the mods available. Problem is that the mod sites are centralized censorious cancer that can't be trusted anymore.
This is something I've noticed with the mod sites as well and even then, yes mods can kind of fix it, but due to the devs deliberate attempts I believe at sabotaging mod compatibility they often end up getting out of date and don't get maintained properly. As a result you download this stuff and all it does is break the game. I'm being black pilled I know, I just also know that even people on this site seem to be sort of hyped for Starfield.
Bethesda games have a unique (and frankly toxic) relationship with the modding community. When people say PC games have mods, what they really mean is Bethesda games have mods. You can add up all the mods for every other game and it won’t come close to what’s available for even one bethesda game. And bethesda know this, which is why they can release comically buggy and broken games and then rely on the modding community’s free labor to finish and polish everything. Bethesda even went one further and tried to monetize those same mods, which is beyond insane in terms of perverse incentives. Imagine being directly financially rewarded for not fixing or finishing your own game lol
Anyways, in this case, Bethesda is in the unique position of both having and eating their cake. They can put out a completely “inoffensive” product that mostly appeases the woke scolds on the left while knowing full well that the degenerate coomers will reliably inject more perversion and fan service than you can possibly imagine.
Yeah that's true, I can definitely see a lot more efforts to screw over modding communities in the future as people go more to the mods to fix these mediocre shitpiles.
Someone in my family has been enjoying Baldur's Gate 3, but they've definitely mentioned how the game's female models seem to be based on "3DPD" and how there's not a single looker in the bunch so far, which is a shame for any self-respecting RPG.
I think Minthara is the best girl and Shadowheart comes an easy second, but then again, I'm judging it by today's standards where I'm grateful if there's even one female main character that doesn't look fugly. 3DPD? Haven't seen that acronym before, I can tell you though that yes, it's not just MetaHumans most of these character creators we see from the big studios is third party software they've purchased.
I was just thinking about this the other day, and it became even more apparent after playing an indie title called The Ascent. It's a cyberpunk ARPG, and in playing it and exploring its various districts as you ascend up the dystopian, ecumenopolis, you can see how distinct each district is based on the cultures, people, and cleanliness (or lack thereof).
It's not so much that art-style is amazing, but the art design is. I was thinking about it because it feels so much more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077, the latter of which feels like a slightly different GTA V clone.
The Ascent did a fantastic job of making their world feel alive, dangerous, unique, enticing, and disgusting, all at once. The hodge-podge of cultures fused with technocratic over-branding gives the game this desperate, yet corporate-controlled look, which ties in well with its lore:
https://i.imgur.com/aBYmYRf.png
(sorry for the resolution/quality, these were captured from the Steam Deck)
You actually get a great sense of scale, and the inspiration from Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, Syndicate, and Shadowrun are definitely noticeable:
https://i.imgur.com/z6saMID.png
It's not so how much how good everything looks, but rather why things look the way they do in making the world feel lived in and telling a story about the world visually:
https://i.imgur.com/wzoApY5.png
You can actually get a sense of dread, depression, and sullenness from the NPCs. The fact that most areas are over-crowded and gun-fights can break out anywhere -- where you see people screaming for their lives, running for cover or cowering in fear as bodies explode around them and limbs can flying in every which direction -- you get an actual sense of how scary it is to live in a place like that:
https://i.imgur.com/r2Quk4i.png
They really managed to capture the spirit of a cyberpunk dystopia, which is where you have people partying in a cool looking night club...
https://i.imgur.com/OLYIQB8.png
While a guy in an alleyway sells you weapons designed to maim, burn, and dismember:
https://i.imgur.com/GDy1exc.png
The architectural design gives the impression that people are just trying to get by and do whatever they can to make the best of an awful situation...
https://i.imgur.com/MtygWdT.png
Many turn to drugs, drinking, or in one case steroid addiction, all as a means to distract them from a crumbling infrastructure governed by corporations who force people into indentured service to escape from whatever planetary hellscape they tried getting away from...
https://i.imgur.com/3YbW2SE.png
As a result, you see how these poor people left one dire situation only to end up in another, where crime, poverty, over-consumerism, and violence rule the day. You can visually see how this mentality of low IQ immigrants have caused the place to turn into just another junkpile of destitution and poverty...
https://i.imgur.com/FbK0MBi.png
At the same time, there are some wondrous locations and design elements that make it apparent why some people would find the planet alluring and the prospect of paying off their indentured servitude to escape..
https://i.imgur.com/wVYAaPn.png
But you have to work your way up through the drudges...
https://i.imgur.com/m0s7Vhe.png
...and the dangers to get there...
https://i.imgur.com/WcZ1Nhc.png
Basically, the game isn't a graphical masterpiece, but it is, in my opinion, a visual masterpiece.
The Swedish developers -- less than a dozen -- managed to churn out a game with a lot more life and visceral worldbuilding through structure and world-design than the millions that CDPR dumped into Cyberpunk 2077.
But the main difference is that The Ascent isn't trying to hit diversity check boxes, it's trying to tell a story about desperate people working as "indents" under an oppressive corporate structure that forces people to work, to consume, and to kill in order to survive.
https://i.imgur.com/Lp87YP0.png
World-building wise, I think The Ascent did a good job of pulling me in visually, telling stories without having to explicitly tell the player what's going on; the overcrowded streets, the acid rain, the abundance of violence, and even the way the safe zones are structured (with massive 20mm autocannons guarding the entrance/exit ways to the main city hubs), all tell a story through images.
It's not unlike how Edgerunners did a better job of depicting Cyberpunk 2077's world than Cyberpunk 2077 did, simply through the characterisation of visualisation.
Stop confirming my prejudices lol
Ha! Much obliged. My long-winded comment aside, I 100% agree with everything in your post.
Baldur's Gate 3 has one of the most uninspired art-styles I've seen. It's so generic, and the options are so limited in terms of characters. Every time I see a clip of the game the player's character always look so generic.
It's like that in a lot of games, though, and most of everyone's comments in this thread about the mix of ESG + diversity hires + consolidation of tech are all right on the money. So we end up with a lack of talent outputting generic box-checking content.
Its comical that almost all character in baldur gate 3 is supposedly diverse with races and body shape and yet 99% of the females have the exact same breast and ass size.
I personally disagree with you about the NMS comparison to Starfield. NMS has a far more simplistic character creator than the fairly simplified (compared to previous Bethesda games) character creator for Starfield.
I'd rather compare Starfield to something like Fallout or Skyrim, both of which (especially Skyrim) look like they had better character creators than Starfield. Even without mods both those games appear to have better character creation than Starfield does. Hopefully Starfield's character creation preview was incorrect and that we will have the same if not better options available than those other games, and failing that hopefully modders will be able to return some of that functionality to it....sadly though I fear this will not be the case. But we shall just have to wait and see.
Now don't get me wrong, I can see why people would think that way, but don't be fooled by the sliders vs clicky options argument. Morph sliders sort of work, but I've noticed that unless it's something like Fallout 4 they often end up being quite restricted and it's because the devs don't want people changing the models too much and potentially breaking something. No Man's Sky I'm fairly sure has a hell of a lot of customisation in spite of it not bothering with sliders unless they updated something differently when I wasn't looking.
By this measure I'd rather see 1000 options for you to click through that have been intentionally created by a proper artist rather than whatever monstrosity a player has come up with by borking their noses and eyes in the wrong position. Of course yes, one could argue that's the point and players should be able to break their MC as much as they like and there's an argument to be made for that.
I'll also argue from the dev perspective as well that it's so much easier simply giving a thousand different combinations to click through than it is to get these sliders up and running. This means more time on actual gameplay or throwing art at the customisation menus because all you're doing is clicking a button rather than anything complicated. In fact I can confirm that because I've designed it all in my head and know how it works lol I'd hate to have to look at sliders so I can see partly why the devs would just grab a third party tool and do it that way. It's a balancing act, but even as a gamer I tend towards fixed options because I just want to play the damn game personally.
This is why I usually just play indie games.