right, uncharted has lots of color, it depends were the game is taking place, gaming is gettin more realistic. this isnt marios world anymore.

if you want color play Final Fantasy advance tactics

i need bubbles. fanboys been assauklting me

Try Eternal Sonata on the 360.Its like someone took a paint factory and poured it into an RPG

XBOX can be accused of this, gears of brown

But look at the PS3,
GTP, LBP, Uncharted, Warhawk so much colour

Probably because i like reduced color pallets. But i think if the setting suits the situation and environment then i think that's a good thing. I love Uncharted but it was actually too bright for me (for the stuff on the boats/jet skies and... That other part towards the end that i don't want to spoil). Assassins Creed is another vibrant game (Jerusalem is beautiful) but games like Gears, Dark Sector, basically every game with war tones to the overall game is a depressive state. Sepia tones are supposed to instate a depressive, slow, down feelings from the overall theme and setting.

I don't understand how this even bothers people. It's not like we're playing games in gray scale. A colourful battlefield isn't immersion to me.

That's right, god forbid any game to have an atmosphere.

Go take some LSD if you want to be surrounded by bright colours.

He's got a point though...Still, some games are quite colorful but nowadays, most looks dark and gritty...Nothing wrong with that though...

It's all thanks to Gears of War and that inferior console known as 360.

Well look at metal GRAY solid that game(movie) is about as colorless as it gets. Not to mention you play some metrosexual dude that crawls around in a cardBORED box. I mean really MGS looks f@acking colorless, slow, real S L O W, then you watch a colorless 90 minute movie? good gawd! is that the best sony can do?

Killzone 2 is like going to "another world", just a black and white one.

I kind of disagree with the article because all the games he mentionned were designed to have these palettes and some of those games actually have colorful aeras.

But still, he's right to a certain point: the colors can be a bit annoying. Like the original Killzone really p1ssed me off with that, everything was f*ing gray, the only other color was the red that appeared on your crosshair when you were seeing a enemy.

Gears has a color setting I'v never seen gears look like that pic used for this post.

Lair was worse than MGS4's Green tent or KIllZone 2's Greys, puts the Blue/green tint in Burnout Pardise to shame.

I guess he's right. Also I hate how the push for realism kills the fun. Neither Skate or the new Tony Hawk are fun. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 was the best because the final level was in space with a volcano.

And Unchartered was awesome. :)

Rule nº1 put down the saturation it´s will more realistic!

nº2 make dirt texture looks more realist and less tiled

nº3 set a color grading to create a more realistic ambient!

Nº4 don´t care about gamers hes don´t know nothing about cgi and 3d!

well i really like the new look of the games! less saturation is better to see and to play long hours! look like cgi movies.

but the most important, more dirt, grain and low saturation = more realistic

less dirt, no grain, and a full color and saturation look CGI and Cartoon!

Cya!

d-3studios.com

You're living in the past man, move on everything's changed...

New games do have to ( in their sort of own virtual atmosphere ) look and feel real, it's in their makers' level of progression. Sign of the times and competition as well.

Meh, Halo 3 had a very colorful palette, but people argued that it was too "cartoony". Depressing color palettes sell these days, mainly because it looks more life-like. I guess that's something that the "hardcore" gamers want.

dumbass devs removed it in the name of "realism".

Also because dull colours help cover up graphical problems like in gears of war.

thankfully we have the bright and colourful resistance2 to save us from such monotone monotony!!

p.s I use the non-american spelling of colour so dont call me a retard hu cant spell!!!

GeOW2 looks just like UT3,and ive been playing those grafix for about a year now.the sad thing is that GeOW2 will never beat UT3 cause without the mods its crap.PLAY B3YOND waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay B3YOND!!

I hate dark games. I get depressed very easy without color.
Yes I want my games to bring me a bankey and warm milk. I play games to remind me of when I was a child and to exscape the real world.

Just look at Halo 3. That has plenty of color. The graphics on the other hand aren't exactly worthy on a next gen game, certainly not one of Halo's stature.

If you want color, go buy a Wii. Games don't revolve around cartoon characters anymore, the realism is welcomed.

People who complain about there being too much "Browns and Greys" are morons. If you want your game to emulate real life then you are going to have to use a lot of bland colors. Get your heads out of the clouds. The only color spectrum you people are familiar with is that of a rainbow. Sorry, I geuss those people living in war torn countries forgot to paint their hut an eye appeasing color b4 it got blown up.

Where I think games like Gears and COD could improve is their explosion effects. When something explodes in one of those games all you see is a plume of smoke. Where is the fire?

This explains why I loved Team Fortress 2 and hated COD4

This dude needs to go pop some lsd and watch the teletubbies. He'll see all the magical colors he wants.

You can't use the whole there ain't colour in the middle-east thing....Last time I checked they had invented colour.
Even in games COD4 the insides of the wall should have paint on it or something, my walls are blue! not grey!
The lack of colour bothers me because even in an army settings the grass is still green!
Pro colour!

colourful with great graphics

oh and great textures for the moron at the top

this topic fails. its the devs decision wether they should tone down the color or not, most games coming out like this are based on Warzones, what games have these bland colors:

MGS4
KZ2
GeOw
COD4
Reistance 2

Guess what these games have in common, you guessed it, its takes place in the middle of a F***ing Warzone! it has nothing to do with the consoles being limited to power bunch of f***ing idiots. its so you can get the feel how its like to be in the warzone, aka the middle of the action in a Crappy enviornment cause War made that way. Does this look at this picture, does this look colorful to you? if you say yes, you deserve to have your testicle cut up.

-Uncharted is a game that takes place in a Jungle and uses almost the same mechanics that Gears uses, does that take place in a Warzone? No

-Look at the 360 two platformers, Viva Pinata and Banjo, look how colorful that game is, is that in a warzone? No, its a freaking family game

-Look at Rachet and Clank Future(the game that looks like a pixar Movie made by insomniac) that game uses the Resistance Engine, yea that engine that powered Resistance 1 and is going to Power Resistance 2. Rachet and Clank Future takes place were in a futuristic place were our favorate characters Rachet and Clank go out to save the world again, does it take place in a Warzone? No its also a Family Game idiots and its very colorful

you idiots have to take it easy with the "OMFG this games has no Colorz THIS GAME IS TEH SUXORSSS." its obvious that you idiots dont know art direction.

why doesn't he just play more colorful games then? like... Super Mario Galaxy? He talks about Mario 64 as if games like that don't exist anymore. Hello? the sequels? And instead of playing the gray games, why not try the "not-so-gray-games"? Switch Gears with Uncharted if it should be like that? Play Crysis, Brawl or Viva Pinata first, and then you could try complaining again.

Snakus has made a well written article.

I particularly like these observations:

'These shots should depict a fun-filled skating game, yet in reality they look like shots from a heroin game where you have to skate to get your next fix'

'Nowadays, all screenshots basically look like they are from the same post-apocalyptic World War III nuclear fallout nightmare.'

Using Bioshock as an example seems a mistake to me. Bioshock is stylistically distinctive and has superb use of colour. It's not depressing in a 'oh the world is so grey' way. Its a mixture of post-war austerity, carefree, colourful opitimism and the belief in science's ability to solve problems (and, although it is a simplistic and wrong cliche in many ways if applied to real life, post 50s disintegration, which happens very early on in Bioshock).

2001 is arguably a key year in this development- this is about the time that it was realised that Dreamcast, unfortunately, wasn't really improving its position in the market. Sega's games had crisp, bright, colourful, elegant visuals. In this year, the Xbox was launched. Despite Halo being quite a colourful game, there seemed to be an emergence of a large number of brown looking war games.

Sony's platforming mascots, Crash Bandicoot and Lara Croft eventually became multi-format. Ratchet and Clank and Jak and Daxter remained Sony exclusive. Examining the plot of these games indicates that sci-fi themes were becoming more important to Sony's platformers. Even Blinx the timesweeper on the Xbox, a great looking game, has a sci-fi theme. Meanwhile, Rare, who were arguably more important for platformers than any other company in the N64 age, is yet to make an entirely new game in any of their platformer series since being bought by Microsoft- publicity for Conker: Live and reloaded concentrated on the more gritty, violent war-oriented multiplayer aspect than the graphically spruced up single player game and even Nuts and Bolts is only 20% platforming, although I now think that it is a going to be a fun, well constructed, game to play.

Sony, who I think should be devoting more resources into making rip roaring adventure games like 'Uncharted: Drake's Fortune', to carpture some of the energetic spirit of the early Crash Bandicoot/Lara Croft days, mostly seem content to play Microsoft at their own game with titles like 'Killzone', 'Resistance' and 'Metal Gear Solid'. This is a battle that Sony are losing, maybe partly because Microsoft actually have some colour in some of their shooters, and are backed up by alternative shooting genres, eg westerns, like Call of Juarez.

The Wii is a relatively reliable console for the kind of visual experience asked for in the article. It's just a shame that more PS3 and Xbox360 games can't strive for this uncluttered elegance, in both visuals and storytelling- not because they are always necessarily better (that's a matter of opinion) but for a change. Mirror's Edge is a good example of distinctive PS3/ Xbox360 visuals.

He had more fun playing those older games because he was a kid then. Who thought about Resolution and FPS when they were 8.

Does color and GPU power have anything in common? What I mean is do they need to dumb down the color in some games to meet the requirements of the graphics?

It seem to me that if your game is going to have very hi end graphic/ realism, You have a choice to dumb down the color or have frame rate problems. Crisis has both great color and graphics, but look at all the juice it takes out of your computer!

I wonder if COD4 would have problems running in nice color???

What a Pansy

just play viva pinata, that game should calm youre thurst for color and if you want more, well, XBL arcade has lots and lots of color games in 2D!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

thats why i love uncharted and all the jungle games (crysis, etc)

it's because every game that comes out this generation runs on the Unreal Engine 3. that engine just doesn't seem to do much for bright colors.

it's not the lack of color that's giving him this feeling. it's the lack of vibrant color. and that's acceptable in a few games, but when every game looks the same...that's when it gets old.

oh, and GTA doesn't fall into this category. it has plenty of color, but it has many ranges of weather effects, and since it's a city, there's a lot of smog, so unless it's a really nice day, the colors will look bland. but that's realistic, which is what they were going for.

but it's not the lack of color, it's the lack of original Game Engines.