Deep Dive Devin

The rest of your post suggests otherwise. We're all familiar with exactly what you want, which is to not be punished for hate speech and harassment. Your chosen path to this is to pretend they're "ill defined". The old "you just call anyone you don't like a nazi" defense. And it's just as bad as it's always been, because big shocker, only a very small and very specific subset of toxic personalities ever seem to struggle with this. It's never a problem for the overwhelming majority of people. That's part of the reason discord servers are chaotic, because clearing that bar is no problem for anyone except the exact people who are supposed to be filtered. If the standards were high enough that only lefties were allowed, servers would be a lot better! You're just mad because the kind of bigotry and harassment you or one of your friends or idols keeps getting banned for is something you think the targets deserve, that shouldn't be disincentivized. And uh, you're wrong. That being said, we should take from Orwell's playbook, particularly from how he dealt with this ideology in Spain.

This is an extremely hilarious thing to say. I just went onto the discord and their policy is the most bog-standard "do not attack people for no reason" stuff any normal person would want and expect. If you feel excluded by this, you probably SHOULD be excluded! Anyone who can't take these extremely basic and sensible guidelines is a person to avoid. I'm not sure how exactly going against so-called "leftist ideology" is much help here if this is your breaking point. This is a movement to have governments regulate corporate industry practices, because basically no other options seem to exist. The economic conservative's answer to the problem of Games Being Killed is "let it keep happening until people get sick and stop buying"...and that's not happening! It would massively destroy decades' worth of art to let it continue even if it did! You want a discord full of channers that don't actually care about the movement? Because it sure SOUNDS like you do. In conclusion,

Nobody said that they did.

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

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?

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.

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. 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. 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. Concept art isn't the game. If something looks bad, it looks bad. It allegedly being intended to look better means jack shit. Bad attempts. Yeah and they accomplished it without applying shit post-processing to the whole game. Insane what difference actually executing your vision properly does. 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?". 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.

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. 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. 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!

There is nothing that humans do that cannot be art when given the proper context; games are art because we say they are. Bad art, cynical, crappy, corporate art is art. And video games, whether someone sticks their hand in the soup with crappy post-processing effects or not, will always be art. Also, there's something hilarious about using Sonic Adventure 1, a game that famously made such good use of the Dreamcast's unique hardware to bring out a sleek, unique Y2K aesthetic that it was utterly butchered when placed on less-fitting hardware (yes, Sonic Team themselves also did a bad job, but that's beside the point), to illustrate how apparently this was the wrong way to do things. If it proves anything, it's that we should have been squeezing way more out of less-powerful hardware decades ago, and just streamlined the differences between platforms more quickly. Baked lighting and vertex paint is still a perfectly legitimate and often surrealistically-beautiful aesthetic, it's just that stuff like real-time lighting is easier to market with the good ol' shiny screenshots from the Deus Ex 2 video, or else allows a scene to be lit faster than catering each palette or paint to a specific mood. None of this is a defense of aggressive and unflattering post-processing either way though...because it just doesn't look good! And it's not ugly because it's realistic, because it's not realistic. It's ugly. New Vegas looked a lot more real when I changed it to something actually natural looking, and it didn't stop communicating a dilapidated wasteland in that. Elden Ring is a fantasy game, but an annoying vignette cutting off my peripheral vision made it neither more real nor more fantastical, it just annoyed me.

I'm trying to think about all the amazing games with great aesthetics and art direction I've played across my life, and whether any one of them would be improved by tinting, chromatic aberration or vignettes applied across the entire image for the whole playthrough. And nope, I cannot think of a single one. Elden Ring was much nicer-looking when I corrected the vignetting, ditto for New Vegas when I got rid of the nicotine-stained look. I wish depth of field was used differently in games, it's clearly trying to look like a nice photo when it should really be something more like mipmapping, smoothing out stuff that's too busy in the distance. Also, fuck most motion blur. But I agree that the extremely simple option to turn off post-processing effects would solve all of these issues and let devs do whatever stupid ideas they want.

You very clearly don't. What an insanely lazy reply.

Well that doesn't address anything that's been said here or make you look any better. Actually, it makes you look worse. So I don't really know why you'd bother.

I think it makes perfect sense that Ross picked Monster for an example, because for his tastes, it's probably something that he was recommended as a serious show, but he still took issue with the presentation anyway. Dragon Ball, One Piece and Sailor Moon, strength of their storytelling aside, are silly kids' cartoons. It actually is more fitting that they'd go over the top in their expressions, but Ross's whole point is that the entire medium has a tendency to push it past his personal limit. He just has a different level of tolerance for that stuff than a lot of us, and that's fine!

The scariest thing about this is that I need to get sleep and wait to see it until tonight.

Oh right, this is the game that jumpscared Vinny with his own voice being in it

@Pilgrim2048 Maybe it's not what you mean, but to get a feel for Ross's taste you can check out this still from the Big Game List video: Hilariously, the comments on that video are full of people coping hard about some of the games he mentioned missing these marks.

Ross, you ever read MS Paint Adventures? I don't think you'd be a Homestuck fan, but Problem Sleuth skewers Noir Fiction and Graphic Adventure Games in a way I think you'd like

I like Elden Ring a lot, but I'm not sure I would agree with the recommendation (I mean, this guy made two posts a month ago and then hasn't been here since, so who knows if it even matters). Elden Ring is a great action game, and it along with the souls games of its type do a great job fostering immersion. These games are all about feeling like a tiny bug crawling along the corpses of titans from centuries past, and they're amazing at that, but the OP is talking about games with, y'know, plot. And a cast of characters. The plot of most Fromsoft RPGs is "some schlub wakes up in a dying world and kills shit until they can't anymore", and the characters consist of a series of vague hints about where to take their quest and some cool items if you do it right. They have personalities, but their stories can end really quickly if you don't know what you're doing, and that's assuming you even know where to go at what time to activate them at all, and I still wouldn't say each of them constitutes a huge part of the game on their own -- it has to account for the idea that you murdered them the second they showed up because there's no other way to get that cool armor, or else the story is about the people you're fighting rather than the ones you're helping. Almost all of the big plot stuff in these games happened before your character actually shows up, and a central theme of the games is not having all the pieces of exactly what happened, let alone knowing how to piece it together. You have to scrape what you can off the underside of item descriptions, know that some things have two names, the etymological significance of certain terms in both English and Japanese -- and even then you're only gesturing to a vague understanding of the story, because the destruction of history and failure to learn from their mistakes is exactly what leads the people of Dark Souls to...well, keep making Dark Souls happen. And I feel like that's maybe not quite what the person who says "I like Witcher and Red Dead's stories, but I'm looking for something a little more obscure" is asking for.

I'm going to replace the spambot comment by saying I finally got around to Night in the Woods after seven years, and I think it's really good. I know Ross used it as an example of "games that are not for me" in the list video, but my taste differs from his pretty frequently anyway. It's about dropping out of college and returning to your economically-depressed hometown, and something sinister is lurking in the woods. You reconnect with your old friends who have their own insecurities and problems to deal with, reckon with why you left college (and why you left home to begin with), get drunk at a party and make an ass of yourself, shoplift, smash fluorescent lights with a bat, and try to make the voices in your head stop. And hey, is that a dismembered arm on the ground? Also, the whole game looks like the kind of anthro animal characters your grandma would embroider on a quilt, or something that would be broadcast on Nick Jr. between episodes of Blue's Clues. The three-way contrast between ruining all your personal relationships, having prophetic dreams of the end of the world, and being an adorable little kittycat girl is very effective at establishing a unique identity, and is just a good character study in general. I've known guys like Gregg, I podcast with a guy who's almost exactly like Angus, and all of this is wrapped around a talentless fuckup protagonist with no life direction, whom I couldn't help but relate to. The lore of the former company mining town being the site of massive labor violations, followed by massive strikes, is both an interesting mystery to uncover and just straight up true about a lot of small-town America. JD Rockefeller had something almost exactly like this game happen. It's a game that's deeply critical of a lot of things Americans (and citizens of liberal capitalist democracies in general) kind of take for granted, and it manages not to beat the player over the head with it much Anyway, it was very genuine as a game narrative, so that's my contribution to this thread. I also think Ross was totally right to pass on it, because a lot of it is queer young adult furries having big feelings at stuff. It has very little in terms of core mechanics or challenge beyond some inconsequential minigames, almost like a visual novel. The otherworldly horror and breakdown of reality mostly stays on the fringes until the ending, which probably didn't go far enough if you're coming for the horror alone. He wouldn't play far enough to see it, but Ross would probably say something like Anyway I had a good time with it, though unfortunately the game expects you to play favorites with your friends. The ending changes depending on whether you spent more time with Gregg or Beatrice, so I have to do another playthrough to see some of the activities I missed. Still, recommended for people that like slow-burn character studies in games.

Ross giving the game the Poe's Law award is extremely apt. Bioshock isn't subtle about it's hatred for libertarian seasteading, but with Culpa Innata, I dunno. It's difficult to tell if it's a critique of objectivism or an ad for it, like the designers either created a sci fi utopia and threw the Randian philosophy into it to make it more questionable, or they designed a society they thought would be objectivist, but didn't really understand what their own philosophy suggested that world would need to look like (a common occurrence). It reminds me of this drawing: This is all complicated by the fact that the foundational assumptions of that society are actually a lie because they need it to be that way to keep the sun from dying. Is that the devs saying "this is the proof it would be the best way for humanity to survive", or "this bullshit would only work if it was a lie while the real adults work on solving actual problems"? Either way, I think the game should have gone harder on the propaganda and consumerism angles.

The site already has an FAQ that addresses most of his false impressions. The real problem is that he's spread misinformation that will proliferate beyond him, and I don't think there's anything that can go on the site to stop that.

Hey, this changes nothing, but just for kicks, it looks like people allegedly have a server emulator going for The Crew, they uploaded a video last week: Yes, I know that the campaign will continue either way and the problem needs to be cut off at its source. But it's nice that this one will probably be rescued from destruction.

I feel a little bad that I know this game because of Vinny absolutely obliterating its reputation in a single clip. Poor bastard never stood a chance.