For me it has to be Toki. The characters were so weird and creepy, especially the bosses!
Probably Morrowind. The game is ugly and the mechanics are a bit clumsy, but damn did I love it. Prolly clocked over 3,000 hours in Vvardenfell man.
I love Morrowind so much that I refuse to admit to its ugliness. I will choose to believe that the less-than-perfect graphics simply enhance the alien look and feel.
Same with the fog to cover up draw distance issues.
“It’s called an art direction sweetie, look it up.” But without any sarcasm.
The game mods that increase the view distance take something away from the games magic, IMO. To this day I remember walking down the road and seeing Vivec city suddenly appearing in front of me from the fog.
Understandable. It’s such a good game.
such a cool game, i would love to play the whole series!
They’re all definitely worth playing.
I think because I played so long ago, that for that time it looked to me fantastic.
its so ugly but the art direction and colours are so on point that it still looks gorgeous to me
oh lord, i need to know more about this game immediately! going to find playthrough on youtube hahaha
This was what I immediately thought of.
Oh my god. It’s beautiful.
Kenshi. It’s simultaneously janky and beautiful.
oh damn, how have i never heard of this game? really interested
Pathologic is a pretty ugly game, but, if anything, it adds to the charm and atmosphere of the game.
“Charm.” Yes. That is the word for Pathologic.
damn this game looks so interesting!
For me, it has to be Dragon Age Origins. I love the brains out of it, but it is as ugly as you can get. Thankfully the rest of the game is fantastic.
Minecraft
Seriously how the hell? It’s fairly basic and unless you have the chops and patience to rebuild a minecraft new york city, not much else going on
But then I fire that pixelated crap up again and off i go trying to recreate a giant tower that looks like a penis.
My mommy group had a minecraft server when all our kids were potato stage and it was mostly a few very talented redstone builders, a few people collecting resources, and my husband in the corner building a penis castle with penis fountains overlooking our little town.
The penis is inevitable.
aw. your husband is also a man of culture i see!
hahaha I am actually glad that it doesnt look polished, but still looks good enough. This way you can make it much prettier with mods, but if you have a slow pc you can also enjoy playing it without much trouble!
Honestly, just how damned ugly minecraft is puts me off every time I think about trying to play it!
Mods, friend! There is some very pretty minecraft out there!
I have seen it being played with apparently higher res graphics packs and… just, wow it’s still ugly! I mean I haven’t exactly looked deeply, but…
Honestly, fair. What counts as pretty to minecraft people is still probably objectively a bit jank. That, and you can make builds and lighting and textures that are truly beautiful at a distance, but minecraft gameplay is usually not at a distance. Gameplay is you standing half a meter from an ugly tree so you can punch it to death.
Nidhogg 2 - I love the first game and the second game is fun, but I honestly hate the art.
yeah i love the first one. i have heard the second one is worse, what do you think?
Does Old School Runescape counts? Cuz damn do those graphics have aged but I still love it to bits.
definitely hahaha even though they created a new one, people still prefer the old. Unfortunately i never played it growing up, I feel i missed out
Old school RuneScape still is alive! It actually has more active users than RuneScape 3. It’s a ton of fun!
Nethack
Hot take: nethack with tile sets is uglier than nethack without the tilesets. At least the ascii characters are interesting! Either way. I love nethack.
ascii nethack is beautiful
that is more imagination than graphics haha looks pretty awesome! check out pocket rogue on android, it has the same graphics
I assume we are only talking about games that looked ugly pretty much upon release, and not games that look really bad now but are still really fun.
In that case starting with the most recent:
Save Room - Puzzle game that is just the inventory management from survival horrors like Resident Evil. Might be just a simple joke game, but I had a lot of fun with it.
Outcast - The voxel tech just wasn’t ready. Amazing game, one of the best of the era, but it its visuals left a lot to be desired. Modern updates have greatly improved its look.
Eradicator - This one was looking out of date when it came out, but its a surprisingly awesome and deep 90’s era shooter.
amazing picks! eradicator actually doesnt look that bad, reminds me of doom, but only if you are using 4 main colors ahaha
I feel like responding with Cruelty Squad might be cheating a bit…
someone already did before you, so you are good hahaha crazy game
Beauty is, I think, somewhat in the eye of the beholder. A few games that couldn’t have been called very conventionally pretty, though:
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A number of roguelikes that use ASCII graphics (though today I play Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead* in graphics mode). Same for Dwarf Fortress. Often these are very deep games with a lot of gameplay to explore and a lot of replayability but nobody is playing them because of their graphical beauty.
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The Dominions series and Conquest of Elysium series from Illwinter are fairly-involved strategy games, which both have graphics that…well, I can understand someone appreciating some aspects of them, but again, nobody is buying these games for the graphics.
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Kenshi – a squad-based open-world sandbox game – has a certain amount of attractiveness, but the textures and models are limited in detail and I don’t think that people are going to call its graphics beautiful or on-par with high-budget games today.
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Noita is a difficult action roguelite game where one constructs wands using various spells and spell modifiers and gives one’s wizards various powers as they dig through a world. The graphics are pretty chunky pixel stuff, which someone can enjoy but aren’t something that you’d probably play the game just to look at.
I think that the importance of graphics is more-important for games that don’t have a lot of replayability. There’s a lot of “oh, wow” factor when you see something beautiful and it’s still novel. But if you see something many, many times, eh, less-impressive. A lot of roguelikes and roguelites focus on replayability – the graphics of something that you’ve seen countless times are going to be old hat at some point, no matter how pretty.
i am glad that they updated the graphics on dwarf fortress, such a great game but too complex for someone to begin getting into
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VVVVVV
i disagree, i love this game’s graphics it is really pretty!
Sid meiers colonization.
just checked it out. i dont think its that ugly, i love the bright colors and the graphics are just the limitations of the time
Probably Risen, I’m a Pirahna Bytes fanboy.
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