Plastic art style

[DuX1112]

So I actually loved the game's presentation at the Xbox Showcase... However.

I am slowly getting sick and tired of this particular "art style." You know the one where everything looks smooth, as if it's made of plastic, or some rubber dough. You're climbing rocks, and a tree... But they look smooth like rubber, or like toothpaste tube, or just like a plastic platter.

I mean, is it that hard to add some texture to what's supposed to be a tree root? Or on those smoothest rocks ever? They look like a bald dude's head. Come on.

Or, the kid's perfectly rectangular flaps on its coat. Everything is either smooth or angular. Looks copy-pasted.

While this won't change the art direction of the game, and while I will probably buy this game when it comes out and enjoy it, I just had to vent about this. I hope they stop making games in this "style."

First it was cell shading.
Then it was pixel art.
Now this plastic goo type of look...

[rennanr_]

looks good to me, the real problem is the stuttering/lagging.

[[MM] WMan22]

What you're talking about is called Phong Shading,[en.wikipedia.org] at least I think that's what the effect is.

Many games, like Fortnite, Team Fortress 2, etc. use it, because it's a development resource and computing power saving trick to put in your art style. From the developer end, it means you spend less time making detailed textures and more time making the game, from the optimization end, it means your GPU spends less power rendering detailed textures, meaning the game can run on more hardware.

I am getting a bit tired as well of seeing it in nearly every game nowadays, and I know what it is to hate a seemingly minor graphical quirk that everyone else has accepted as normal (Temporal Anti Aliasing I.E. TAA sucks real bad, I miss Multi Sample Anti Aliasing I.E. MSAA cause it looks cleaner) however, I get why people opt for it and don't mind it as much as you do and there's absolutely no way it can be changed at this point this late into development.

[DuX1112]

Originally posted by MM WMan22:

What you're talking about is called Phong Shading,[en.wikipedia.org] at least I think that's what the effect is.

Many games, like Fortnite, Team Fortress 2, etc. use it, because it's a development resource and computing power saving trick to put in your art style. From the developer end, it means you spend less time making detailed textures and more time making the game, from the optimization end, it means your GPU spends less power rendering detailed textures, meaning the game can run on more hardware.

I am getting a bit tired as well of seeing it in nearly every game nowadays, and I know what it is to hate a seemingly minor graphical quirk that everyone else has accepted as normal (Temporal Anti Aliasing I.E. TAA sucks real bad, I miss Multi Sample Anti Aliasing I.E. MSAA cause it looks cleaner) however, I get why people opt for it and don't mind it as much as you do and there's absolutely no way it can be changed at this point this late into development.

Wow, I have to complement you for an informative, and kind comment! I learned new things today. And yes, you're right, I've noticed that some types of AA don't really mesh well with this style... I think also Dredge and Tunic use it too, yes? I would say it's suitable for some types of games that channel that children cartoon (or claymation) spirit, it's just kinda jarring to see it used for games with more realistic activities (such as climbing, being a human etc.).

[[MM] WMan22]

Originally posted by DuX1112:

it's just kinda jarring to see it used for games with more realistic activities (such as climbing, being a human etc.).

I watch a lot of Seinen anime as my secondary hobby to video games so "cartoonish art style used to depict realistic-ish concepts" isn't really that alien to me personally, but I can see how it would be to someone else.

Either way all I'm saying is that there's a reason the art style is popular. I know that doesn't make it better, after all, the reason that people use TAA now is that MSAA is far more resource intensive in a deferred rendering engine than TAA and also cannot anti-alias foilage textures allegedly (this is still a problem with TAA, just less so, it's why you'll see games with near photorealistic graphics, but character hair is blurry and jaggy), but I get it, as someone who's closely followed the development of things I care about before, and even mildly dabbled in some engine stuff myself (nothing released, unless you count GZDoomBuilder and SteamVR Home SDK, but those don't have this issue, really.)

While I'm still on this topic, I'd like to eschew a side tangent for a moment that's not related to phong shading.
Frankly, I don't care about raytracing that much. If Nvidia announced tomorrow that the 5000 series would be solving the problem of TAA in games, I'd actually be hype for new hardware for the first time in half a decade. People will point to DLSS and Nvidia DSR as a solution, like "Bro just downsample to fix it", but this doesn't really solve the problem of TAA blurriness so much as just kinda put duct tape over it since DSR is very buggy with HUDs sometimes and steam overlay.

[HAL9081]

Jusant does NOT use textures at all.
It uses Unreal Engine 5's Nanite and Lumen technology to "texture" objects.
All details of the game world are baked into the geometry models.

(Source: Interview with Jusant's technical director)