The color of next-gen gaming is brown
by Blake Snow 
{ Oct 23rd 2006 at 1:55PM }
Aeropause compiled a montage of next-generation screenshots and found the overall color tones to be dull; mostly browns and greys. From the article: "Console developers have 16.7 million colors to choose from! Why are they still using predominantly greys and browns? This color scheme even seems to have spread outside of first person shooters and into other genres."
Author Nick encourages game developers striving for realism to "step outside and have a look around" because life's "not that drab." Well if Flickr's favorite color is a bluish grey, maybe it is, Nick. Maybe it is. Though we're with you on using more colors in games to escape this cold, hard world of ours.
[Image: Original montage as compared to our pixelated version]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
clay @ Oct 23rd 2006 1:58PM
dark colors cover up mistakes. period.
GlitchCog @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:06PM
The pixilation blurs stuff together. Get a bunch of brightly colored paints and mix them all together. You'll get brown.
That being said, I think most games are too brown, even if this "test" doesn't prove it. It's one of the reasons I'm drawn to Nintendo games over the realistic stuff other companies offer. I like the vibrant colors.
alan @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:07PM
Dude, brown is hella edgy and says, "The man doesn't get me, man. I'm playing by my own rules, because I'm a tortured soul sittin' out my couch playin' XBox."
LunarDuality @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:07PM
Chalk it up to all the post-apocolyptic settings... (Even the pseudo-historical stuff looks that way now.)
Pedro Van Faulk @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:08PM
What do we expect? For about 10 years straight any game that had more than 4 different shades or gray was labelled cartoony or lighthearted or "teh Kiddeh". Which spelt doom for it since no one wanted to have a kiddy game.
Hell, I've heard sony fanboys say that Halo is all cartoony and childish compared to killzone(now resistence) which is harsh and adult.
Sadly we live in a time where art design is a four letter word.
Mark W @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:08PM
Because the world is brown?
noob @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:09PM
maybe becuase dirt, which is what the ground is made of is brown?
the sky is blue...blue + brown = brown. brown + anything but black = brown.
brown owns.
BBXboy @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:11PM
Um, this is an absolutely ridiculous assertion... by averaging all of the pixels, of course you're going to get something neutral/brown. Try mixing up a bunch of primary colored paints and see what you get: yep, brown. In order to arrive at a down-sampled primary or bright color, the screenshot in question would require an overwhelming percentage of a given primary/bright color and would therefor lack anything akin to realism.
Looks like 'author Nick' needs to educate himself with regards to both color and resampling - in fact, I challenge anyone to come up with a single example of a down-sampled screenshot of any game that doesn't end up something like these when reduced to a single pixel. If it comes out bright and happy I guarantee the source if super-saturated and lacks much depth or contrast.
Sorry, but like the kids like to say, author Nick has been 'pwned'. There is zero credibility in this assertion whatsoever.
pixelate @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:13PM
OK, now we know who put in that preorder for Viva Pinata.
Unit @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:17PM
i agree with you LunarDuality, it's like the majority of next-gen games either are set in a post-apocolyptic world or your playing as some military soilder/space marine. it seems that developers think that if it's realistic it has to fall in these catagories military,dingy,blown up buildings, and shooting stuff. it's almost to the point were everything is lookin' the same!
LordMinogue @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:20PM
Yeah, I'm worried about Gears of War. EVERYTHING is the same rusty gray.
Gary @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:21PM
For example, I've always thought that Metal Gear 3 was a predominantly green game. Felt like I had grass stains on my eyeballs.
I've assumed that narrowing a game's color pallette allowed designers to squeeze more out of a console's performance.
Another example is perhaps that Assassin Creed's pallette is mostly black, white & gray with bloom effects.
2ez @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:21PM
Brown is the color of mature games! Any other colors are stupid and kiddie and should be on kidtendo!11
mocax @ Oct 23rd 2006 11:55PM
nobody's gonna buy Gears of War if the textures are pink! or worse, purple!
ALH @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:29PM
Brown has its places, Shadow of the Colossus would not feel as epic if it were bright and colourful.
MURKYNESS in games bugs me more than brown though the two often go hand in hand- shadow manages to get across a subdued colour range without falling into the trap of making everything impossible to see.
I hate how platformers like jak and daxter/ratchet and clank caught this murkyness bug too. When I play a platformer I want bright colours and blue skys, save the edgy stuff for the survival horrors PLEASE!
Same @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:07PM
Who is tired of killing zombies/nazis/aliens on dark places? That's all we got.
Jake @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:36PM
How about a 3rd person Mega Man shooter. That would color things up a bit.
Erik Novak @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:37PM
Marrowind was VERY brown. Oblivion was not. Sometimes a next gen upgrade can be GOOD for color.
White Cloud @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:42PM
I like brown.
bm @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:57PM
If twelve year olds see colors, they are oh so harshly reminded of the Teletubbies which they've only just stopped watching. They don't want that, they wanna be like the grownup people now. That's why most playstation/xbox games are brown.
Unit @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:51PM
although i had some issues with farcry, it was a good example of varying up the setting abit in a realistic game. You had lush jungle enviroments, then you had your lab settings, rusty dark and dingy metal enteriors and night scenes and they all had their own different colors chemes. It was def' a nice change of scenery in that game.
Rein @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:25PM
Perhaps all the designers are allergic to grass? I mean, I like brown and all, but I like other colors much more when it comes to video games.
And yeah, this whole post-apocalyptic phase games are going through is really annoying. I'm having a weird feeling that I'm not going to like next-gen games all that much.
jojo29 @ Oct 23rd 2006 2:59PM
World of Warcraft. Hold on i know some of you people out there DONT like this game but its a perfect example of a company (Blizzard) using the 16 Million+ colors we have. The game is not the best graphically, compared to its competitors, EQ2 and Guild Wars, it doesnt try to 'look' real, instead Blizzard masterfully combines their gorgeous art style, with the many colors out there, just take ONE flight from Darnassus to Silithus and you will be amazed how 'detailed' and 'colorful' yet 'fantastically realistic' all the landscapes look. I mean the atmosphere Blizzard has portrayed is amazing and is the REASON most people follow Blizzard: They have an original art style and an immersive atmosphere that only Blizzard games bring:)
benjamin @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:00PM
>life's "not that drab."
Yes it is. Life is cold and meaningless and hurtful. I'm going home to listen to some Linkin' Park and go cut myself.
I'm an emo kid, nonconformist as can be...
Evorgleb @ Oct 31st 2006 12:42PM
Browns and greys are being used heavily in cinema these days. makes perfect sense for video games to follow suite
headhunter @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:03PM
BBXboy, nobody will listen to you.
RGB = R + G + B, three components each up to 255.
Red = (255,0,0)
Green = (0,255,0)
Blue = (0,0,255)
So if you saw the screen in three red, blue, and greens stripes (the three components turning into all the colors of the rainbow), the pixelation (== average here) would be grey:
((255,0,0) + (0,255,0) + (0,0,255))/3 = (85,85,85)
As some colors are more common than others, the down-to-1-pixel color ranges from this grey to somewhere in the brown area.
Same thing, from a 2-color game to a 24M one.
And that's it. No post-apocalipsis yet guys.
Scutpuppy @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:15PM
This only gives further credence to an already overused allegation -- gamers never go outside.
DreamCodex @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:10PM
I guess I'm the only one who played Tron 2.0, or Katamari Damacy, or Killer 7, or Shin Megami Tensei. Plenty of colour in my next-gen diet. (But then, I don't give a toss about FPS'ers and military games, whose palettes seem confined to the gunmetal-to-scorched-earth colour range.)
32_Footsteps @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:11PM
Well, this isn't exactly a new phenomenon. To quote a previous generation's music stars, "It's not easy facing up when your whole world is black." I think the marketing trend du jour in video gaming is to reach out to the disaffected and pretentious, and if there's anything that group hates, it's bright colors.
I'm personally holding out for punk video games, where the colors are violently garish, covered with attitude, and frankly not giving a rat's ass what you think of it.
Evan @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:11PM
Yes, next-gen games are lacking colorful storylines and vibrant characters. The their plots are dull and colorless.
Matt @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:19PM
Well, they could make a hell of a M*A*S*H game on next-gen consoles huh
Epic @ Oct 24th 2006 10:35AM
This is pretty fascinating. The palettes really are pretty uninspiring. Part of the reason Half-Life 2 (and now Crysis) are so striking is the bright color pallete. Dark, post-apocalyptic corridor crawlers have their place, but the next-gen should really give us more interesting environments. Instead, we're taking steps backwards. Compare Battlefield 2 to Battlefield 2142, for a recent example.
spike117 @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:27PM
The reason these games have the same colour pallette is pretty obvious to anyone whos ever done 3D CGI work.
When trying to make things look pretty in CG it is much easier if the scene is dark. When the scene is bright all of your shortcuts are very very obvious.
If you want an example of this turn your brightness on your television up, does the game look as good?
Once the hardware reaches the point where it can render light efficiently and they start using modeling techniques like NURBS instead of polygons you will see brighter representations.
Pixars movies are a great example of bright colour pallettes, but if you look at their early shorts many are dark.
lordroba @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:29PM
I'll have to agree with BBXboy on this one. This article is just plain silly. Hey guess what color Katamari Damacy is when it is pixelated? Take a look for yourselves: http://img264.imageshack.us/my.php?image=katamaripixeliz5.jpg
Aden Nak @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:29PM
So basically, after ten long years, we've reverted to the original Quake palette?
http://wiki.quakesrc.org/index.php/Quake%20Palette
This amuses me more than I can even really say.
Designerbradr @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:32PM
Blake,
Your pixelated version only makes this issue even more confusing. What you did (arbitrarily decrease the pixel count to 3x5) is not an accurate representation of the average of the colors on those screenshots. And while I would argue that cherry-picking screens from various in-game or CG scenes compeltely decimates Aeropause's argument, I took the liberty of correcting your attempt to expand on their point.
If you take a look at the image below, I've averaged each screenshot's pixels to obtain the overall tone of the image.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y138/designerbradr/miscellaneous/Screenshots_Averaged.jpg
Your way of doing things mixed pixels from other images instead of averaging those inside each. Feel free to use it.
Those of you claiming the Wii is the counter-punch, take a look at this screen.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y138/designerbradr/miscellaneous/WiiScreens_Averaged.jpg
I took several screens form upcoming Wii launch games, screens that I thought best represented actual gameplay as well. The colors are indeed brighter on an overall basis, but do note that the more mature-rated the title, the more "muddied" the screens get.
The problem with this method is that (as some have already mentioned) inevitably you'll always end up with an unpure color – a brownish or grayish color of the hue. It's just a natural way that visual colors mix.
As an art director myself, I will agree with the general point about some next-gen games looking too muddied or too one-dimensional. Art direction is the key as with any game – making or breaking the game design. It can be bright and obnoxious or it can just as well be muddied and beautiful – it all depends on how cohesive your color scheme is and how you use color throughout the game to evoke a mood. And It also has to work with all the design aspects of the game and seem like a unified package in order to transcend all the other malarkey out there.
Some new games seem to be in the right direction, like Zelda and Bioshock, others, like Lair, could use something extra to give it that personality or punch. Of course it's all subjective when you get down to it. But there is some bit of truth in the article – perhaps a real concern.
Martin @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:45PM
Browns the color of poop. Maybe the next gen is poop!
Now back to being mature.
It really just seams that games have taken a more mature route through the years. What once needed to be colorful to show detail doesn't really need to be anymore, which is why color scheme is getting darker and darker.
geo dude @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:48PM
Why not a shooter in a San Francisco like place along colored row houses or in some colorful fishing village or something like a colorful Mexican town. How about a wildflower meadow where you could duck down for cover? There are so many places.
I see no reason why developers can't base thier realistic games on some of the more colorful places on this planet.
Tomas @ Oct 23rd 2006 4:41PM
I just made a similar point on xbox360fanboy.
i'm sick and tired of the same f*ckin pseudo-realistic dull palette everytime.
that's why I love my Dreamcast so dearly, why I'm excited about getting my hands on a Wii, and why I'm getting Viva Piñata when it comes out.
as simple as that.
Lixie @ Oct 23rd 2006 3:48PM
Not any new news. I've been telling people for the last two years that Western games are just variant shades of grey and brown.
Finally, someone else noticed.
Dejital @ Oct 23rd 2006 4:40PM
The color of NEW gen ;-)
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/4302/newgenif9.jpg
Pince @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:08PM
As the current consoles gain graphical capabilities, the immediate reaction of most developers is to try to make their games seem incredibly photorealistic. That is the main conclusion that I draw from looking at those screenshots.
It would be nice to see more developers use current graphical technology to diversify their artistic styles trying to ignore the human obsession with creating something that looks photorealistic.
Realism is fine, but as it has become possible to create something very realistic, it seems like many developers are ditching the idea of having distinct styles and favoring attempts to model the very pores of human skin. That's cool I guess, but there is so much more that can be done. Like pinatas.
I reference games like Castlevania SOTN (gorgeous in 2D, with an amazing level of detail), Katamari (wierd, polygonal graphics, but a huge scale and ability to model tons of crap onscreen with sharp detail), Mario Sunshine (same old Nintendo artstyle, with an emphasis on beautiful water effects), Sly Cooper (my favorite Cel-shading example), etc as examples of games that take advantage of their graphical power of their respective machines, but in different ways that just creating incredibly realistic images.
More of them please.
FSK405K @ Oct 23rd 2006 4:51PM
I don't see any Wii Sports Tennis or Super Mario Galaxy in there, so it's obviously not an accurate representation of "next gen" gaming.
Jeff @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:23PM
"Not any new news. I've been telling people for the last two years that Western games are just variant shades of grey and brown.
Finally, someone else noticed."
It's not just you. I've been saying the same thing for a while now. Go open up any Famitsu and yeah, you'll see some blacks, greys and browns, but you'll also see a lot of blues, reds, pinks and whites. Open up EGM and it's just dark, dark, dark.
It's gotta say something about our national mood. Seriously.
I was just in Japan earlier this month - every time I go there it is almost shocking to me what a happy place it is. I know that sounds goofy, but it's true - especially compared to paranoid schizophrenic America. Their games reflect that, and so does their gaming media.
It goes hand in hand with the box art comparo we saw here a while back, where all the western game releases had snarling characters in the midst of swinging various weapons, while the Japanese versions had the same characters more often than not just standing around smiling.
I have to admit that video gaming here has just gotten really dark and depressing lately. Aren't we all supposed to be having fun? Or is dark and depressing the "new fun"?
F3nyx @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:27PM
If you want to conduct a meaningful analysis, use a color histogram instead. Averaging the colors together obliterates the real patterns.
JD @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:35PM
Hopefully game designers will finally take notice that this junk looks all the same. (I get it, apocalyptic war is cool, mkay?) I was hoping that BF 2142 might be different. It is supposed to be in the future after all -- no need for images to based on current reality. But surprisingly in another hundred years, the future is going to look just like texture maps from 1990.
Mr. Khan @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:30PM
I would agree that its simply because everyone assumes that "colors are teh kiddie"
And more "mature" games can be rendered in living, breathing color, like Red Steel, the Metroid Prime series had some very colorful spots, and Killer 7 most games based in Space also seem to use a broad pallate of colors to help supplement the uniform black
AssemblyLineHuman @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:38PM
But benjamin: "Screw Xbox, I play old-school Nintendo."
What's up with that?
Mark @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:42PM
#18 has it right. FarCry must have used almost every shade of green and blue possible. FEAR uses lots of pretty reds, and HL2 sported plenty of orange!
There's plenty of color to go around, people. Don't be racist. Open up your eyes! [/endinjoke]
Mr. Khan @ Oct 23rd 2006 5:41PM
Sorry for the double post, but i made another observation
Designerbradr makes the assumption that Wii games have brown/dull colors overall, just like everyone else, but the only games that get that overall brown are Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam (not "kiddie" themed but not mature themed overall either) and Wii sports, which he too could've easily cherry-picked that image (bowling alleys are generally brown)
The point he should've made is that "Mature-ish" themed games seem to be universally dull, while Nintendo's franchises largely escape that.