Bloodstained Graphics Discussion.

I guess your intentions were to be informative, but it comes off as rhetoric. Cadtledan had already given a proper response and simply liking his comment can show you are inclined to agree with it. If you would like to discuss this further please feel free to PM me.

I forgot about the Sword or Whip comments hinting towards 2.5D. Come to think of it, I don't think I remember reading about it at the FAQ on the very bottom of the page.

There was an Ask IGA video where he talked about the graphics/camera angle, and to me, that was where a lot of details were clarified and IGA gave a better idea of what to expect from Bloodstained.

Looking at something the Miriam Facebook page asked (anything about the game so far you don't like) and the minority opinion thread, I posted this to the page just now:

The only thing I really have is something they can't really do anything about...it's just the nature of how things are. A lot of us deep down want a 32 bit 2D game with beautiful sprites like Symphony of the Night, but making a modern game that way is next to impossible, or would take a length of time that would extinguish a budget or just cause the game to go into something of a Duke Nukem Forever production crawl/halt.

Here's the thing to me, though. If you're doing a Kickstarter for the fans, do you -have- to do a modern 1080p game? If it's indie, I think many would be fine with something 480 or SD. Sprites will be pixelated upscaled to modern televisions obviously, but isn't that kind of the rage now anyway? Big, blobby pixels? So long as they're clean, I think that's fine.

I may be in the minority, though...the game wouldn't look its objective "best" this way. The more time goes on, too, the harder it will be to sustain continuous 2D content on modern technology.

I can't say that I'm disappointed per se or expected different from the project. It's just the nature of how things are today. Could it have been kept 2D on a portable platform, with just a HD edition upscale on PC/console (Azure Striker Gunvolt)? Yeah, I think so...but it just wasn't and isn't meant to be. I'm hoping the mini-game/retro game and classic mode content is good, though, and they can sustain a good bit of the "2" of 2.5 overall.

Just a post from the .

Yeah but are those 2d games as deep as an igavania? We're talking 100's of enemies with unique animations. Tons of items, weapons, a fully explorable castle. Not just that but in many of the games you mentioned they're level based and much more basic. (

I think it's reasonable to believe a game like this might cost more money to do in 2d not to mention they would be able to do more for less in a 2.5d landscape like visual changes to the character which is much easier to do with 3D models.

That's just my take of it. They wanted to return to consoles and I can appreciate their honesty about this being the easiest, cheapest, and most efficient way to do it.

Plus it looks damn good. Look at that character model? Look at that sprawling environment, you could do really neat things in 3D.

The ONE thing I'll miss is the charm that 2d ANIMATION can bring. I just highly doubt they could ever top the animations they were able to do in SOTN in a 2.5d style game.

Animation is a huge part of it. Ironically enough, there are just way more fantastical things you can do in 2D than in 3D. Plus, what you can't see, the imagination can take and run with it. What we can't see in the far distance of a SotN background enhances the mystery and romance of the setting, while actually -being able- to see everything around us in a 3D game takes that away. You can see what's there, and it probably pales to your imagination.

crocodile , I've been saying that for years for fighting games especially. I hear SO OFTEN that excuse in relation to creation of 3D fighting games instead of 2D, but there are infinitely smaller offices than Capcom making 2D HD fighting games. I'm not even talking about Arc Systems, I'm talking about Examu's Arcana Heart, Aquapazza and Nitroplus Blasterz or French Bread's Under Night In-birth. BaseSon/Unknown Games' Koihime Enbu. Examu and FB/Ecole are like, 1/100th of Capcom? These games come out pretty regularly, and must not cost that much to make seeing as these tiny studios keep doing them. I don't buy the 2D time consuming/expensive thing either.

Now however, the last time I went on a rant about this in a FB group I'm in, someone chimed in with this and it makes sense:



So yeah, there are a lot of factors to consider in the market. Could it still happen? I think so. It may eventually. I'm looking forward to it if/when it does, but until then I'll remain crotchety about this daggone third dimension as I have been since the mid 90s.

smaller companies also arent usually spending massive amounts of money just existing, capcom is paying lawyers, accountants, hr people, management, marketers, analysts, a bunch of people that can influence a game being made without ever having to actively have a hand in making the game

as for depth, there are quite a few tricks that could be employed to keep things mysterious, from using the lighting to keep far objects in just enough shadow that you wonder whats going on back there, to using different layers of objects and parallax to tease or have things come into view only when you are in certain spots, im sure iga and the team will have plenty of ideas on cool stuff and mysteriousness to put in the background

That rebuttal you posted from Facebook is both correct in some respects but also a bit weird? Like yes, the developers at Examu, French Bread, etc. could be overworked and underpaid but what makes them think the developers at Capcom are each making $100k a year and sipping margaritas while they program during their 5 hour business days? To that end, Lab Zero was certainly underpaid for their efforts on Skullgirls - especially the kickstarter portion of it - but even if you doubled their pay for the entirety of the project, you still end up with a relatively cheap game ($2.6m budget vs. 5.2m budget). Also cost of living has to factor into things - the Witcher 3 was made on a very small budget for a AAA game because Polish wages AND costs of living are lower than in a lot of other countries.

The argument that "what sprite based fighter has gotten any traction" is a bit of a non-sequitur because then its not an issue of cost but rather an argument that "the mainstream consumer" prefers games with a 2.5D/3D look. Which is a fine argument to make and I've heard others make it as well but that has nothing to do with the actual cost of development. I'd also say the fact that all 2D fighting games are attached to smaller/niche IPs is going to inherently limit their appeal. EVEN THEN, games like Blazblue, Persona and Skullgirls have all put up good sales and tournament attendance numbers. If the argument is, "why isn't this game as popular as Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat?" well then very few fighting games are going to reach that bar no matter what.

I can appreciate that making games is hard but I'm not sure I cosign the notion that "playing it safe" is always the best way to succeed or that always defaulting to 3D is "playing it safe"(though again, the are real reasons why someone might want to go 3D - to does have its benefits). The aesthetics for games that go 2D is often an actual selling point. Going 3D for say a Vanillaware game is not a guarantee of additional sales.

...yeah. That's about all I can post at this point now, lol. I just agree crocodile .

Though I'm with Astaroth and Dan in that I have faith they're going to do very well with what we have here.

That's just the way it is, man. I'm sure we don't/can't know all of the true factors behind this, but for sure, the big point we can't overlook is that a game of the desired scale is much more feasible in 3D. SotN itself reused a lot of sprites from Dracula X as it was, Bloodstained would have nothing to start from. No lore or ideas otherwise to piggyback off of, either. That just sounds too big and scary to undertake.

Fighting games, though? Yeah, they have no excuse to me. KOF 14...well...it looks better than it did. But 13's sprites being gone...it hurts my soul. I should purify more weird ones to feel better?

ghaleon , if you're referring to what I said, what I meant when I threw out the resolution numbers is, it feels like game companies don't want to release a full HD game in 2D because of the detail and work necessitated with that. A lot of time has to go into drawing something as large scale as that, and animation of all of those same images in frames, etc. On a smaller screen, you don't need as much of that - the player likely wouldn't be able to see smaller detail anyway, and if they're playing on a larger screen and can make out the pixels easily, so what? It's not really a shameful thing, I think, to most now. I'm not saying something like drawn/2D = SD or anything, just that the higher the resolution, the more work is perceived by the producer to show the same things. Not necessarily so. Upscale the PS1-era resolution, put a filter on it if you want, and it's fine.

Yep. I don't like how Shadow Complex looks either. And yeah, KOF is leveraging cast size, and they do certainly have that over SF5 and Xrd.

Let me be the first to say that I don't pretend to know things about game design. I hope nothing I've said has implied anything different, I mostly take the stance of I don't know what I don't know, so I'm slow to judge decisions. I'm more or less just speaking from what I enjoy in games and the frustration when I don't see those things as much now.

The better conversation you're hoping for would have to come from people working in it themselves, and my understanding is that they're likely chained to desks and haven't seen their families in years, so they won't be coming around any time soon to chat us up lol. Otherwise, you have the ol' standard people who like to think they know what they're talking about, which are often the most willing to talk, so...

Playing fighting games brought me to the place, I think, where I can just quickly recognize in any field that there's more to it than I know, so I respectfully and generally don't dive into anything with my thoughts and opinions. Unless it's fighting games, or Castlevania, or Souls, or swords, or...