Thank you GGG, you inspired me to follow my dreams. (Eitr shown at e3!)

"

Charanjaydemyr wrote:

THAT SAID, I am typically against these retro designs these days, because..well...

Spoiler

Simply put: I am against this retro thing because it's...well, I'd call it misappropriation when developers who might not have actually been around when ntsc and secam and pal were extremely important terms to gamers make these hi-res, shiny...shitty graphic games.

I have two things to respond to about this post.

1) I'd call that image at best cherry-picking, if not outright misrepresentation. Most of my gaming growing up looked more similar to the left image than the right - I'd wager that this is because I didn't have consoles when I was young, so my retro gaming was on DOS, and mostly on a computer with what at the time was a quite decent monitor (despite how laughable it would seem today) - but if the point of the image only applies to a specific subset of "what retro games actually looked like" then that seems to largely invalidate it's point. My retro gaming experiences were certainly not nearly as blurred as the right image, and individual pixels were clearly visible, similar to the left. I remember spending hours copying down pixelated images of Commander Keen onto graph paper so I could later replicate them in MS paint. There were blocky as fuck, but they still looked good.

And that's what it really comes down to. Pixel art, including retro pixel art (see 2, below) is just a style, and like any other, you can do horrible things with it, or stuff that looks really good. I do feel there are a few too many people these days who lean on pixel art because they think it'll be something they can do on the cheap instead of paying a real artist, which is silly. But equivalently, you also get people who licence the newest, fanciest engines believing those will give them a shortcut to making things look good, and they're just as wrong.

Good art is good art, regardless of style, and likewise shit art is shit art.


2) Pixel art does not necessarily mean "retro", regardless of how much some gaming media might conflate the terms. The art of Eitr that I've seen is clearly pixel art, and I'd say it's really well done pixel art, but I wouldn't call it retro. The use of lightning effects, bloom, range of colours, etc, are all indicative of more modern games, that happen to use pixel art. For contrast, look at Shovel Knight (one of the best games I've played in a long time) which definitely is retro in style - everything is done not only in low-resolution pixels, but without fancy modern effects and in a limited colour palette (along with other restraints on backgrounds, number of moving sprites, etc) that while not exactly the same of the games it hearkens back to, closely resembles them and is intended to evoke that similarity.

I don't see anything "retro" about Eltr - I see a modern-looking game with a solid style and really good use of colour and detail that happens to use pixel art, and also looks really fun to play. I'm still keeping an eye on it, and look forward to giving it a spin.