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I think Nick's right, and there's value in seeing all these amazing looking games... but! I agree that game art direction has gotten worse. Because all the limits are essentially gone these days, there are very few technical hurdles forcing people to make good art decisions.

you're so wrong I will die on this hill and I will take you with me. Have you forgotten the absolute *wasteland* of 2009?

I agree with you that the slop is a nightmare, the money men are heinous aliens with the worst intentions, I just really don't think there's proportionally more bad art direction decisions being made than there were before when you look beyond AAA...I think we're doing better than we could be

I feel like the era I graduated into was a genuinely worse time for video game art taste writ large, and it stayed that way until gradually project by project we proved that the world didn't want uniform brown sludge to be THE defining look of gaming

now the aesthetics that broke us out of that rut are feeling overplayed, market forces are driving decisions into easily-digestible clots of The Expected And Safe, true AAA is in a bad way, but I just don't see the evidence that game art as a whole has gotten worse