Its not really true that 2D art inherently ages better than 3D, its just that the stuff we remember fondly (or at all) was that which came from the heyday of 2D technology -- The SNES, GBA/DS, Genesis, and Neo-Geo or other arcade platforms. No one really thinks Atari or Intellivision 2D sprite art cuts the mustard anymore. In the same vein, when we think of "retro 3D" we think of the Playstation/Saturn/N64 and early PC titles -- which are the Ataris and Intellivisions of 3D graphics in the mainstream. We only just made it to comparably advanced 3D to the SNES' 2D with the last generation I'd say -- maybe even the current generation.

I haven't seen many 3D games that embrace an early-3D asthetic -- there was a Kickstarter recently for a modern throwback to Quake-era FPSes (with art and design tropes to match), and it actually looked really good. I can count the number of retro 3D games I've seen that don't just look cheap on one hand with room to spare -- though, I've not spent much time looking.

But 2D art is definately lower-fidelity than 3D, and that makes it significantly easier to produce. That's not to say that great 2D sprites are easy, but they're just more forgiving of imperfections, which means there's usually fewer iterations (note: this applies less to very large and high-color sprites, but I don't think we're meaning to talk about that here).

Sorry, I didn't mean that it inherently ages better. I don't think either style is easier than the other (as I've learned the hard way self-teaching in both regards). Art can be difficult when you don't know what you're doing, or the basic principles of what you want to do, because no matter which path an artist decides to take, both require a certain level of skill to produce quality graphics.

Some of the early 3D games that are more stylized than realistic (like FF7) age pretty well, actually. The image above looks like an up-res screen from the PC version or maybe an emulator. It looks pretty good as is, and doesn't appear all that different than WOW, say. A higher resolution and better texture filtering can go a long ways all on their own.

Early 3D games that tried to be realistic tend to be ones that don't age as well. Look at any of the early 3D sports games, for instance, or military shooters on PS1 or PS2.

Right. I probably shouldn't have used FF as an example because it's a fantasy game (although, as a series, the example still shows a progression within the same franchise). I mentioned that the reason why aging in 3D happened was because many attempted realistic graphics, before hardware allowed for a better representation of reality. Thanks for bringing that up. With smaller pixel art, you almost have to use something other than reality (cartoon style) because there's just no way you're going to make a realistic human face with a 16x16 sprite.

*Note: That's not to say that aging is a bad thing. The one thing I liked the most about FFVII was the map. The camera angles were simply astounding, and I'd never seen anything like it before. Final Fantasy X also had the same great aesthetic. I liked the fact that you couldn't control the camera. When I play a game, I'd rather not have to tinker with the camera while I'm running around, but that's also just a personal preference. I still enjoyed the Uzumaki Chronicles series (they went for a different graphical style in the second title and added multiplayer). One shining example of an immortal 3D game is one of my all-time favorites: Wind Waker.

My first thought was..."Wow, you really like dogs." It's actually quite good, in my opinion.

Thank you. I was just doing pics of my dogs for my wife. She thought it would be fun. I'm training for the next Ludum dare, and art is not my strong area.

That was nice of you. If you keep at it, you can make a 2D pixel art dog sim game!

Hello. Are you tired of seeing indie games with 2d pixel art, or do you welcome it as an immortal art style?

What about books ? Why haven't movies and tv series made books completely obsolete, considering that movies or tv series visualize a story in a more or less perfect, photorealistic way ?

Imagination is still a powerful tool and pixel art leaves a lot of the visualization to the imagination of the viewer, therefor I think that pixel art will always works far better than e.g. 3d art which try to mimic realistic visualisation too much.

To be honest, your FF screenshots already surpasses the threshold, for me it is an aged version of approaching realistic visualisation. Compare it to WoW ,Diablo III or TF2 as modern version of art defining its own style, moving away from realism on purpose.

Therefor I don't think that pixel art only works because it is old or retro, and I don't believe that old PS1 3d art will work in a similar way at all.

Hello. Are you tired of seeing indie games with 2d pixel art, or do you welcome it as an immortal art style?

What about books ? Why haven't movies and tv series made books completely obsolete, considering that movies or tv series visualize a story in a more or less perfect, photorealistic way ?

Imagination is still a powerful tool and pixel art leaves a lot of the visualization to the imagination of the viewer, therefor I think that pixel art will always works far better than e.g. 3d art which try to mimic realistic visualisation too much.

To be honest, your FF screenshots already surpasses the threshold, for me it is an aged version of approaching realistic visualisation. Compare it to WoW ,Diablo III or TF2 as modern version of art defining its own style, moving away from realism on purpose.

Therefor I don't think that pixel art only works because it is old or retro, and I don't believe that old PS1 3d art will work in a similar way at all.

That's a good comparison. I read books from time to time for that reason too.

Colors are also important. After digging a bit further into my subconscious thought process in choosing a game to buy/play, I realized something. 2D or 3D, I tend to prefer games with more saturated colors. Saturation makes color more vibrant, upbeat, and for this reason more fantastical or cartoon-like. If you compare PS4/XBox One titles to Wii U titles you'll immediately see what I'm referring to.

That's perfectly understandable. I think it's mostly just preference. I don't play a lot of video games anymore, so I had to ask this question for those who do. Thanks for the input!

I did mean FFVII (sorry for not being clear in the main post). I was comparing the first edition of 3D Final Fantasy to the latest edition of 3D Final Fantasy (and old 2D Pokemon to new 2D Pokemon). I wasn't putting FFVII down at all. I have the PS1 multi-disc case sitting on my dresser. It was a good game, for sure (I still haven't beaten it though)! Also, FFX is an equally amazing game, and I've recently gotten through half of that title. Those two are said to be the best of the FF series. I was only comparing the progression of the 3D graphical style, and how much has changed.

<offtopic>

Dude, I sorry to derail the thread, but FF VI was the alltime high Final Fantasy game for me. Admittetly I stopped playing the full games after FF VIII or IX and stopped even looking at them after 1 or 2 additional games, still.... I don't believe any modern FF could beat FF IV both in story terms and general atmosphere. No way.

What REALLY turned me off the FF Series was of course not the story alone.... don't get me wrong, IMO the FF VII Story wasn't that bad, just cheesy at times and trying too hard to one up the earlier games, but it just couldn't match FF VI for epic scale and pacing. Might just be me and it seems I am a minority there, but I didn't shed a tear when the girl died in FF VII... I wasn't too fond of that character anyway.

What really turned me away from FF was the dumbing down of the whole gameplay. FF VII wasn't to bad in that aspect, but later games where not only extremly linear in their gameplay, you didn't even had to search for items, clues or levers.... get close to them, and you get a "Press the X Button" flashing on screen (so much for exploration).

Anyway, more or less personal opinion and agreed, I might need to give Final Fantasy another try in the next year... after all, it was one of my favourites series during the snes days... (replaced by Breath of fire during the PS1 days, until dragon quarter on the PS2 also ruined that series... BoF 4 on the PS 1... best... JRPG... ever!!!)

</offtopic>

Some of the early 3D games that are more stylized than realistic (like FF7) age pretty well, actually. The image above looks like an up-res screen from the PC version or maybe an emulator. It looks pretty good as is, and doesn't appear all that different than WOW, say. A higher resolution and better texture filtering can go a long ways all on their own. But it didn't look that good on the PS1, not by a long shot. That's acutally one of the key differences between upgrading a 2D game vs. a 3D one -- you can't really up-res a sprite game without changing it -- scaling algorithms like Scale2x can look good, but they can introduce some noise; 3D games can be scaled to any resolution and you're never less-sharp for it.

Early 3D games that tried to be realistic tend to be ones that don't age as well. Look at any of the early 3D sports games, for instance, or military shooters on PS1 or PS2.

That is why cell shading / non photorealistic shading holds so much potential for Indie games. When you remove the need for pixel accurate lighting and perfect color accuray, you can achieve so much more with so much less.

Yes, graphics styles like FF VII's have aged much better than more realistic ones. It seems like FF VII embraced the low polycount and made it a feature, instead of trying to work around it or hiding something that cannot be worked around and cannot be hidden.

And when textures are not showing much details at all, the horrible, horrible texture mapping errors from the 3D renderers of that time don't seem so obvious as with some thirdperson view racing games with realistic graphic from the era (ugh, those horrible drives through tunnels... what ought to be the showpiece of 3D FPS and TPS games turned into horroshows by the texture artefacts on the tunnel walls!)

PS1 era 3D Graphics = NES era 2D graphics... good enough that its no longer just a showpiece for future tech and really looking great at the time, still nothing you want to go back to 10 years later.

The late 70's console 2D graphics I would compare rather to the PC 3D graphics of the late 80's / early 90's, and maybe the SNES era superFX chip graphics. It even looked bad at the time to 15 year old me... it was ONLY exciting because for the first time, you would get a First Person view and could actually pretend to be in the cockpit of a space fighter... in an ugly looking world made up simple boxes and triangles painted in simple colors, still... exciting at the time.

Sorry guys... I didn't mean to turn this into a discussion of the Final Fantasy series. I really should've used a different example in the OP. I blame my small game library.

If anyone's still interested in this topic, feel free to introduce me to a game that did pixel art well for you. If you don't like pixel at all, what would make the style more tolerable for you?

Thanks again,

On Rye

I would say this is the age old problem for anything. Many people use this style because it is easy to create. Freelance for it is rather cheap and affordable so it is fairly attractive to indie devs. Just beacuse the previous statement is true deosnt mean its bad or low quality. In fact, many new high end companies are noticing that well done pixel art can be a great way to provide a timeless feeling.

I just recently got into the alpha called: Duelyst and it uses pixel art + new shaders. The art is so well done that I dont even mind the retro freel and at times feel as though im playing with actual models. So, in short, you can do it correctly so long as you put some thought into it.

Its not really true that 2D art inherently ages better than 3D, its just that the stuff we remember fondly (or at all) was that which came from the heyday of 2D technology -- The SNES, GBA/DS, Genesis, and Neo-Geo or other arcade platforms. No one really thinks Atari or Intellivision 2D sprite art cuts the mustard anymore. In the same vein, when we think of "retro 3D" we think of the Playstation/Saturn/N64 and early PC titles -- which are the Ataris and Intellivisions of 3D graphics in the mainstream. We only just made it to comparably advanced 3D to the SNES' 2D with the last generation I'd say -- maybe even the current generation.

I haven't seen many 3D games that embrace an early-3D asthetic -- there was a Kickstarter recently for a modern throwback to Quake-era FPSes (with art and design tropes to match), and it actually looked really good. I can count the number of retro 3D games I've seen that don't just look cheap on one hand with room to spare -- though, I've not spent much time looking.

But 2D art is definately lower-fidelity than 3D, and that makes it significantly easier to produce. That's not to say that great 2D sprites are easy, but they're just more forgiving of imperfections, which means there's usually fewer iterations (note: this applies less to very large and high-color sprites, but I don't think we're meaning to talk about that here).

Sorry, I didn't mean that it inherently ages better. I don't think either style is easier than the other (as I've learned the hard way self-teaching in both regards). Art can be difficult when you don't know what you're doing, or the basic principles of what you want to do, because no matter which path an artist decides to take, both require a certain level of skill to produce quality graphics.

Some of the early 3D games that are more stylized than realistic (like FF7) age pretty well, actually. The image above looks like an up-res screen from the PC version or maybe an emulator. It looks pretty good as is, and doesn't appear all that different than WOW, say. A higher resolution and better texture filtering can go a long ways all on their own.

Early 3D games that tried to be realistic tend to be ones that don't age as well. Look at any of the early 3D sports games, for instance, or military shooters on PS1 or PS2.

Right. I probably shouldn't have used FF as an example because it's a fantasy game (although, as a series, the example still shows a progression within the same franchise). I mentioned that the reason why aging in 3D happened was because many attempted realistic graphics, before hardware allowed for a better representation of reality. Thanks for bringing that up. With smaller pixel art, you almost have to use something other than reality (cartoon style) because there's just no way you're going to make a realistic human face with a 16x16 sprite.

*Note: That's not to say that aging is a bad thing. The one thing I liked the most about FFVII was the map. The camera angles were simply astounding, and I'd never seen anything like it before. Final Fantasy X also had the same great aesthetic. I liked the fact that you couldn't control the camera. When I play a game, I'd rather not have to tinker with the camera while I'm running around, but that's also just a personal preference. I still enjoyed the Uzumaki Chronicles series (they went for a different graphical style in the second title and added multiplayer). One shining example of an immortal 3D game is one of my all-time favorites: Wind Waker.

My first thought was..."Wow, you really like dogs." It's actually quite good, in my opinion.

Thank you. I was just doing pics of my dogs for my wife. She thought it would be fun. I'm training for the next Ludum dare, and art is not my strong area.

That was nice of you. If you keep at it, you can make a 2D pixel art dog sim game!

I may be doing that next week.

I gathered together some examples of low-polygon 3D games (some of which still look quite nice!), and contrast that to the "overused" block-voxel minecraft-like art styles.

My point was, iirc, that even if you aren't particularly skilled in the 2D or 3D art department, and don't have the budget for high quality contractors, doing exactly what everyone else does is not your only option. You can differentiate your game from the competition, developing it's own style and aesthetic, without much more budget or skill than going the 'identical' route.

"Realm of the Mad God" is decently well known, but having never played it, my first thought when seeing the screenshot you posted was, "Heh, that archer looks familiar."

If your game looks identical to other peoples' games, that's usually not a good thing, because people might mistake it for someone else's work or think you weren't really trying.

I would say this is the age old problem for anything. Many people use this style because it is easy to create. Freelance for it is rather cheap and affordable so it is fairly attractive to indie devs. Just beacuse the previous statement is true deosnt mean its bad or low quality. In fact, many new high end companies are noticing that well done pixel art can be a great way to provide a timeless feeling.

I just recently got into the alpha called: Duelyst and it uses pixel art + new shaders. The art is so well done that I dont even mind the retro freel and at times feel as though im playing with actual models. So, in short, you can do it correctly so long as you put some thought into it.

I'll do my best to make my own art unique. Oddly enough, I've never heard of using shaders with pixel art before. I'll have to check that out sometime.

I may be doing that next week.

Good luck with your project! Maybe you can share your progress with us in the future.

I gathered together some examples of low-polygon 3D games (some of which still look quite nice!), and contrast that to the "overused" block-voxel minecraft-like art styles.

My point was, iirc, that even if you aren't particularly skilled in the 2D or 3D art department, and don't have the budget for high quality contractors, doing exactly what everyone else does is not your only option. You can differentiate your game from the competition, developing it's own style and aesthetic, without much more budget or skill than going the 'identical' route.

"Realm of the Mad God" is decently well known, but having never played it, my first thought when seeing the screenshot you posted was, "Heh, that archer looks familiar."

If your game looks identical to other peoples' games, that's usually not a good thing, because people might mistake it for someone else's work or think you weren't really trying.

Wow, thanks for that link! I found Antichamber's graphics particularly interesting. It looks 2D, and that's pretty hard to do well in 3D from what I've heard/seen. Cell-shaded graphics are both simplistic and nice-looking if done right.

Yeah, I'm trying to make my gameplay as different as possible, while keeping it within the realm of what people expect from an RPG. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. What I don't want is to clone someone else's work, or appear to do so. Those sprites do look pretty similar, and I had no idea that the other game existed until you mentioned it. Hopefully, it was pure coincidence. I know that I'm always paranoid about my music sounding similar to someone else's, so I go to great lengths to try and make my own sound different or delete it if it's too similar to a song I've heard before.

You know, one style that seems to be under-used is hand-drawn artwork. The Disgaea series and early Street Fighter games use that sort of style, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong about Street Fighter, I'm not sure about that one). Time and Eternity was given a bit of a hard time over its story, but the graphical style was quite unique and interesting in my opinion. Who else would like to see more of that sort of thing? I've always wanted to make a legit anime game (graphics are hand-drawn, smooth 2D animations). I'd be willing to pour my time into such a thing if it's something players would welcome.

I've wondered this myself, cause there are so many pixel art games being made now, I could see the market feeling over saturated with them. But I'm really excited for Hyperlight Drifter, which has amazing pixel art.

Gods May Be Watching was a really interesting game with pixel art. It has a level where you're tortured, that would have been very difficult to get watch with hyper realistic art. With pixel art, it felt brutal without being completely unbearable. I'm considering doing something like this in my next game. Not similar gameplay, just the mix of simple art in a brutal world.