It’s worth noting that the OP has written this thread like three times already.
Maybe there are a few colorful spots in the game. Overall though it looks like this. The overall aesthetic of the game is tan/gray and desaturated (combined with obnoxious, overly-bright white lighting effects.) This is just a fact.
Surely some people here have played Final Fantasy VII, right? Remember how beautiful that game was? How bold and colorful every area was? It wasn’t just that there were more colors, it’s that the colors were bold and vivid. Even this one tiny screenshot from Corel Prison (one of the more dumpy and washed out areas of the game) looks more colorful than Fallout 3’s entire palette.
All I see is the blue of his clothes. The rest is the same grey-brown blob you’ve been bitching about for years now.
But you want color? I give you the best game of 2010. So colorful your eyes will pop out of your head.
You’re ignoring the yellow truck, the orange patina of rust on it, the deep blacks of the tires and the shadows around the junk pile, and all of the different colors and highlights of the ground…and they’re all deeply saturated and bold. This is not a gray-brown blob.
It is not comparable to this.
If you’re going to look at that and tell me it’s the same, then…shit, I don’t know what to tell you other than that you might have vision problems.
I’ll take “Seeing Only What You Want To See” for 1000, Alex.
Yeah, some current games are drab. I couldn’t play Gears of War because everything was just grey, and I couldn’t make out detail enough to figure out what was a hole, what was a wall, what was debris, and what was an actual enemy (and yes, I have an HDTV with the right hookups).
But when your only counter to evidence that color is used in many current games is to show more pictures of drabness, well. Either your assertion is that all current games are drab, which is pretty quickly disproven, or some are, which is uncontroversial and also not really something to get all that worked up about.
Even more evident in Assassin’s Creed 2 is when you visit your art gallery collection. All of the paintings look like they’ve been soaked in motor oil. Go to a real museum with real renaissance paintings and, even after 500 years, the colors are breathtakingly vivid.
Not arguing that this is the prevalent trend in games, but just that it is annoying as hell when desaturated brown palettes are used. Renaissance Italy, done with a vivid Bioshock attention to lighting and color, would have kicked butt.
