Eh, not a fan of the troll aesthetic, lost me already. Shame, the original was really good.
So it is a technical reason, instead of an artistic one.
And I don't know if they understand what maximalism meant, because neither do I. I've never seen the term used outside of interior design.
I can understand their reasoning and personally I like the new aesthetic
Looking a little bit at their cited artist's twitter and I think I'm starting to see the problem. Toby Dixon is a really talented dude in pixel art and claymation from what I checked, and can do both pretty well. The problem is they seem be having a worst of all world's situation with their technical and aesthetic choices.
The background is solid and grounded in color palette, but all of the characters still have influence from the atari-look of the original; solid-neons that should in theory pop nicely but wind up instead clashing very harshly. There's also the fact that the neon tones and lumpy shading (which I think could work) are being jarringly "warped" by what I'm assuming is the skeletal animation system that runs with fast animations.
I think this style shift would have would have worked better if it embraced either:
1. Straight up digitally photographed and processed claymation from Toby Dixon animated in the vein of Ragdoll Kung Fu and the claymation games by The Neverhood.
2. Kept the pixel look, but focused on a way to tone down the intense "jitter and warp" on the characters.
3. This shouldn't count, but abandoning the "maximalist" artstyle for a revised look that would be more n++ than Atari 2600
Also I don't know how to take direct images from tweets currently and I'm having a hard time figuring it out, but here's the background art separated and drawn by Toby:
[url]https://twitter.com/TonyDixob/status/859227288914808832[/url]
and here's what I'm assuming is just his generic body form in a plain background, rigged to the 2d skeleton and animated by Mark Essen. It makes the "jitter and warping" really obvious in my opinion.
[url]https://twitter.com/messhof/status/857794869795840000[/url]
I still think they should have gone with more of a monkey Island aesthetic with the characters. With some nice smooth animations like the first game, it would have really fit the new backgrounds, and the setting.
Personally I always imagined the first games characters as being sort of gentlemen duelists, with waistcoats and fancy hats. I don't think anyone imagined the naked Homer simpson look.
[quote]In a post on the PlayStation blog, creative director Mark Essen spoke at length about the change in aesthetic. Basically, it came about because the team had crafted lots of new animations and felt it would be "silly to use all this potential on pixelated stick figures"[/quote]
On the contrary, I think that certainly would've been much, much better than what we've ended up with for Nidhogg 2.
The least they could've done was go for knights and shit rather than these...elf...troll...monkey...things?
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