For me the biggest thing is sprite art. God damn do I hate playing 2D Mario with 3D graphics - I've hated it since New Super Mario Brothers, something about it just makes the game look mushy and shitty and generic. One of the best things about Super Mario Wonder is that they put an awful lot of effort into aping the old 2D style with that game's animations and environments - in the same way that for example Arc System Works games ape anime art with their 3D models - and I have to ask why they don't just do high quality sprites from the jump?
I also like sprite art; it's literal art frame to frame. The original 90's doom is more fun to me than the new ones and in my honest opinion feels better to look at.
This is why unfortunately. KoF XIII tried that and it looks absolutely fantastic, but the amount of time it takes an artist or even a team of artists to do 500+ drawings per character is intense.
High quality sprites are expensive and difficult to work with. Think about if they were to release a new fighter like slayer. The number of hours to get good sprites for thr transformation makes it prohibitive. Also, there are way fewer artists skilled in that anymore. 3d is still cheaper and easier. And, now that they can do it well all kinda of cool options are opened up with rotation and transformation that couldn't be imagined before
Bespoke pixel art is an unbelievable amount of work. I always like the example of Dead Cells where the art guy had too much work to do by hand so he went with low-poly models run through a pixelization filter and exported to a prerendered sprite sheet. Much, much faster than working by hand, and it also allowed him to do things like easily adjust animation timing and minor movements without needing a whole new sprite or a weird visible pause in the sprite animation. It's like the opposite of Donkey Kong Country, which did prerendered sprites for the high amount of detail at the time, he did it because it's so much less work these days.
For me the biggest thing is sprite art. God damn do I hate playing 2D Mario with 3D graphics - I've hated it since New Super Mario Brothers, something about it just makes the game look mushy and shitty and generic. One of the best things about Super Mario Wonder is that they put an awful lot of effort into aping the old 2D style with that game's animations and environments - in the same way that for example Arc System Works games ape anime art with their 3D models - and I have to ask why they don't just do high quality sprites from the jump?
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I also like sprite art; it's literal art frame to frame. The original 90's doom is more fun to me than the new ones and in my honest opinion feels better to look at.
This is why unfortunately. KoF XIII tried that and it looks absolutely fantastic, but the amount of time it takes an artist or even a team of artists to do 500+ drawings per character is intense.
High quality sprites are expensive and difficult to work with. Think about if they were to release a new fighter like slayer. The number of hours to get good sprites for thr transformation makes it prohibitive. Also, there are way fewer artists skilled in that anymore. 3d is still cheaper and easier. And, now that they can do it well all kinda of cool options are opened up with rotation and transformation that couldn't be imagined before
Bespoke pixel art is an unbelievable amount of work. I always like the example of Dead Cells where the art guy had too much work to do by hand so he went with low-poly models run through a pixelization filter and exported to a prerendered sprite sheet. Much, much faster than working by hand, and it also allowed him to do things like easily adjust animation timing and minor movements without needing a whole new sprite or a weird visible pause in the sprite animation. It's like the opposite of Donkey Kong Country, which did prerendered sprites for the high amount of detail at the time, he did it because it's so much less work these days.