There’s a frequently perpetuated myth that all triple-A video games boast near-identical grey/muddy brown color palettes. While I will be the first to complain about the problems that tend to plague the big-budget gaming industry (dull protagonists, overabundance of sequels and console-specific exclusive DLC, to name but a few of my gripes), the suggestion that game worlds continue to suffer from the blandness exhibited between 2006-2012 is an annoying one due to how completely untrue it is.
Ever since the first Gears of War, the desaturation of video games has been a bone of contention among those brought up on the vibrancy of Super Mario World and its ilk. After Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare‘s release, it seemed as though every big developer wanted its game to suddenly be “gritty,” with this grit largely serving as a synonym for “bleak,” or “grey,” or if you’re a cynic like me, “unbearably dull.” During this time period, game worlds were no longer a product of the game’s content, but rather the concept of each game seemed to be built around the philosophy that the average consumer ached for more realism.
For a while, this was true: while I always fell into the category of people who asked “why can’t this game look more like Nintendo made it?” many wanted their virtual cars to drive like real cars, their virtual guns to shoot like real guns and their virtual worlds to look like real war-torn cities as welcoming as an invite to a bachelor party in Silent Hill. In Gears of War and Call of Duty 4, the use of a dull color pallet made sense given the games’ subject matter, but from there on out the greys and browns became marketing ploys. Everything became washed out and ugly in order to add “realism,” and in an era when Nintendo’s non-HD Wii was besieged by a conveyor belt of similarly bland-looking third-party games, there was little respite for console gamers who wanted something more colorful.
But things are different now. The gaming industry has moved on, and we’ve found ourselves enjoying an overabundance of beautiful game worlds, more so than ever before. Even the FPS genre, once home to a seemingly endless slew of concrete cities, has now lightened up. The Call of Duty series has been consistently edging towards beauty in spite of its dated graphics engine, offering wingsuit gliding over tropical vistas and a variety of multiplayer maps that range from the 1950’s visual stylings of Nuketown to the sun-kissed yacht of Hijacked. Oh, and Gears of War? Yeah, that was injected with a rainbow, too, as Gears of War: Judgment employed a much wider range of colors and disparate environments.
In the past few years we’ve been bludgeoned over the side of the head with gorgeous game worlds, so much so that I fear it has broken the gaming community and caused many to believe that this simply cannot be the case. Triple-A titles are SUPPOSED to be grey and brown, so therefore the likes of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and BioShock Infinite‘s vibrant settings are deemed the “odd ones out,” despite a cursory glance at the recent best-selling video games revealing that they’re anything but. Among the top ten best-selling video games of last year there was the aforementioned ACIV and BioShock Infinite, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Grand Theft Auto V, Monster Hunter IV, Pokemon X & Y and Tomb Raider. All of those games completely went against the grain of the popular opinion that the masses are only appeased by grit and realism, each offering a bright (and more importantly, fun) world to explore. Yes, there are still many bones of contention to be had when it comes to the themes, structure and development of big-budget video games, but by and large dull game worlds are not of them.
With the advent of sharing features on the PS4, Xbox One and Wii U, it’s now in the best interests of developers to make their games look as pretty as possible. Indeed, I wasn’t interested in Destiny whatsoever until I saw a tweet containing an image of its gorgeous hub world that had been shared directly from a friends’ PS4, which caused me to immediately check out more screenshots and gameplay footage of it. In ACIV I found myself turning off all the HUD options in order to share a perfect screenshot of its vast, rippling ocean, as protagonist Edward Kenway perched atop the Jackdaw’s billowing flag. Greys and browns simply do not look appetizing enough to inveigle the consumers of a console generation obsessed with frame rates and resolution, so we can only expect our video games to look prettier as time goes on.
Gaming trends have typically only served to harm the output of developers and force them to fall in line with their peers, as evidenced in the perceived popularity of the grey/brown color pallet. However, the colorful direction that the industry is heading in, and has been for the past two years, is a welcome one that is being ignored by the triple-A naysayers who like to deride content produced by anyone other than independent developers. We should remind ourselves how far the industry at large has progressed in recent years in terms of visual diversity, considering that it was only 2012 when Epic Games was applauded for releasing its Call of Duty parody Duty Calls ahead of its rebellious, goofy FPS Bulletstorm. Now it’s not so difficult to imagine a game such as Bulletstorm financially succeeding.
There are problems with the gaming industry in 2014, and there always will be. But the masses’ acceptance of more diverse-looking games, and developers’ willingness to feed them said diverse titles, is not one of those problems. Of all the complaints you can level at this industry, the blandness of the virtual worlds it produces should no longer be one of them.
