Oh yeah ... being a german, I have no idea how that woud be offensive. But when I search for Jerry Cans on amazon.de I actually find gas canisters. So maybe that's just the name of the guy who invented them??
I personally love the visual style of the game. I even crank up the HDR a bit because the color blast, my eyeballs want to be entertained, too.
Horizon 1 + setting all my lights in sync with my living room hue system was as incredible to me as my first VR experiences, especially in the really dark underground environments with neon lights. It's something that you have to experience to get.
To each their own regarding the visual style but when it comes to the valve argument I kind of want to be nitpicky: a) Horizon uses the valve player guiding especially in it's underground mission design (like for example green lights at exits, lightning of important things, sound effects, anything pushing you in the right direction, you can find analog things in Horizon as well but mostly in linear valve-like environments) b) while the commentary from portal says "clutter bad" it also explicitly references Half Life (2) which said "clutter good". Not a good argument, because I don't want all games to be the same, and neither does Valve apparently.
I'm not argueing that Horizon is perfect btw, it's not. But I love the environments and exploring them, and like Jess I would love there to be more eyecatching stuff driving me to interesting discoveries. Sadly in Horizon there are a lot of eye catching objects (even seen in the video here) but mostly that's just window dressing. They don't need to change the visual design for it though, they need to maybe rethink their "map design" or a dozen other things. There isn't a single cause and a single solution. BotW solution is mostly if it's important it gets glowy colors, otherwise it looks washed out which defined the look of the game. You could totally do that in Horizon without changing much. Single out a never or barely used color (there are some, or you can slightly change some designs and force it) and let all important shit glow in that color. There are ways ... Changing art direction is a bad solution though because that kind of is one of the most important elements of the game IMO.
In short, I enjoy these takeouts, but I totally disagree with the a to b to c from "that worked in one game I liked so all similar games need be that way". I'd love a game that has the exploration of BotW and the look of Horizon, but I disagree with that BotW should be the starting point for anything open world.
Also I think for a debate about valve and botw game design this video is actually too short because I think that part is really interesting and still kind of new in the open world context and also I think the click baity "colors ugly" part of it takes up too much of the whole thing. But I would love to hear some actually designers talk about that as well though. Maybe actual Horizon devs? I'd love that. But that might be a symptom of Jess drifting from controverse opinion of art into game design which I don't know this is the best format for.
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