If you go down even a couple more notches in terms of resolution, crawling specular highlights for example could easily distort perception of the object because it obscures a lot of the form itself, which in low res art is often defined from luminance values themselves.Ĭlick to expand.Low resolution as you're describing in old games is a technical constraint rather than a deliberate artistic choice. One thing that stuck out to me was the Planetary Annihilation example with its specular highlights. When the player must be able to spatially orient themselves in different lighting situations, and read the environment from a variety of angles and perspectives, pixelated graphics might simply make that more difficult. I can definitely see 2D pixelated graphics as an art form, because it works with much less information and more assumptions can be depended on, to the point where someone can be perfectly comfortable with it and enjoy it. Perhaps the difficulties introduced by pixelated graphics are not something that art direction can simply solve without making compromises as to what the game can do.
But with this question of low-res aesthetics, I'm not so sure.Ĭlick to expand.Well my point is that pixelated graphics may well simply be a less optimal form of conveying information, regardless of personal preference. With gamedesign I feel like I don't have a super weird taste and if I like or dislike something, enough other people will feel the same way about it. High res needs better texture detail and can get away with a lot less inconcistencies in the art assets. Low res needs more exaggerated proportions, less detail noise and easier to read shapes. Making it an optional feature seems like a no-brainer but the thing is that to get the best out of it, art assets really need to be designed with the final screen resolution in mind. But I'm questioning whether that's a viable choice commercially, because I don't see it being done by others, and on the opposing end of the spectrum I see people getting super mad if a game doesn't support 4k resolution. Now I wonder, why exactly is it that it's apparently super uncommon for retro-ish 3D games to offer a low-res filter? I really kinda like the look of super sampled and and antialiased 3D graphics, it's like instant nostalgia for me. I might have played a lot more old classics in recent years if it was easier to run them fullscreen but with crisp pixel upscaling to even factors.
I just kind of liked it and the main reason why I stopped playing with that is that the interpolated upscaling that typical TFT screens do, just looks aweful. It's like the image got a better coherence through it, and the lack of discernable details put my imagination back to work again. In ye olden gaming days I've had a fondness for using lower resolutions sometimes, because they kind of "tied everything together" visually. I don't mean unfiltered pixelated textures like in Minecraft, I mean for example running a game like Quake 1 on 640 x 400 pixel resolution with crisp non-filtered upscaling so that you really see the bigger pixels. Of the top of my head I can't think of a single semi-popular 3D game from recent years, that goes for a (forced) retro low-res pixelation effect all over the screen.
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