Color Palette and saturation

[Chris S]

Holy **** someone actually responded to that. I googled 'the outer world color' and it brought back the same post.

I've played all the damn games from the 'Golden Era' etc like I'm sure you all have, and it takes some real mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the recent spate of neon saturated games is some sort of coincidence with the license to print money that is Fortnite. So much so it's going to establish for Epic a storefront, much as Valve did with HL2, and set them up for a decade.

I just can't imagine what sort of immense foolishness, or doll playing fantasy, you'd require to believe that. Or perhaps I can, and I know what a waste of time responding to this garbage is.

The difference of course is that the Fornite art style is self-consistent and works in the world they've created. Every other game just takes their existing design (art deco in this case) and splashes neon everywhere. It's crazy and looks awful. Art deco plus fluorescence, good grief, the poor old art director must be chafing under the 'make it neon' directive they received.

You don't need to be a 'design expert' champ to open your bloody eyelids and look at it. Maybe you're colour blind and don't know it, I don't know. 

Ben, yes it has become almost a cliche now. Rage 2 was probably the funniest one with the purple mohawks in the desert.

Like everything it had a predecessor. Clearly I did not say Fortnite pioneered a brand new art style, I said every major dev studio feels pressured to imitate it's art style in order to appeal to some of the ~200 million people who have played it. The result is a mostly pretty Goddamned ugly mish mash of art styles.

 

[daven]

The character faces remind me of The Sims 4. Annoying smirks on everyone's faces and everyone looks like a lesbian. Very progressive!

Edited August 5, 2019 by daven

[the_ragnarokkr]

I actually love the color palette and saturation in TOW. One of several things that drew me to it.

[ABearIsHere]

I'm not really noticing any similarity in art style with Fortnite. While both games employed saturated colors, the color palettes are actually rather different. Same with RAGE 2, the color use of which reminded me of Tyranny most recently. Both games tended to feature brown/earthy tones most of the time but very saturated colors to indicate when you were encountering magic/technology/superpowers.

Now, it's totally fine not to enjoy The Outer Worlds' art style, you certainly wouldn't be the first person I see online to find it visually unappealing, and it's not even totally incorrect to argue that there's a trend towards more colorful artstyles these days (it actually predates the incredible success of Fortnite and can be seen in the shift of Bethesda's Fallout from the sickly greens of Fallout 3 to the wider color palette of 4 and 76), but I don't think you made a very compelling argument overall.