> It can be a lot easier to model, rig and animate a 3D

Some do. The talking heads in Fallout were sculptures, for example (I think from paper, but cannot remember well).

But drawing vs rendering from 3D models can be either an aesthetic choice (Braid is an example) or an optimal choice depending on your workflow, expertise, equipment etc.

And in the current times, also Generative NNs I think were proven a possibility to generate animation.

> in the current games economy

Indie vs mainstream have different ways.

> Doing these by entirely by hand is a really difficult proposition in the current games economy.

And yet, it's still very common in the indie space. I just played some Vampire Survivors, for example (although I don't think it's very good in terms of art direction, but that aside).

As for the 3d / 2d one, two games come to mind; one is Factorio (of course, it's very popular with software developers) where most assets are created in 3d then converted to 2d sprites. I want to claim it's great for performance given how much Stuff is on screen at any given time (just like Vampire Survivors), but then Satisfactory came out and showed that giant complex player-built factories can also work and perform well in 3D.

The other one is Hollow Knight where all art is hand drawn (digitally I presume but I don't actually know), but rendered in 3d (from a fixed perspective so it still looks and plays like a 2d game), easy parallax and high flexibility in the "spacing" of the layers and I'm sure there's other reasons too.

> The part that gets really painful with 2D sprites is animation

bro doesn't know Metal Slug

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTfaTLkt3Y8

Aeris’s hands are massive lol but yes these are super cool

Yes. I stopped playing video games when 3d happened ( mid to end of the 90s) because most games were either uninteresting (3d for the sake of 3d), or plain ugly.

I started playing again during lockdown, and that was a bit of a shock - modern games are gorgeous, use 3d properly, and often enough have brilliant stories. I still play pixel art games - as you say, it’s timeless .

You may be pleased to hear that Nintendo are remaking Ocarina of Time.

Just a few weeks until the OoT remake is released

Same goes for Game Freak.

The first five Pokemon generations had fantastic pixel art. Each generation had its own distinct style and felt like a solid step up from the last.

The fifth generation (Pokemon Black/White) was unique in the sense that it was the first generation that used the same hardware (the Nintendo DS) as the previous generation, so they had a chance to get more experimental by using a pseudo-3D overworld and fully animated sprites during battle to help differentiate those games from Diamond/Pearl/Platinum.

After that, they attempted to make the transition to full 3D for the 3DS era, which is where the series really fell off a cliff. Each new generation feels less like a new world full of distinct handcrafted sprites and more like a poorly-shaded mess of recycled 3D assets that somehow struggles to maintain its intended frame rate.

I would like to throw in one 3D example, which I found to be excellently executed: Metroid Prime (1) on GameCube.

Looks beautiful, beautiful soundtrack, very much has you puzzled when solving the puzzles for the first time, tons of secrets, and maybe we can call it an adventure.

what do you mean? Every 3D game is played on a 2D manifold except for like, 6DOF flight games or lucid blocks

> 2D because random walks there always return

With an infinite expected return time...

If you meant "you have to necessarily flatten", check 3D displays like the ones based on screen rotation,

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49780526 for example: it is a DIY, and there is a demo of playing Doom in apparent 3D.

Another system in which matching interactive design and art could be difficult - but surely not impossible, and, on the contrary, a good challenge.

Some 2D games are played in 3D space.

Maybe there's something to be said for allowing the art style to make room for imagination.

I'm not sure what "soulful" actually means in this case, it sounds like a vague / handwavy term. Art direction? Style? Feel? Atmosphere? I'd like to refute the claim by posting some of my favorite (3d) games but without understanding I can't lol

soulfulness has nothing to do with 2D or 3D, but more to do with mass market commercialization of games, where the creative vision is not from an individual artist (or very small number of them), but via design by committee, and various managerial interference for profitability and market appeal.

That's why you will find the modern AAA games (which is of course 3D) very soulless. However, the same soul still remains in indie games.

There are plenty of absolute cop outs of 2D games and there are plenty of modern 3D (and 2D) games that are absolutely brimming with soul

I think it was more the folks involved. Real story tellers and weirdos with great taste and somehow supported by organizations that got finished titles published.

Wasn’t there a dive on Freddy Pharkus up on FP recently?

These kind of folks still exist and still create. There is a lot more noise to sort through these days.

Limitation forces thoughtful creativity.

I’d have agreed until the indie gamedev scene adopted the retro/PSX aesthetic in earnest and, for me, it has become an indicator of soulfulness. It’s not nostalgia at all, it feels to me like going back to an era when AAA high-fidelity open world by-the-numbers games wasn’t even in the cards. It’s people making a game aware of their limitations, which is what people did in the 2D era of slow CPUs and doing the most with what you have.

This aesthetic will keep trucking on in the AI era of slop, which will eat pixel art, will eat vector art, will try to eat high-res 3D art (and fail miserably), while only indies will care about the PSX/PS2 aesthetic with its fake dithering and 960x540 viewport size.

The indie game Tiny Life is an homage cover of The Sims, played in the key of The Sims 0 -- like Little Computer People, 1985, one person and his dog living on one floppy disk. It has in soul what it lacks in resolution, and soul was always the hard part.

https://tinylifegame.com/

Playing Tiny Life for the first time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLkrxRJiRI

One important premise of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics is that you can trade resolution for identification and empathy. Lower graphical resolution is not just pixels swapped for soul as if it were a compromise, it's the mechanism that produces the binding. Every specific a face carries is a specific that can contradict the player, so subtracting detail buys the player room inside the character. A photorealistic face is somebody else's; a six-pixel face is yours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics

Scott's point is that when the world is concrete but the person is iconic, the player wears the person while believing the place -- which is what The Sims did with mumbling low-poly people in carefully detailed rooms, and what LCP did with one man drawn in a handful of pixels whom players named and worried about for forty years.

He calls the effect "masking":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(comics)

Little Computer People Review (Commodore 64):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBRXWUVMAg4

The Sims wouldn't exist without This | Nostalgia Nerd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYz_leh9J3E

That is why "soul over resolution" is not a hedge about the graphics, it's a claim about what the graphics are for.

Will Wright, Maxis, "Interfacing to Microworlds", Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford, April 26, 1996, previewing the Dollhouse prototype that became The Sims:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk&t=4470s

Student: What about from person to person, you talking about the information that's contained within the objects, so there can be information in another person, that you want to interact with in the environment. Have you looked at any reasons why you would want to do that?

Will Wright: Oh yeah, I mean, that's that's the hard problem. I mean, simulating ants is hard enough, when you get to people there's really no hope.

There are two issues here. You can look at this as a technology. It's not a product right now. And there are a few directions this could go. I could see this becoming, let's say, a multiplayer network MUD kind of a thing. You might have a thousand people playing SimCity from the bottom up, each person building their own house in a big multi-user space. In which case that issue is a little less important, because most of the people are real people, and you're dealing with puppets.

As a standalone game, which is probably our closer target, we have to deal with the problem you're bringing up, which is how do we deal with people to people? And it's hard, I mean there's just -- I'm sure Terry can elaborate on that more than I can. But the best thing we can do is prop up a convincing illusion. We don't have to be doing a valid simulation of human personality. What we have to do is we have to put up something that's ambiguous enough to where somebody can read in what they want.

Actually in this thing what I have right now are people come up and they converse, but you don't hear what they're saying, they just gesture, and sometimes they look mad, sometimes they kind of look contemplative. It's kind of interesting how much people will read into that.

This is kind of dynamic that we've seen again and again where something happens in SimCity and they said "oh I was running my nuclear reactor near the red line, and then there was so much smoke coming out of it, this plane crashed, and because of that, this and that happened", and they'll describe this long causal chain of events that I know does not exist. I designed the simulation, I know that there's no linkage between the power output of the power plant, the planes crashing, but they're convinced it exists.

Don Hopkins: They're using it as a medium to tell stories about.

Will Wright: Yeah!

Don Hopkins: Where they're using it as a piece of paper, to write.

Will Wright: Yeah, that's exactly right. There's a parallel simulation going on here in the game. Everybody's taking a linear path through this, and they're basically, most people will attempt to understand things like this with a story. They'll think about "I did this, then that happened, because of that", and so the story becomes kind of their logical connection, their logical reverse engineering, of the simulation that they're playing inside of.

Now on the people's side, I think we can do a lot in this as a product, by propping up that illusion of people. Again, if this is a doll house, we don't want the dolls to be sentient things. We want the dolls to be interesting enough to where I can play games with them.

There was actually a really interesting doll that this company came out with. Oh, it was Worlds of Wonder, this really cool doll, I've got a couple of them after they went out of business. It's called the Julie doll. But it was like this $250 doll with voice recognition, and it said all these things. It had just a huge amount of ROM with digitized speech in it, and so it would sit there and try and have stupid conversations with you. And really it was kind of Eliza, or had keywords it would recognize, and give you these kind of non-committal responses.

But in the testing of that, well first of all it was a $300 doll. Who's going to buy the kid a $300 doll? So it was really more, it was actually the only doll I've ever seen that appealed to grown men. Grown men love this, I mean this is a hacker's doll.

But I talked to the guy who was working this project, and he said they put this in focus groups with girls. And they played with it for a while, and then after about a half an hour they take the batteries out, and keep playing with it.

And what was happening is that the girls were propping up this elaborate fantasy in their play, and the dolls were supposed to be a structure for that fantasy, they weren't supposed to be the fantasy. The doll was telling them what the fantasy was, and it was conflicting with what the girls were saying, and so it was interfering actively with their fantasy and their play.

So in that regard, I think we can actually kind of take that path with these people. And all we have to do is deal with them at a very local kind of a state machine, Braitenberg Machine kind of level, and say that they're angry, and they're hungry, and they're sleepy. And then we can actually do some things where maybe they have a little, what you might call, structural ambiguity about what they're actually saying.

One of the thoughts I had about this project in particular is that you'd see the people go up and they talk, and there would be some kind of a flavor to their conversation, but it would be more like Peanuts. When they did the TV show of Peanuts, you'd hear the adults talking, and the adults would always be like "mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa mwa", or soft, or loud. You can tell if they're mad, or angry, or what, but you wouldn't hear what they were saying. You'd have to read that into it.

I think this is the area where we sidestep the issue, just because as a commercial company we have to ship a game, we're not doing a research project. So that's a long winded answer, sorry. Yeah?

There's something in the sidebar saying it's currently broken on mobile. I guess I see it because I'm on a desktop browser then.

2D physics is an evening project for a week or two. 3D physics is an exercise in smashing your head against a wall, and is basically no fun whatsoever (I’ve written a 2D and 3d physics engine and shipped games as a physics programmer)

> biased with older generation that [has] grown up with

It is a matter of aesthetics. So it is possible that the gap is not about nostalgia, but about artistic exposure.

I could give you an example of a suggestion that there has been a flood of degradation: I was exposed to a television recently tuned to a videomusic channel: the limited samples I glimpsed were about "young and fit", as if the collective visual show converged to heavily "body oriented", in a heavily basic manner. When "commercial to the median" floods the spread imagery and artistic awareness is on the contrary not encouraged, you can get - and I have witnessed them - people nodding at the ugliest things.

I guess if you were born in 1980, your teenage years start with Doom - which was a relief from being trapped in a world of disappointing parallax effects - and end with Silent Hill, and Alpha Centauri, which used awkward homespun voxels to make its low res 3D sprites because it still wasn't something you could just pick off the shelf and stuff into your game. In 1999 there was a mixture of games going 3D when they shouldn't (Earthworm Jim 3D, Prince of Persia 3D) and indie developers still being frustrated because they couldn't.

What generation are you?

My kids mostly play Roblox, Rocket League, Fortnite and ~FIFA~ EA whatever-it’s-called-now. But they do enjoy stuff like 2D fighters and 2D mobile/tablet games too.

Ive found it’s been less about 2D vs 3D and more about content that matches their interests.

Pixel art is extremely popular. Not sure what you're talking about

Go look at the 2d-hd games that Square Enix is putting out

I'm young enough to have grown up with the Wii and the Switch, and I love pixel art.