Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra
 
Why is it always a tradeoff between good aesthetics or good gameplay? by Mischief Maker 02/04/2022, 3:15pm PST
I recently bought Urtuk: The Desolation and I fucking love the gameplay. It's everything I wanted I wanted Battle Brothers to be. Battles are still nail-biting affairs where a character can suddenly permanently die in a moment, but there's (almost) no RNG involved. You live and die on the quality of your tactical positioning.

It's also the ugliest fucking thing I've ever laid eyes on. People who say its graphics resemble Darkest Dungeon are levying a HUGE insult at DD:



Brown, grey-brown, green-brown, punctuated by the occasional gross red obstacles. The titular character Urtuk is on a quest to find a cure for his strange disease and he's displayed in loose-fitting robes to best show off the disgusting pustule clusters all over his skin.

Compare that to something like Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus, which has one of the best videogame soundtracks since Mechwarrior 2:



But the actual gameplay is garbage. it's a drool-bib simple tactics model made complicated by the overlaying "cognition gauge" system that gives a gameplay reason for your tech-priests to poke as many Necron artifacts as they can, at the cost of everything else. It makes the simplest things a pain-in-the-ass in the early game, but once players level up their tech-priests and use the systems that unlock the game becomes a cakewalk from the mid-game on, often seeing you move a single tech priest move from one side of the map to the other and wipe out boss-tier enemies in the first round of combat.

-

There are plenty of more comparisons: Sanctus Reach vs Battlesector, Black Future '88 vs Scourgebringer, Operencia: The Stolen Sun vs Tainted Grail: Conquest. And I'm not talking about limited resources here, all these games have talented art teams behind them, they chose to make their games that ugly. A huge kickstarted team of 3d modelers and animated intentionally made Tainted Grail that ugly when they could just as easily used the same resources to whip up something as beautiful as Opencia.

That new Binding of Issac spin-off "The Legend of Bum-bo" looks like just the kind of game I'd like, and clearly a lot of artistic talent went into making the game look like a puppet show with cardboard puppets. But you're literally playing match-3 with piles of shit and drops of urine! I don't wanna spend my free time doing that!

What is wrong with the brains of game developers that whenever they have a great idea for gameplay systems, they immediately set out to make it as ugly as humanly possible?!!
NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
Why is it always a tradeoff between good aesthetics or good gameplay? by Mischief Maker 02/04/2022, 3:15pm PST NEW
    Re: Why is it always a tradeoff between good aesthetics or good gameplay? by E. L. Koba 02/10/2022, 2:33pm PST NEW
 
powered by pointy