Why is pixelation or low-res emulation in 3D games unpopular?

[NECRO WARNING]
Someone dug up a thread from 2017!


Of the top of my head I can't think of a single semi-popular 3D game from recent years, that goes for a (forced) retro low-res pixelation effect all over the screen. I don't mean unfiltered pixelated textures like in Minecraft, I mean for example running a game like Quake 1 on 640 x 400 pixel resolution with crisp non-filtered upscaling so that you really see the bigger pixels. In ye olden gaming days I've had a fondness for using lower resolutions sometimes, because they kind of "tied everything together" visually. It's like the image got a better coherence through it, and the lack of discernable details put my imagination back to work again. I just kind of liked it and the main reason why I stopped playing with that is that the interpolated upscaling that typical TFT screens do, just looks aweful. I might have played a lot more old classics in recent years if it was easier to run them fullscreen but with crisp pixel upscaling to even factors.

Now I wonder, why exactly is it that it's apparently super uncommon for retro-ish 3D games to offer a low-res filter? I really kinda like the look of super sampled and and antialiased 3D graphics, it's like instant nostalgia for me. But I'm questioning whether that's a viable choice commercially, because I don't see it being done by others, and on the opposing end of the spectrum I see people getting super mad if a game doesn't support 4k resolution.

Making it an optional feature seems like a no-brainer but the thing is that to get the best out of it, art assets really need to be designed with the final screen resolution in mind. Low res needs more exaggerated proportions, less detail noise and easier to read shapes. High res needs better texture detail and can get away with a lot less inconcistencies in the art assets.

With gamedesign I feel like I don't have a super weird taste and if I like or dislike something, enough other people will feel the same way about it. But with this question of low-res aesthetics, I'm not so sure.

What are your thoughts on this?

 

Can you show some examples? My guess is that it would not work very well for 3D because of how information is being displayed on the screen. With a 2D pixel platformer for example, it's easy to differentiate stuff like the platforms from the background, because the light remains fairly constant and it's easy to guarantee good partitioning of information, whereas for 3D it seems possible that you could easily transition momentarily into a scene that is kind of difficult to look at and process.

Also, unless it's orthographic with a constant camera direction, pixelated 3D graphics will cause all sorts of weird edge effects as edges change angles.

PS I see you gave the example of Quake 1 - I'm not sure that the lowres effect is in itself a pleasant thing but it may be just personal preference.

 

Or maybe with the flood open of game released they had become more difficult to found, I know there is some that where developed taking inspiration from psx era (survival horror aping resident evil and early alone in the dark). There is also game like delver who have two mode of pixel (64px and 16 px)...

 

The only recent game I could think of is Devil Daggers (seen it a lot, but never played it tho). I'm a fan of these retro aesthetics too but yeah it could just be nostalgia kicking in.

 

I messed around with a game experiment sort of kind along these lines last year...

Although probably much reduced on the visuals from what you are thinking of.

Anyway... I like the idea and have played wolfenstein and Doom style games (modern ones I mean). It does seem like they were 2D using raycasting instead of true 3D though.

Maybe it is just because so many people get caught up in the fancy modern graphics and just don't think about it or think of ultra low poly instead.

 

That's a question for artdirection to solve.

That's a real concern, AA does help but it will never go away. Ortho is what I originally wanted to do but had to drop the idea.

Personal preference for sure, the question is how widespread that preference is. Motion blur e.g. seems to be very devisive too, but it seems like at least half the people like it.

How could I forget that? I logged 13 hours in that game, it's amazing! Go get it!

Half the internet is currently down for me and I can't see the pictures at the moment :-/.

I almost can't imagine no one thought of doing it because we all grew up with low res games, know how they look and it's not hard to implement. I wonder if this is one of those cases where the reason almost no one has done it is that it is a terrible idea.

Delver looks like Minecraft. If they have a fullscreen pixelation feature they don't show it in the steam screenshots.


Examples:






The first is Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, a game not well suited for the effect because everything is high-detail and visually noisy. The left side is sharpend and pixelated to 2x pixel size.

The second one is Planetary Annihilation, a game that works a lot better with the effect because the assets are simple and stylized with easily readable shapes. Left side shows pixelation to 3x pixel size, lower quater is with sharpening after downscaling and top quarter is without sharpening. Imho the sharpening is needed to not lose too much contrast.

 

Outside of nostalgia I'm not convinced it actually brings anything to the table. From my own experiences of playing around with emulation or remakes of old games I have found that older games that looked good for the time at low resolution often look even better once they've been brought up to a higher resolution.

 

Well my point is that pixelated graphics may well simply be a less optimal form of conveying information, regardless of personal preference. Perhaps the difficulties introduced by pixelated graphics are not something that art direction can simply solve without making compromises as to what the game can do.

I can definitely see 2D pixelated graphics as an art form, because it works with much less information and more assumptions can be depended on, to the point where someone can be perfectly comfortable with it and enjoy it. But 3D is different. When the player must be able to spatially orient themselves in different lighting situations, and read the environment from a variety of angles and perspectives, pixelated graphics might simply make that more difficult.

One thing that stuck out to me was the Planetary Annihilation example with its specular highlights. If you go down even a couple more notches in terms of resolution, crawling specular highlights for example could easily distort perception of the object because it obscures a lot of the form itself, which in low res art is often defined from luminance values themselves.

 

Didn't devil daggers do something like that?

IMO, the reason for that is that for 3d graphics pixelation doesn't contribute much to the aesthetic. It is more or less an artifact and 3d games are pretty much supposed to be resolution independent. The important factors for aesthetics for retro 3d are:

1. Pixelated unfiltered sprites.
2. Unfiltered textures
3. Palette
4. Specific ways of handling lighting.

But not pixelated rasterization.

Pixelated rasterization effects pops up here and there for displaying some sort of "system meltdown" effects, but that's it.

Basically... 3d graphic games are supposed to be acting as a vector display system, so pixelation doesn't matter much, and Quake 1 looks pretty much the same on 1920x1080 as it does in 320x200.

Pretty much the only place where pixelated render could make sense is in game with pre-rendered backgrounds. But that's pretty much the only use I can think of.

 

Nostalgia seems to be one of the best predictors of financial success for crowdfunded games. I'd say it is a powerful force. I understand what you mean though.


After careful consideration I came to the conclusion that it only makes sense if every aspect of the game's design is aimed at hitting the nostalgia nerve. Devil Daggers also abandons many modern gamedesign tropes and goes for a remarkably pure design with a simple highscore-attack gamemode and insane difficulty. That just works, it's perfectly consistent and the game was fairly successful. I think currently I don't have the level of abstraction and retro-feel in the design of my game, that would justify the retro aesthetic.

 

If you wanna achieve retro feeling in a game, that's a different story. You'd need to post a screenshot so people can tear it apart.

Low resolution in 3d has a problem -> it limits viewing distance, because faraway objects turn into a pixel soup. So if you're implementing it, it makes sense to keep it to something sensible, like 640x480... but then you'll be also dealing of issues with low resolution GUI. For example, FTL on an old platform could look like this:


Keep in mind that simply downsampling modern games (like in that planetary annihilation example) will not necessarily create retro feeling. You'll need to go through lighting, textures, etc.

 

What about return of the obra dinn?

 

Screenshots on the site are in 1280x720.

Here's spectrum resolution (upscaled 16x):

Spoiler

 

Oups I hadn't checked in a while lol
Leyt's try the game: back in 1995

 

Checked out steam page. A steam review sums it nicely:

I googled some silent hill 1 screenshots. Interestingly... there are a lot of high res ones.

Spoiler

Interestingly ... the main things that create that distinct ps1 aesthetic are:

• Palette
• Lack of perspective correction
• Lack of texture filter.

It is interesting that increasing resolution doesn't kill the visual style.

Honestly, I think that PS1 aesthetic is interesting. The problem is .... resolution doesn't seem to be the main part of it.

 

Devil Daggers was a moderate commercial indie success, and it was as low-rez as they come. DUSK was more PS1/HL1 era, with smooth gourad-shading on polygons but non-smoothed textures. Both are love letters to oldschool FPS games from their respective eras, and both were very well put-together. The moral of the story is whatever art style you choose, you'd best bring the gameplay to match.

 

Low resolution as you're describing in old games is a technical constraint rather than a deliberate artistic choice. If higher resolutions were available and performant then they probably would have been used.

There are plenty of games which go for a simple art style, they just generally don't choose to arbitrarily make all of their lines chunky and noise at the same time. I'm not an art director, but I would assume that's really all there is to it. "Lets use line art" or "keep the colour palette simple" or "stick to primitive shapes" are all things I've heard arty people talk about. "Lets make everything chunky"..? The only similar thing I've heard is the choice to use pixel art, which is fairly common, and the chunkiness is just a part of a broader aesthetic.

I do have another example for you, though: The Last Night. It's a 3D game but where many of the individual components are made of pixel art. The rendering resolution is high, but many of the constituent pieces have prominently visible pixels.

 

Oh... actually, there are a bunch of cases where I have heard people talk about deliberately making stuff low res. The archetypal example would be PuzzleScript games, which deliberately adopt a super low resolution as a technical constraint. This isn't so much for the game's visual style as it is to force developers to think about gameplay and mechanics over visuals.

 

Please - and in spite of how this sounds I really want an answer to this because I'm really curious - walk me through the process that made you necro a thread from 2017, and mention 1 game that has already been mentioned in several posts of this fairly short thread, and 1 game that was released at the end of 2018. You have been active on this forum since 2012, how does an accidental necro still happen?

I think you're right. In addition to that (and I hope I'm not repeating anything here because I haven't re-read the whole thread from 2017 again): I've found out through trial and error that pixelated 3D graphics introduce a LOT of visual noise and movement into otherwise static scenes under certain conditions. In a pixelart game the individual represantation of an objects is "stable" while panning, but in for example an RTS with a 3D view that isn't strictly isometric where you pan the camera over the map, you can't "lock it to a pixelgrid" so everytime it moves the pixelated representations of all objects on screen go through changes in how they are rasterized and you just can't pile on enough anti-aliasing to make that go away. It's worse the smaller the objects are, so RTS is pretty much the worst case. For Devil Daggers it's ok because all the shapes are relatively big and simple.

I don't know the details, but the game got more or less canceled because some "internet outrage stuff" or something. People seemed to be very interested in the art style though, probably because it was fairly unique.

This one seems to use it as well and I'll check it out because I got it in the humble monthly bundle:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/897030/Paratopic/

And there is one Unity-made retro inspired shooter with high-fidelity shading but very lowres pixelated textures and a fancy rendering setup that renders animated 3D objects onto spritesheets at runtime to give them a look similar to how Doom 1's enemies looked. I forgot the name, but by now probably most people have heard of it.


P.S.: I've put up a "warning sign" in the OP.

 

Hell, low-res/low-poly was getting to be such a big deal three years ago that Gamasutra has articles about it.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...loying_a_retro_lowpoly_mid1990s_aesthetic.php

 

NECROing this thread in 2022, because i was searching for unity 3d possibilities to make the rendering more stable at super low resolutions. so not 640x400 as the thread starter wrote, but 320x200 and lower. maybe even real 3d on a gameboy. and there everything is so super jerky and jumpy, that if you use skinned mesh renderers AND antiaaliasing, a simple "idle" animation of breathing becomes a distracting mess of pixels jumping arround.

another point, i know this doesnt really fit your question, there is quite a craze going on about super low res 2d games, e.g. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php system allows developers to focus on less features, less global illumination and screen spaced reflections, but rather gameplay and emotions (fun, atleast).

there is a new unity pdf document what made sable so good, and they also sey "less choices".

 

...

At the moment, the best emulation of pixelated graphics I saw was Saints Row 4, their "Saints of Rage" mission.

I believe they had a youtube video about it, somewhere. Looks like this:

Spoiler

The characters are 3d models, because player appearance customization is reflected in the visuals.

Ther's no problem with skeletal meshes and antialiasing, you simply have to limit the framerate of your skeletal mesh, and instead of using display refresh rate, make sure the animation is playing at LOW framerate (even down to 4 fps is possible), with absolutely no interpolation. Then it will look authentic.

Discussion of pico is offtopic to this thread.

 

Why such low resolution? Maybe it's just me but I have refunded a few steam games that did not support modern resolutions cause it's so eye straining to play on larger screens (such as 4k 34" monitor)

Even if it supported full screen, it's so blurry and stretched - and if you play in windowed at the games native resolution then it becomes tiny.. (as well as distracting because of all the desktop noise around it)

FTL is one of those offenders, but I give it a pass as it's an older game. It plays way better when using a smaller monitor (say 24" 1080) but then I need to swap monitors

 

why such super low resolutions? oh, i also play in 4k and am not interested in that. i was just talking about the technical side. i personally need 3d voxels for global illumination (2013-2017 style) and there the problems become quite similar to having 320x200 retro games with normal unity 3d graphics pipeline (e.g. skinned meshes)

the idea to run animations at low speed, e.g. 250ms per frame is great, but i was merely talking about the math side of 3d, e.g. directional suns hadows ... obviously if you have rather 2d static backgrounds (even if in 3d, but e.g. isometric) your problems are reduced. still, even in isometric,if you render shadows then from the sun direction into your isometric lowres world, you get a lot of jerkyness that you must hope to battle with antialiasing and blury settings for shadows.

so if you "smooth" your problems ... the look willnot be 1990 crisp 320x200 but in fact become much more year 2000+