Beauty is really something that distinguished even the early Anno titles (Anno 1602 and Anno 1503) from other similar games like "The Settlers" or even "Age of Empires". I remember that playing these games was just so nice... lush green landscapes, beautiful cities full of half-timbered and renaissance houses, palaces, ships in full sail on a blue ocean. It was also the first time I really came into contact with classical music as a kid.
The 'feel' of a game can't be understated. I get the same vibes from KCD 2, where just walking through the environment is in itself a joy.
The thing I didn't like about Age of Empires compared to Settlers was that warfare is the main point of the game; I wish AoE had a plain city / society building mode. Actually it probably does via mods or custom maps, or there's other games that tick the AoE and city builder boxes. Settlers has war as well but I always felt it was secondary, definitely not something large scale.
> Settlers has war as well but I always felt it was secondary, definitely not something large scale.
Yes. This is the main reason why I always preferred Settlers and the Anno titles to AoE, EE or similar games. You could build things. AoE was mainly about destroying things. "Warfare" in the original Settlers I was just 2 cute knights hitting each other on the head with a sword until one of them was flat as a pancake.
> I get the same vibes from KCD 2
Add Gothic II, which was also very pretty (it still is, although it came out nearly 25 years ago).
Not sure if this is nostalgia: What I don't get with modern games, at least on the most likely device I could be using for gaming - the iPad - is how ugly they are.
Even AoE and Settlers (both preferably in the second edition) look soooo much better to me than most of the games I can find, they look just strange, both the remakes from "brand name" studios and a lot of the smaller games like you'd find on Apple Arcade.
Interesting how you are absolutely right but I didn't notice it at all. I understood exactly what they were telling me even though the description that I was reading was completely wrong.
The fact that I found the animations descriptive and very pretty to look at is probably to thank for that.
This also happens in real life on the equator when the sun is at just the right point in the sky ordinary objects look like bad rendered cgi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahaina_Noon
In my own personal 3D game project I did the same thing, and then thought it seemed strange so I changed it back. Now I wonder if I have experienced this many times before in games and just never noticed it, and it only seemed strange in my own project because I was hyper-aware of it.
Yeah, I can imagine it would bother some people as it's rather unnatural. Having a setting to toggle it is a nice touch. I could imagine that it might even induce motion sickness in some. While this doesn't give me motion sickness, I have experienced it from other not-quite-natural effects. Sometimes it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause.
I actually thought this was a "bug" with the renderer, feel silly now realising it's a feature, a great one at that, now it's been pointed out! very cool. Anyone wondering if worth some play time, it definately is!
It definitely feels like a bug to me, and would be the first thing I'd turn off. I mean, I get that from that one angle it looks flat -- but the sun moving with my camera would be way, way worse for me.
I wonder if you rotate the camera more often than I do. I can go an entire play session of Anno without rotating the camera once, since it's a top down city builder.
Hmm I feel this might just be nostalgia at play. I've not played any Anno games, but comparing the two side-by-side and 1800 looks leaps & bounds better to me. 1602 looks like it was drawn in MS Paint.
Of course it does :) The two games are decades apart and 1800 was known to require quite a beefy PC to run good when it came out.
My point was 1602 holds up visually in a sense of doing it’s job assisting the game mechanics, something most modern games often fail and over complicate. Also.. nostalgia.
Can you expand on that please? (I recently prototyped a maze editor in isometric view and would love to hear more about the alternatives and what makes the isometric projection interesting.)
IMO for a significant amount of games, isometric is the best way to display them as it emphasizes the dimensions of things, makes for a clear navigation and general awareness of what's going on.
Also not really an issue these days, but I think it's still somewhat valid: In a controlled isometric projection where the angles are fixed, you can focus on making the art just pixel perfect, shadows and lighting being also a big part. This makes it possible to make your game look good with a fraction of the budget. In many cases, depending on the style, you still want to model and render the stuff in 3D and use hugely advanced renderers ( now GPUs/game engines have realtime ray-tracing, global illumination, subsurface scattering, advanced shadows, etc. but still, you can get most of the look by rendering it offline and just present sprites in a "2.5D" isometric projection and they'll look amazing at a fraction of the cost for both a game studio and the gamers who have to run that )
Of course there is also a great deal of nostalgia, but I would not discount the current trends of "going back to the basics" as just "nostalgia".
I hate the "3D" in many video games, in particular in strategy games. Beauty is appreciated everywhere, but for me the most important part is the gameplay loop/mechanics, however you call it. In a (real) strategy game that's decision making. You're reading the map of sorts, and come up with a strategy based on what you see. This 'parsing' of the map is a crucial element, and in particular an element I don't want to be challenging. That is, I'm not a fan of "find hidden objects" genre. I want the map to be very clear, with important elements easy to spot. Well, all elements involved in game mechanics easy to spot, as it should be me who decides which is important.
And here comes the problem with 3D: The more advanced a 3D engine, the more varying looks of the same object (e.g. metamerism): The object can be occluded (happens in 2D to a very limited degree), it can be lit at various angle by Sun (various angle if the Sun moves) and other light sources, it may have reflections, there may be a perpective distortion, and maybe some more.
All this means that a particular element can't be easily recognized, because there's no particular look that your mind may look for. It's just less readable. Imagine a strategy game, where you don't control your mouse cursor directly, but it's attached to a string to the real cursor, and swings all around as you try to click things. Interesting gameplay? Maybe, but not what I'm looking for when playing strategy games.
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The thing I didn't like about Age of Empires compared to Settlers was that warfare is the main point of the game; I wish AoE had a plain city / society building mode. Actually it probably does via mods or custom maps, or there's other games that tick the AoE and city builder boxes. Settlers has war as well but I always felt it was secondary, definitely not something large scale.
That's also why I love Anno 1800 (as well as its predecessors). You can (mostly) avoid combat.
Yes. This is the main reason why I always preferred Settlers and the Anno titles to AoE, EE or similar games. You could build things. AoE was mainly about destroying things. "Warfare" in the original Settlers I was just 2 cute knights hitting each other on the head with a sword until one of them was flat as a pancake.
> I get the same vibes from KCD 2
Add Gothic II, which was also very pretty (it still is, although it came out nearly 25 years ago).
Even AoE and Settlers (both preferably in the second edition) look soooo much better to me than most of the games I can find, they look just strange, both the remakes from "brand name" studios and a lot of the smaller games like you'd find on Apple Arcade.
> The sun keeps a position relative to the camera and thus the shadows always fall from left to right:
The video shows shadows fall from right to left.
> One can get into the unfortunate situation where the camera is positioned so that the sun casts shadows behind the camera.
The video shows no shadows because they are behind the things that are casting the shadow. There would be no shadows behind the camera.
Is this seemingly reversed notion of "casting" common?
The fact that I found the animations descriptive and very pretty to look at is probably to thank for that.
From a game perspective it can seem pretty simplistic at first but there are a lot of interesting systems with hidden depth
This game is an incredible time sink; I can lose entire days to it because there’s always “just one more thing” to do.
But the original Anno 1602 still wins in the looks and style department. As most 2.5D isometric games do..
(A friend’s mum was famous among us kids because she could play 1602 well, I always got bankrupted by tools. How did she do it!!)
My point was 1602 holds up visually in a sense of doing it’s job assisting the game mechanics, something most modern games often fail and over complicate. Also.. nostalgia.
Can you expand on that please? (I recently prototyped a maze editor in isometric view and would love to hear more about the alternatives and what makes the isometric projection interesting.)
Also not really an issue these days, but I think it's still somewhat valid: In a controlled isometric projection where the angles are fixed, you can focus on making the art just pixel perfect, shadows and lighting being also a big part. This makes it possible to make your game look good with a fraction of the budget. In many cases, depending on the style, you still want to model and render the stuff in 3D and use hugely advanced renderers ( now GPUs/game engines have realtime ray-tracing, global illumination, subsurface scattering, advanced shadows, etc. but still, you can get most of the look by rendering it offline and just present sprites in a "2.5D" isometric projection and they'll look amazing at a fraction of the cost for both a game studio and the gamers who have to run that )
Of course there is also a great deal of nostalgia, but I would not discount the current trends of "going back to the basics" as just "nostalgia".
I remember a YouTube video talking about this and I think it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs4B8-qoY1I
And here comes the problem with 3D: The more advanced a 3D engine, the more varying looks of the same object (e.g. metamerism): The object can be occluded (happens in 2D to a very limited degree), it can be lit at various angle by Sun (various angle if the Sun moves) and other light sources, it may have reflections, there may be a perpective distortion, and maybe some more.
All this means that a particular element can't be easily recognized, because there's no particular look that your mind may look for. It's just less readable. Imagine a strategy game, where you don't control your mouse cursor directly, but it's attached to a string to the real cursor, and swings all around as you try to click things. Interesting gameplay? Maybe, but not what I'm looking for when playing strategy games.