ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: GOTHIC

[ultrayoba]

Don’t you see that you are contradicting yourself?..

No. The foundations of art are always based on the mix of reality and understanding of human perception and then - twist them, modify, amplify to deliver a message, idea or feeling. This feeling or idea should not nessecery be "pleasant".

However, you took two random quotes from random places and mashed them together, one of which was a comment on a purely technical thing, with cross reference of basic academic principles and technology. If you have any technical comments on techniques of baked-in lighting, vertex color, vertex shadow, normalmaps and so on, to actually answer what was written - I am ready to hear.

 

The whole point of games is that they don’t need to look as ugly as real life.

There is nothing to answer when a person solely sees something as an object of escapism for their personal taste which said person can not even explain, thus using his personal basic emotions/reflections as "ugly/good/bad" as the description. "Game ugly bad me don't like" - those words mean absoluetly nothing. No technical description, no academic art description, not even some kind of explanation.

 

It’s literally the polar opposite. Everyone™ says that Skyrim is the best RPG ever made (usually because this is the only RPG that these people have ever played).

And same time you said that "nobody likes the art of Skyrim and Fallout 3", eh? If you wish to play the contradiction.

 

I find it hilarious that you snobbishly distance yourself from “the average person who wants the dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product”, while at the same time whacking off to one of the most egregious examples of a dumbest, blandest, most empty and devoid of any kind of personality product.

To make a popular and beloved by many thing, you don't need to follow the demands of the audience and lower yourself to a common denominator (which Skyrim still did in its writing and world-building, but this is a different topic). This is how things are done which creates trends, create later imitation: not by giving the audience what they think they want, but by creating something interesting out of yourself, with a vision. Not just base all your creative process onto a checklist of "what the audience wants" and create something for everyone and same time for nobody.
 

That's a.. statement. Quite argumentive [sic].
(Note that I’m not denying your right to have an opinion, merely pointing out that it’s what it is – just an opinion, as subjective as mine).

I can defend my opinions. With facts - technical, historical, or ones from academic art. Yes, Fallout 3 and Skyrim and Morrowind had the strongest art direction teams out of most Bethesda games. Simple by the fact that Oblivion barely had proper concept art, besides a handful of basic images - they didn't have a big concept art department during the development and some of the things they just failed to carry. The same goes for Tribunal addon for TES3 for example, there is no proper concept art for this at all, and part of it was assembled from leftover ideas. Daggerfall from the old Bethesda team had more than a dozen artists but they got in and left so many things unfinished and inconsistent, and about Daggerfall and later Battlespire and in part Morrowind you can read about in lots of Mark Jones interviews and old articles.

This is not the place for giant walls of text on the history of the development of multiple 25 years old games, so this was shortened in the idea that the person I am talking with is familiar with the context, or, at least, will go and read about all this himself, without this attempt at "gotcha".


Basically all this topic, if simplified, comes from the brainless repetition of some older late 00s-10s perception of graphics without understanding of them: there was a point where games tried to be cinematic and had any kind of personality in terms of visuals, but there was a simultaneous wave of games which or overdid bloom, or overdid color correction. Combined with lower resolution, PS3 and Xbox 360 also had problems with texture resolution and they liked to put some overlay effects to hide it. And from this was born this narrative of "PC games of old were so sharp and awesome! Color - bad, lighting - bad, blur and bloom effects - bad! We need absolutely flat render of idTech3 with maximum size textures and no post effects!"

And then those "piss filter" and "soap graphics" become repeated without any meaning to them from people who can't explain their taste properly or can see something wrong, but can't say what and leaning into braindead absolutism and then to just "me like - me don't like".

It is sad that real life is ugly for you tho, that I can say for sure.

 

[ScumCoder]

It is sad that real life is ugly for you tho, that I can say for sure.

You dare to arrogantly poke at other people’s less-than-flourishing life? You think this proves anything or gives you any weight in the argument?..
You dare to deny hundreds of millions of miserable people their right to enjoy the only vent hole they can afford – escapism – in the form of games that do not have “making players feel off-put” as their goal?

And same time you said that "nobody likes the art of Skyrim and Fallout 3", eh? If you wish to play the contradiction.

…and now you are twisting my words. I said “even rather hardcore Bethesda fans agree”, which not only doesn’t mean “everyone”, but means the opposite – people who played every single game, know every technical and lore detail, know all the behind-the-scenes struggles at Bethesda, up to and including rubbing shoulders with actual people working there. (See e.g. the excruciatingly detailed ramblings of Zaric Zhakaron).

I can defend my opinions. With facts

I can’t believe it. You actually went and did it, didn’t you? You claimed that your opinions on things like beauty and artistic expression are objective.
This is basically an automatic defeat on your part, since there can be nothing objective about beauty. The only terms in which it can ever be discussed are, indeed, “me like – me don't like”.

technical

No technical facts can serve as an argument in discussing art, for they are but tools which can produce both beauty and ugliness alike. No knowledge on “baked-in lighting, vertex color, vertex shadow, normalmaps and so on” will ever help you to “prove” that something is beautiful.

ones from academic art

No “academia” can claim the monopoly on the artistic truth, for these very people proclaim a banana duct-taped to a wall to be an art piece.

leaning into braindead absolutism

Again, I can hardly believe what I just read.
It is you who are an absolutist here. It is so obvious it is glaring. Others, Ross included, are pronounced relativists, always emphasizing that “to each his own”; in fact, I personally am a relativistic extremist, to the point that it caused me some trouble in life.

The foundations of art are always based on the mix of reality and understanding of human perception and then - twist them, modify, amplify to deliver a message, idea or feeling.

Basically all this topic, if simplified, comes from the brainless repetition of some older late 00s-10s perception of graphics

All you do to “defend” your views is make completely unfounded claims from the position of authority, as if you were a university professor holding at least a Dr.Sc. in fine arts, talking to a bunch of freshmen; except it’s even worse. See, for someone coming from scientific circles, where second-guessing oneself is an assumed virtue and the voice of said freshman is as loud as the voice of said professor, trying to appeal to one’s gravitas means – once again – an automatic defeat in an argument.

There is nothing to answer when a person solely sees something as an object of escapism for their personal taste which said person can not even explain

See, the core difference between you and everyone you are arguing with here is that others are, so to say, pro-choice. Nobody demands anything they don’t like to be removed – merely plead to be given an option to do so.
It is you who are the one insisting on shoving stuff down other people’s throats. I said it before and I’ll say it again – you are in absolutely no position to do that. Shut up.

 

[Deep Dive Devin]

I can defend my opinions. With facts - technical, historical, or ones from academic art. Yes, Fallout 3 and Skyrim and Morrowind had the strongest art direction teams out of most Bethesda games. Simple by the fact that Oblivion barely had proper concept art, besides a handful of basic images - they didn't have a big concept art department during the development and some of the things they just failed to carry. The same goes for Tribunal addon for TES3 for example, there is no proper concept art for this at all, and part of it was assembled from leftover ideas. Daggerfall from the old Bethesda team had more than a dozen artists but they got in and left so many things unfinished and inconsistent, and about Daggerfall and later Battlespire and in part Morrowind you can read about in lots of Mark Jones interviews and old articles.

Those things don't actually reinforce your opinion. A game could have more concept art, more artists, an overwhelming amount of time and money spent on crafting an aesthetic, and still not actually look any better than another game with less. This is possible not just by the unique voices of different people shining through without too many chefs spoiling the broth, or by the game having dogshit post-processing effects slapped over it that distract from the art direction that was there.

Basically all this topic, if simplified, comes from the brainless repetition of some older late 00s-10s perception of graphics without understanding of them: there was a point where games tried to be cinematic and had any kind of personality in terms of visuals, but there was a simultaneous wave of games which or overdid bloom, or overdid color correction.

If you don't have better examples of games "being cinematic" and "had any kind of personality" than fuckin' Fallout 3 and Skyrim, then I would say there's no such thing as "overdoing it" - it's just a bad decision to begin with.

"PC games of old were so sharp and awesome! Color - bad, lighting - bad, blur and bloom effects - bad! We need absolutely flat render of idTech3 with maximum size textures and no post effects!"

Color and lighting are the exact things that aggressive post-processing is either obfuscating or trying to replace entirely. Every game with a shitty filter over it is more colorful when it's gone!

 

[ultrayoba]

Those things don't actually reinforce your opinion.

It actually does. This is how argumentation is: you present your arguments with some basis you can build upon. If your argumentation is based on just pure personal emotion like that other guy, or on statements like "everything is art!" - this is not productive, nor is it argumentive. Coding, design, and concept art, are all done by specialists with skills. These skills are acquired and require education and understanding. Some people might right away go scrub their deviantart sonic OCs and call themselves "artists" with bombastic smugness, but those people will forever stay in "amateur" or "outsider art" categories. And making those people and actually educated people as equal is just an ignorance towards people with specialty and education.

 

If you don't have better examples of games "being cinematic" and "had any kind of personality" than fuckin' Fallout 3 and Skyrim, then I would say there's no such thing as "overdoing it" - it's just a bad decision to begin with.

Fallout 3 and Skyrim have personalities and artistic direction.  Denying this is just ignorance. But if you have managed to read my post, I mentioned in one of them how dynamic filter lighting and staging were used in og PS2 version of GTA San Anders, and how the absence of it. You would be surprised, but colored filters and dynamic global lights were important parts of graphics when developers managed to code them in.

 

Color and lighting are the exact things that aggressive post-processing is either obfuscating or trying to replace entirely. Every game with a shitty filter over it is more colorful when it's gone!

Have you seen Skyrim and Fallout 3 concept art? Adam Adamoviz art is near-monochromatic. Those filters and contrast were actual honest attempts at converting this vision. Like, do you know that Fallout games are about post-apocalypse? And good ones are pretty grim? Have you seen Fallout 1? Fallout 2? Fallout Tactics even? They are 80% brown or rust metal. The color palette is washed out to the maximum like this is the intent, this is what those games are about.

While this "lots of colors good! Happy! Positive" "not many colors bad!" - is the mentality of a kindergartener, I am sorry. Yes, there are movies, and there are games, and there are paintings and books which exist to have off-putting, or strong uncanny atmospheres. There are things that communicate feelings with viewers besides the sheer "happiness" of the caramel world of Mario games. And yes, what a surprise, Gothic is one of them. All gothic textures are dark, it is really all this rocky dead muddy place where all characters are bastards in one way or another. It is bordering on the edge of "dirty realism" direction. Ross managed to find here some small batches of forest that remain and call it a "fairy tale" game which is questionable at best.

 

[ScumCoder]

Coding, design, and concept art, are all done by specialists with skills. These skills are acquired and require education and understanding.

making those people and actually educated people as equal is just an ignorance towards people with specialty and education.

There is a world of difference between technical and artistic prowess. The former does require formal education. The latter doesn’t. It’s impossible to become a good programmer by autodidacticism, but it’s absolutely possible to become a great artist.
Online galleries, like DeviantArt that you’ve mentioned, are choke full of both professional artists with diplomas that draw soulless drab, and of self-taught artists that never attended art school who draw fascinating pieces full of life. The fact that you mentioned “coding” and “concept art” in a single sentence shows that you either have tunnel vision because you’ve never surfed said galleries; or that you are actually a professional™ certified artist yourself and do in fact understand what I said – whether consciously or subconsciously, – and now are taking out your annoyance on us here.

 

[Deep Dive Devin]

It actually does. This is how argumentation is: you present your arguments with some basis you can build upon. If your argumentation is based on just pure personal emotion like that other guy, or on statements like "everything is art!" - this is not productive, nor is it argumentive. Coding, design, and concept art, are all done by specialists with skills. These skills are acquired and require education and understanding. Some people might right away go scrub their deviantart sonic OCs and call themselves "artists" with bombastic smugness, but those people will forever stay in "amateur" or "outsider art" categories. And making those people and actually educated people as equal is just an ignorance towards people with specialty and education.

This is just you being an elitist. Maybe you shouldn't be treated as equal for having dumb opinions like this one. You think art is just whatever personally appeals to your emotions and makes you feel comfortable. It's childish. It takes skill to actually practice a craft to completion, it takes no skill to have a vision and taste. Those things are endemic to human existence, and you're dumping on tastes you don't like for not matching what you subjectively believe art is "supposed" to look like.

Fallout 3 and Skyrim have personalities and artistic direction.  Denying this is just ignorance.

Everything has a personality, and anything with visuals has "an artistic direction". Doesn't mean I have to think they're good, or that me doing so is any less valid a take than yours.

But if you have managed to read my post, I mentioned in one of them how dynamic filter lighting and staging were used in og PS2 version of GTA San Anders, and how the absence of it. You would be surprised, but colored filters and dynamic global lights were important parts of graphics when developers managed to code them in.

When it's appropriate, maybe. Nobody is arguing against games using colored lighting to convey a day/night cycle. That's not the thing being debated here, it's aggressive post-processing applied to entire games regardless of context.

Have you seen Skyrim and Fallout 3 concept art?

Concept art isn't the game. If something looks bad, it looks bad. It allegedly being intended to look better means jack shit.

Those filters and contrast were actual honest attempts at converting this vision.

Bad attempts.

Like, do you know that Fallout games are about post-apocalypse? And good ones are pretty grim? Have you seen Fallout 1? Fallout 2? Fallout Tactics even? They are 80% brown or rust metal. The color palette is washed out to the maximum like this is the intent, this is what those games are about.

Yeah and they accomplished it without applying shit post-processing to the whole game. Insane what difference actually executing your vision properly does.

While this "lots of colors good! Happy! Positive" "not many colors bad!" - is the mentality of a kindergartener, I am sorry.

Please don't be a bitch. You're not "sorry" when you're responding to something nobody said. Literally no part of this is about games not having or not needing dark atmosphere, it's about not trying to achieve that atmosphere in a way that looks bad and cheap, which nasty filters and pointless distractions do. It seems like you believe that the games you like cannot actually be criticized and everyone else simply must be convinced to like them. It's kind of rich to see you strawmanning people this hard to call them children when your whole take is essentially just saying "these games objectively look good, so how could anyone say another game using their techniques doesn't?".

All gothic textures are dark, it is really all this rocky dead muddy place where all characters are bastards in one way or another. It is bordering on the edge of "dirty realism" direction. Ross managed to find here some small batches of forest that remain and call it a "fairy tale" game which is questionable at best.

Bud, the video is over an hour long. We can see what kind of environments the game has, and more importantly, we can see that the new one is washed-out and vapid to look at by comparison. Whatever you act like is being attempted here clearly is not the same between both games, because they fucking look different, which means it makes sense to judge one as better and the other as worse for how they choose to portray their vision.

 

[vovan666]

God, you guys are such philistines. Color grading has been a thing in movies for over a century now, and I dare you to say any of those films look worse because of it. If anything, people remember those, among other things, because of their visuals.

From Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to basically anything made by Wes Anderson, the visual language of cinematography has always been deeply intertwined with the creative use of color (unless you're one of those people who consider schlock like Deadpool vs. Wolverine to be good-looking in any way, that is). And if you consider games to be any worse than that, then I have some bad news for you: videogames are a visual medium too.

 

[vovan666]

I'd add that 'visual clarity' and 'natural colors' haven't been seen as definitive and 'objective' qualities of a good visual art piece since the 1870s. A truly good artist always experiments with the palette, thus enhancing the mood and atmosphere of his work, even if we're talking about the realm of realism.

Gothic 1, on the other hand, goes for a slightly different thing, which still benefits of certain post-processing, albeit in a different way: through making it closer to so-called 'dirty realism'. As a game has always been an example of low fantasy, that leans into the 'dark' subgenre, it's set in a literal penal colony, a ridiculously hostile place that treats the main character in quite a rough manner. Of course, making it all grey and desaturated would enhance the atmosphere, thus giving everything that happens an even more moody and unfriendly vibe. That's, like, visual storytelling 101. And, of course, making it all muddy and shitty enhances it even further, as that's precisely what it was trying to do in the first place with limited early 2000s technology.

You don't expect vibrant colors from Tarkovsky's Nostalgia or Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. In this concrete case,  desaturated visuals help convey a certain tone, which perfectly corresponds to everything that's happening on the screen, and you have to be blind and deaf to say it's not.

 

[Deep Dive Devin]

Gee, I wonder if there's some difference between carefully curated atmosphere and colorwork in a movie or drawing and games with shit post-processing. Could it possibly be that the one that looks like dogshit gets treated worse?

Nah, everyone else must just need to be convinced bad art direction is actually good.

 

[vovan666]

'This thing is good, because it's good, but this exactly same thing is bad because I said so, even if there's no difference between the two'

Okay, then.

I'll just give some examples, mostly from the games that have already been mentioned in this thread.

FO3's and Skyrim's visuals were carefully curated to emulate the look of Adam Adamowicz's art, as noted before me. The green/brown palette reflects the ecological catastrophe, tint changes based on your location to enhance the visual language (red in Pitt to reflect the glow and heat of steelworks, blue in Ancorage to make the thing feel colder, etc.)

RE5's color correction is the way it is as a homage to Black Hawk Down, changing between the levels from yellow to green to red.

Far Cry 2 tries the same, conveying visuals similar to The Blood Diamond and looks like plastic garbage instead of dusty savannah with its filters off. Far Cry 3, on the other hand, uses its postprocessing to enhance the green jungle and blue ocean, making the image more saturated than it really is, thus, achieving the feel of 'tropical paradise'.

Payday looks like that because it emulates Heat.

Terminator Resistance and Aliens: Colonial marines occasionally use blue filters to make their visuals closer to James Cameron's movies.

San Andreas uses filters to look like certain mid-90s hip-hop music videos and Menace 2 Society, also changing its color grading based on the location, thus providing different feel and atmosphere to different regions.

Alien: Isolation and CP'77 use chromatic aberration to maintain a certain 'retro' look and feel, which is directly connected to their retrofuturistic art-direction.

The Trine series has always used heavy post-processing and LUTs to make their environments more bright and vibrant, but still easy on the eyes, sometimes reducing them to soft pastels, and sometimes making them high-contrast within the same level, based on the scene, and those are some of the most gorgeous games out there.

And, finally, The Gothic Remake uses desaturated colors the same way desaturated colors are used in, say, Children of Men.

The list goes on and on. You're just either too stupid and parrot something you've heard from a random guy on YouTube, outright blind, or just hate videogames and are extremely biased against them.

 

[Deep Dive Devin]

I never said "even if there's no difference between the two", because there is a difference. Maybe the guy calling everyone else stupid for being able to see that difference is the one who's not thinking for himself?

 

[vovan666]

You got me there! My opinions about the matter are based mostly on the info I picked up from these books:

 

[Deep Dive Devin]

I guarantee not one of these books said video games should have shit post-processing effects all over them.

 

[vovan666]

Yeah, because video game visuals totally differ from any other type of visual art and obey totally different rules (they don't, btw).

 

[Deep Dive Devin]

Nobody said that they did.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

So uh, that remake is out now. Yahtzee did a review of it. He had, from the sound of things, even more trouble with it than Ross did.

I'm curious to hear Ross's thoughts on this, since these are literally the only two people I know of who've covered this game I knew nothing about besides the name. And also his thoughts on the remake in general. That seems like decent followup episode material.

 

[Zacharin X]

Overall, a very cool and entertaining review. As a fan of the first two Gothic games, and as someone who considers them to be the best RPGs of all time by a distance, i'm always happy to see big youtube channels reviewing and presenting these games to a wider audience, especially in US where they're not very popular.

That being said, going into a Ross review of an RPG game, there are always some concerns for me, because i've seen Ross misunderstanding mechanics, when it comes to combat and character development in other reviews and using cheats as a result. Those are by far my least favorite videos from him. And Gothic is not very "new player friendly", so i expected him to struggle and jump to exploits. Even though he's not new to Gothic, he still jumped to the opportunity to use exploits, like the lockpicking save scum to ransack all the huts in the old camp before he even learned how sneak (i don't even remember if he got any thieving skills at all), or using strafe to neglect fall damage. So there was the first bit of misinformation... yes, there aren't many lockpicks in The Colony, but there are lockpicking skills that you can learn and make opening chests a lot easier, while lowering the chance of breaking the lockpicks by a lot. He failed to mention that because he never considered it... i'm going to blame the game here for allowing the player to pick locked chests without ever training in the skill for it, which is something Gothic 2 fixed, at least partially. He also didn't find out that you can forge swords and sell them for extra ore. Also, the magic ore is not the only currency in the colony - everything is currency. If you play your cards right, you only need to spend ore for buying armor, for bribing NPCs (if a quest requires it), or for training skills (if the trainers require it). Everything else you can buy by trading the trash in your inventory, of which there is a lot. I don't remember ever having to spend ore to buy weapons, potions, magic scrolls, or lockpicks in this game. The beatuty of the trading system in gothic is that all traders are general traders, so you can give them useless items in your inventory, or the countless weapons you collect throughout your journey, and they're going to take it. You don't have to look for a specific trader to sell your herbs, another one for your miscellaneous items, and third one for your weapons. Therefore, picking up everything that isn't nailed down, has as much value as finding ore.

Another issue, especially for newcomers, who might get introduced to the game after watching this review, is Ross' poor understanding of yet another RPG combat system. Implying that Bow and Arrow is the superior combat style for new players is wrong on so many levels. The melee is by far the most powerful and easier route in the Gothic games. In fact, i'm willing to argue that the ranged combat and magic exist in this game only as a secondary, support styles to the melee combat.
Ross mentions the melee attacks being timed, but he misrepresents the system as "working whenever the game feels like it" and also "a guessing game", which is wrong again. The main character is supposed to be a total novice when it comes to holding a weapon, so naturally it will be very awkward for him to swing a sword without training, and that is felt in the controls as well. It's harder to do untrained, but there is definitely a "method to the madness". Ross just couldn't get the hang of it at the untrained level, but that's not a fault of the combat system, it's his own fault for not investing in One-Handed training, after which the attacks become more fluent and the combos are a lot easier to chain. Did he mention that in the review? He didn't, which is strange, because there are one or two edits in the video that show him swinging a sword with one hand, which means he must've trained in one-handed combat, but he still didn't see the potential of the system and how better and easier attacks become when you spent skill points to develop them? That lets me to believe this part of the review might've been taken from another video by someone doing a melee playthrough.
Once you train your one-handed skill to a master level (which only requires 30 skill points in total), the melee combat becomes a cakewalk, and the bow couldn't hold a candle to it. Yes, the bow is powerful in the later game, but so is the melee. In chapter 1 however, and if you're new to the game, your best choice is always the melee route. And when it comes to the bow, Ross misunderstands that system as well. It's not only the stats that determine the accuracy of the bow, it's also the distance. At close distance the bows are more accurate, as they would be in real life. There's no "invisible hitbox that the bow is aiming for", other than the enemy itself.

Well... at least he didn't outright cheat in this one, so that was nice.