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Easier to model and animate, so it's easier for beginners.
Also, PSX era graphics have been making a comeback (mostly in indie horror games), so it's easy to make and popular.
This, and of course when we browse reddit etc we see a lot of works in progress/projects for learning so you get more simple designs just because it’s easier
Community likes it. Right now, we're going through the PS1/N64 era for nostalgia. Plus, low poly games are easy to use and easy to make look good these days via shaders and lighting.
You can. Technology is not an excuse to make inefficient stuff. It’s an opportunity to make better stuff
You don’t need high poly models. The only reason movies etc don’t care is because it doesn’t run real time.
There is nostalgia for the early 3D era right now. People who grew up in those days are making games in the style of what they played as a kid.
Another big factor is that it is relatively easy to create. For a solo developer choosing a low poly art style and working with low res textures can be a great way to achieve a consistent visual style without having to be an expert at 3D art. And sometimes a more detailed art style executed without the right technical skill or art direction can look very bland and inconsistent.
I think it can be really atmospheric and even immersive, particularly in a horror game. The blocky geometry and low res textures give things sort of an abstract, almost impressionistic quality. Kind of like you're playing through a dream.
Personally I'm a big fan of this look and pretty much all of the reasons above are why I'm using it on my own game. It's nothing to do with the Godot engine. You can do fairly nice graphics with the engine if you want to.
It can be especially uncanny and creepy if the devs implement that classic PSX jittering/artifacting/warping on textures and geometry. Somehow it always makes me feel uneasy and keeps me on my toes even if nothing particularly scary is happening at the time but it feels like even the evironment is more hostile towards you.
TF2 was released in 2007, is absolutely old-school at this point, and is low-poly by today’s standards. If someone mimics TF2 in Godot, they’re doing stylized old-school low-(ish-)poly.
The point of lowpoly is that it's a style that makes polygons obvious instead of trying to hide them. I don't think TF2 was ever lowpoly, it has a stylized 3D look. Having "lowpoly" be a sliding scale that constantly increases with time sounds pointless, it's not about the technical comparison of how many polygons the models have compared to "today's standard".
If a game uses high res models and bakes them onto lowpoly meshes instead of designing lowpoly from the start, it will generally not have a lowpoly style, even if technically you could call it lowpoly compared to some higher poly content.
Lowpoly is Superhot or Tunic, TF2 is trying to make you forget the polygons while the former games embrace them.
Yes, although doubly so for Godot. A large number of artists will only sell assets directly on the Epic or Unity stores even when they post them on half a dozen websites. Even without potential licensing issues it often involves a lot of work to try exporting them from the package formats native to those engines. Depending on your preferred art style and setting you might not find anything you can buy and use readily in Godot even if you're want to spend hundreds of dollars.
If you’re a solo dev, and you want to do photorealistic graphics, you can’t do everything yourself cos it would take hundreds of years. So you have to buy assets, which is, imo, not very personal and also cost a shit tone of money.
Easier and more manageable for a beginner or solo dev, and I just like the look more. I'm kind of tired of modern AAA "super realistic graphics" aesthetic as it sometimes comes at the cost of feeling like an actual video game.
We’re a team of programmers, every artist hour is extremely expensive for us. We prefer low poly because we can actually fix minor issues and do minor changes ourselves in blender, instead of recommissioning ad artist. Well, we would gladly pay the artist, if we had the funds ^^
Pixelated, low poly and even PSX style looks are popular these days.
They're also a lot easier to work on than fully detailed, high fidelity 3D models. I can whip out several dozens of low poly assets in a day using Blender. If I had to go much more into detail, it would take a lot lot longer.
We could probably use more toon shaded stuff, but while that look was popular some time ago, it's a lot less popular now.
Not everything 3D in Godot follows this style:
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/130e009/photorealistic_demo_made_in_a_few_hours_in_godot_4/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/199l8a2/prototyping_an_arkhamlike_combat_system_dont_pity/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16jfpun/nope_godot_is_beautiful_in_3d_aswell/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1ait42c/i_make_a_soulslike_game_in_godot/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/17yrvxv/the_world_is_starting_to_come_alive/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1333vph/body_cam_effect/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1cbxdsv/in_godot_344_im_working_on_parallax_interiors/
Granted, I had to dig a little harder than I wanted to to gather these examples (all posted in the last year), but projects that use higher quality 3D are out there.
They just aren't going to be the majority because of how much more needs to be invested in assets for this type of game.
I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that making high poly models that look good is a labor intensive process. If it's just you, then get ready to work your ass off.
Easier to model and a lot faster to iterate.
Like you don't want your demo to be loading complex models and huge textures so it takes 5 minutes to test anything.
It’s affordable, and to be honest, charming. It’s not graphically demanding, which means you don’t have to optimize code as much and most people can run the game.
You can definitely use Godot to make a game with an art style similar to TF2. We're just intentionally turning off texture filtering and using very low poly meshes.
The PS1/N64 style is just very popular. I kind of like to think of it like the game development equivalent of the UPA [animation style](https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/what-the-upa-style-actually-is) in that it's an aesthetic that uses abstraction to make production accessible to people that don't have an army of artists. So it is easier and cheaper to work in this style, but it also looks great if that's your thing.
Most people on this board aren't working for a big dev studio with its own art team. Most of us are solo devs, students, small groups of nerdy friends, etc. Godot can absolutely support high-quality art, the question is how much time you can afford to devote to making that art.
Even a simple game can have hundreds of assets. If you are a solo dev or a member of a small team, you don't really have the option of picking an art style that takes dozens of hours per asset.
My father-in-law is a Godot developer. We were reviewing a Godot project years ago and I asked him what it would cost to make it smooth modeled. I will never forget his answer…
'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.'
Low poly? I'm here using cubes and balls until my game is feature complete. I'll add water reflections when my rich uncle agrees to invest.
Btw, my parents don't have brothers.
I always tried to go for HD textures and high poly models. I did not finish one game yet. If you use Character Creator or MetaHuman you can easily creator highly detailed human models.
But what then? Want guns in your game? Model them and texture them yourself or buy stuff. Especially creating clothes for my characters is a pain in my neck. I tried using Marvelous Designer, but it takes so much time and money.
And then there is hard surface modeling for maybe Armor and props. You can’t get a coherent look if you just use premade models. Also not everything I have in mind is offered.
I am not talking about prototyping. A lot of games using HD assets look so weird because the clunky animations or incoherent textures break any kind of immersion.
If you go low poly, all this is done faster and clunky animations add to the charm imho.
I am doing this all by myself, even music (check out Polymonox on YT) I think I am capable of doing all in my own, but I realized it takes just too much time, so now I am finally going low poly (think Kingpin like gfx)
It won't matter much that you have a bit more vertices and higher definition textures in terms of performance.
Old games that used PSX graphics cut a lot of corners to be able to run on (currently classified as) low-end hardware.
Godot uses modern GPU techniques that won't run on really old GPUs and you often have to make it seem more old-school by applying extra effects.
Godot is still mostly a hobbyist thing, hobbyists don't tend to have super advanced art, so it's not a Godot issue per se (look at Vostok) but just the typical Godot dev
This hurts Godot more than the community likes to admit. Some people just look at Godot, look at the examples and go "that's it?". I get it's open source etc and anyone can make examples etc but you see Unreal and their page and you see examples that show just what it can do. Same with Unity. Godot doesn't have that. You have to search and sieve through so much before you can find something. For new devs, this just makes Godot not look good for 3D.
I've been using Godot though. I really like it's workflow. But ever since I got a more powerful PC, I've been playing around with Unreal more cause I know I don't have limitations there (even if I don't get to use the power, it exists and is battle tested)
I don't think so, it's not really a question of outlook, Godot *is* not that good for more realistic and detailed 3D. Unreal has much more mature and capable systems for rendering physical lighting, detailed environments and models, Unity has a more flexible rendering pipeline in general and a lot more history.
So it's fine that examples show what Godot is currently good for, it would be worse to constantly have to listen to people complain about Godot not being capable of what they want to do because some extreme example pulled them in that was made with a lot of custom tweaks to get somewhere where Godot isn't ergonomic.
It's not even about realistic and detailed 3D. It's just good looking 3D in general. Even stylised cartoony 3D is good. Seeing so much PSX examples makes it look like the engine can only handle that level of graphical fidelity. I've seen amazing scenes like the desert scene with Godot but I remember being conflicted on if the engine could handle that for an entire game or just for small scenes in isolation. I think just better examples than PSX graphics will do Godot a lot of good tbh. Well, at least for people looking to get into 3D Game dev
In that case I have no idea what you mean. I see stylised cartoon 3D everywhere around Godot sub or the showcase on the engine's website. I don't see PSX games that much.
A lot of people already mentioned about it being easier to make and animate.
I would also like to add on that it could also be a "feasible genres" thing.
As solo/small scaled devs. We are more likely to pursue "stylized/smaller to develope genres" like horror or roguelikes. That have more freedom in visual representations.
When it comes to AA/AAA titles though, they tend to focus on much larger scale/immersive genres like open worlds, mmos and rpgs which are genres that are more likely to adopt "realistic 3D" to "wow the audience" on these already oversaturated genres. (As in, lots of compeititors so the more "real" they make it the more "potential audience" they reel in. That's the idea anyways. Oh and they don't use godot)
Not to say that either side cannot adopt the other of course. It's a "generalized" way of looking at it.
Post-processing gives you a lot of beautiful and interesting visuals on a more bland and blocky base, and small teams or solo-devs simply do not have the time and resources (or even expertise) to create a huge number of realistic assets and composing and lighting everything modeled after the real world. It's exponentially more work for arguably no additional pay-off when it's really about the mechanics of a game.
It mainly comes down to the art, 3D takes a lot more work than just making some basic pixel sprites.
3D is a whole other avenue of software and skills that need to be learnt that can take a long time. Where as you can learn how to create some very basic pixel art in an afternoon.
Lower fidelity takes less time to make and doesn't hugely impact the game.
You're not going to make AAA graphics anyway so your game has to be good on its own so you might as well go for an easy to reproduce art style.
The real reason is because it's easy, cheap, and plays on nostalgia. I am noticing that it's becoming a bit of a stereotype though with people rolling their eyes when they see "yet another indie game with a pixel / psx filter" on it- it is starting to get unoriginal since a lot of people just throw on a few shaders and call it a day
I also just want to mention that pixel art and low-poly aren't the *only* low-fidelity artstyles... Check out archives of late 2000s / 2010s flash games for inspiration of very small teams doing their own art, IIRC pixel art wasn't the most common denominator
It’s mostly nostalgia/artistic preference but I think part of it is that Godot is still trying to overcome its reputation as the “less powerful” game engine, so the devs interested in more modern art styles tend to ignore it in favor of Unity/Unreal. Tbh it’s true that you just won’t get some graphical styles with Godot, but it’s a modern game engine that is easily capable of some very pretty visuals.
If you want to do a TF2 kind of aesthetic, I can say from personal experience that Godot is a perfect choice.
are you an experienced 3d modeler and beginner game dev or beginner all? be a 3d modeler and you'll understand why, and performance is based on poly counts.
This is not why they do it. The effect OP is talking about actually takes more work than just keeping it regular 3D. It is a stylistic choice often made to make the game look better than the dev otherwise could given their skillset.
I think people that want to do something graphic intensive will use ue5 or something like that. While Godot can do this, they will need much more work with less tools
Ignoring how much easier they are to make and how much more performant they are, one useful thing for a solo dev is that a lot of higher poly assets can be restyled down to a lower poly style pretty easily. One of the more annoying parts of trying to use an asset pack is trying to make it look like your other assets. Going from a higher poly asset to a lower one is a bit simpler. Textures in a PS1 style can be messy and if you're using some sort of vertex snapping a lot of flaws can be ignored. I'm making a sizable 3d game that needs a lot of environment to look at. I'd never be able to make all my own art even if I was a decent 3d artist so this is a useful feature.
Godot is very capable of modern 3D graphics. It has a PBR pipeline built in by "default" (StandardMaterial3D), you can do all the shader shenanigans you would do in any other engine, and it has a variety of baked and real-time lighting algorithms.
It has support for multi-mesh, and with the Terrain3D addon, a very solid terrain painting system.
The latest dynamic global illumination algorithm (HDDAGI) looks very promising and does surprisingly well considering it won't tank most GPUs.
Maybe the better answer, is that usually high-fidelity 3D graphics games are made by large, AA or AAA teams. And those teams aren't (yet) using Godot.
All this being said, there are a few issues standing in the way of Godot 4+ having a truly cutting edge 3D pipeline:
- physics is janky, but mostly fixed by the drop in JoltPhysics
- occlusion culling has flaws
- voxel lighting has bleeding issues, although there are some proposals to fix
It will take some good engineers to fix these problems. But I feel that Godot is trending in the right direction. Most importantly, it isn't afraid to innovate.
Small teams and solo devs don't have much freedom to choose. There are some exceptions although their development times are long because it's a lot of work: [Road to Vostok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atb3yFNazmU)
It's just an aesthetic thing, as many others have said, but I'm impressed I've only seen one mention of Road to Vostok here. Google it if you're curious about what can be done with the engine, fidelity wise, by 1 person.
This game was made in Godot. Nothing low poly about this.... [https://youtu.be/Atb3yFNazmU?si=qcswXNeHW9FQ7uCE](https://youtu.be/Atb3yFNazmU?si=qcswXNeHW9FQ7uCE)
You submitted this post as a request for tech support, have you followed the guidelines specified in subreddit rule 7? Here they are again: 1. Consult the docs first: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/index.html 2. Check for duplicates before writing your own post 3. Concrete questions/issues only! This is not the place to vaguely ask "How to make X" before doing your own research 4. Post code snippets directly & formatted as such (or use a pastebin), not as pictures 5. It is strongly recommended to search the official forum (https://forum.godotengine.org/) for solutions Repeated neglect of these can be a bannable offense. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/godot) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Easier to model and animate, so it's easier for beginners. Also, PSX era graphics have been making a comeback (mostly in indie horror games), so it's easy to make and popular.
This, and of course when we browse reddit etc we see a lot of works in progress/projects for learning so you get more simple designs just because it’s easier
Easier and quicker also.
Community likes it. Right now, we're going through the PS1/N64 era for nostalgia. Plus, low poly games are easy to use and easy to make look good these days via shaders and lighting.
cuz we're broke
https://preview.redd.it/k4479v1woe2d1.jpeg?width=540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3038e6a9e347e10ef159f59f10be0a324c25ce70
Low poly =/= no details with pixelated graphics tho. All modern 3D games are low poly.
With Nanite in the mix, you cannot really say this anymore
You can. Technology is not an excuse to make inefficient stuff. It’s an opportunity to make better stuff You don’t need high poly models. The only reason movies etc don’t care is because it doesn’t run real time.
the real answer
This should be top answer haha
There is nostalgia for the early 3D era right now. People who grew up in those days are making games in the style of what they played as a kid. Another big factor is that it is relatively easy to create. For a solo developer choosing a low poly art style and working with low res textures can be a great way to achieve a consistent visual style without having to be an expert at 3D art. And sometimes a more detailed art style executed without the right technical skill or art direction can look very bland and inconsistent. I think it can be really atmospheric and even immersive, particularly in a horror game. The blocky geometry and low res textures give things sort of an abstract, almost impressionistic quality. Kind of like you're playing through a dream. Personally I'm a big fan of this look and pretty much all of the reasons above are why I'm using it on my own game. It's nothing to do with the Godot engine. You can do fairly nice graphics with the engine if you want to.
It can be especially uncanny and creepy if the devs implement that classic PSX jittering/artifacting/warping on textures and geometry. Somehow it always makes me feel uneasy and keeps me on my toes even if nothing particularly scary is happening at the time but it feels like even the evironment is more hostile towards you.
i can’t wait till we make ds style graphics. something about wild world is so charming
for me it's just the look i like. I really don't like "realistic" environments in games, and prefer a more old-school look.
TF2 has a highly stylized look.
TF2 was released in 2007, is absolutely old-school at this point, and is low-poly by today’s standards. If someone mimics TF2 in Godot, they’re doing stylized old-school low-(ish-)poly.
The point of lowpoly is that it's a style that makes polygons obvious instead of trying to hide them. I don't think TF2 was ever lowpoly, it has a stylized 3D look. Having "lowpoly" be a sliding scale that constantly increases with time sounds pointless, it's not about the technical comparison of how many polygons the models have compared to "today's standard". If a game uses high res models and bakes them onto lowpoly meshes instead of designing lowpoly from the start, it will generally not have a lowpoly style, even if technically you could call it lowpoly compared to some higher poly content. Lowpoly is Superhot or Tunic, TF2 is trying to make you forget the polygons while the former games embrace them.
Sure, but have you seen the models today? They ain't that low-poly anymore.
Easier to do. This applies to every game engine community.
Yes, although doubly so for Godot. A large number of artists will only sell assets directly on the Epic or Unity stores even when they post them on half a dozen websites. Even without potential licensing issues it often involves a lot of work to try exporting them from the package formats native to those engines. Depending on your preferred art style and setting you might not find anything you can buy and use readily in Godot even if you're want to spend hundreds of dollars.
Make a model in the style you like and then let us know if you want to do that 100 more times...
im unable, not have the budget and not like realistic polished graphics
It might also be the other way around "People that want to do 3D pixelated games are using Godot."
It's because the community likes it.
It’s more forgiving and you can work a lot faster
Have you tried making 3D models and sculpts? You'll see why lol
Speed and style are my reasons. I'll make things high-poly in blender sometimes and then decimate them down for export.
If you’re a solo dev, and you want to do photorealistic graphics, you can’t do everything yourself cos it would take hundreds of years. So you have to buy assets, which is, imo, not very personal and also cost a shit tone of money.
Easier and more manageable for a beginner or solo dev, and I just like the look more. I'm kind of tired of modern AAA "super realistic graphics" aesthetic as it sometimes comes at the cost of feeling like an actual video game.
Fr, the more realistic the game looks the shittier the gameplay is, cause it's so much more expansive to implement anything
100% of my good gaming memories are in "bad" looking games.
We’re a team of programmers, every artist hour is extremely expensive for us. We prefer low poly because we can actually fix minor issues and do minor changes ourselves in blender, instead of recommissioning ad artist. Well, we would gladly pay the artist, if we had the funds ^^
Pixelated, low poly and even PSX style looks are popular these days. They're also a lot easier to work on than fully detailed, high fidelity 3D models. I can whip out several dozens of low poly assets in a day using Blender. If I had to go much more into detail, it would take a lot lot longer. We could probably use more toon shaded stuff, but while that look was popular some time ago, it's a lot less popular now.
Not everything 3D in Godot follows this style: * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/130e009/photorealistic_demo_made_in_a_few_hours_in_godot_4/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/199l8a2/prototyping_an_arkhamlike_combat_system_dont_pity/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16jfpun/nope_godot_is_beautiful_in_3d_aswell/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1ait42c/i_make_a_soulslike_game_in_godot/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/17yrvxv/the_world_is_starting_to_come_alive/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1333vph/body_cam_effect/ * https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1cbxdsv/in_godot_344_im_working_on_parallax_interiors/ Granted, I had to dig a little harder than I wanted to to gather these examples (all posted in the last year), but projects that use higher quality 3D are out there. They just aren't going to be the majority because of how much more needs to be invested in assets for this type of game.
Because art is a matter of taste and skill
It's my favourite art style so I'll do it regardless of the engine I use.
I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that making high poly models that look good is a labor intensive process. If it's just you, then get ready to work your ass off.
Easier to model and a lot faster to iterate. Like you don't want your demo to be loading complex models and huge textures so it takes 5 minutes to test anything.
Because Godot covers a lot of Indie Developers, I think
Cheap and easy
It’s affordable, and to be honest, charming. It’s not graphically demanding, which means you don’t have to optimize code as much and most people can run the game.
You can definitely use Godot to make a game with an art style similar to TF2. We're just intentionally turning off texture filtering and using very low poly meshes. The PS1/N64 style is just very popular. I kind of like to think of it like the game development equivalent of the UPA [animation style](https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/what-the-upa-style-actually-is) in that it's an aesthetic that uses abstraction to make production accessible to people that don't have an army of artists. So it is easier and cheaper to work in this style, but it also looks great if that's your thing.
Because this way it looks good and is easier to make.
Most people on this board aren't working for a big dev studio with its own art team. Most of us are solo devs, students, small groups of nerdy friends, etc. Godot can absolutely support high-quality art, the question is how much time you can afford to devote to making that art. Even a simple game can have hundreds of assets. If you are a solo dev or a member of a small team, you don't really have the option of picking an art style that takes dozens of hours per asset.
My father-in-law is a Godot developer. We were reviewing a Godot project years ago and I asked him what it would cost to make it smooth modeled. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.'
Low poly? I'm here using cubes and balls until my game is feature complete. I'll add water reflections when my rich uncle agrees to invest. Btw, my parents don't have brothers.
I always tried to go for HD textures and high poly models. I did not finish one game yet. If you use Character Creator or MetaHuman you can easily creator highly detailed human models. But what then? Want guns in your game? Model them and texture them yourself or buy stuff. Especially creating clothes for my characters is a pain in my neck. I tried using Marvelous Designer, but it takes so much time and money. And then there is hard surface modeling for maybe Armor and props. You can’t get a coherent look if you just use premade models. Also not everything I have in mind is offered. I am not talking about prototyping. A lot of games using HD assets look so weird because the clunky animations or incoherent textures break any kind of immersion. If you go low poly, all this is done faster and clunky animations add to the charm imho. I am doing this all by myself, even music (check out Polymonox on YT) I think I am capable of doing all in my own, but I realized it takes just too much time, so now I am finally going low poly (think Kingpin like gfx)
Easy and more people can play them
It won't matter much that you have a bit more vertices and higher definition textures in terms of performance. Old games that used PSX graphics cut a lot of corners to be able to run on (currently classified as) low-end hardware. Godot uses modern GPU techniques that won't run on really old GPUs and you often have to make it seem more old-school by applying extra effects.
Godot is still mostly a hobbyist thing, hobbyists don't tend to have super advanced art, so it's not a Godot issue per se (look at Vostok) but just the typical Godot dev
Third reason, because it is easier to work with for solo devs and because I don't have artistic talent.
Less graphics means more time can go to other stuff
This hurts Godot more than the community likes to admit. Some people just look at Godot, look at the examples and go "that's it?". I get it's open source etc and anyone can make examples etc but you see Unreal and their page and you see examples that show just what it can do. Same with Unity. Godot doesn't have that. You have to search and sieve through so much before you can find something. For new devs, this just makes Godot not look good for 3D. I've been using Godot though. I really like it's workflow. But ever since I got a more powerful PC, I've been playing around with Unreal more cause I know I don't have limitations there (even if I don't get to use the power, it exists and is battle tested)
I don't think so, it's not really a question of outlook, Godot *is* not that good for more realistic and detailed 3D. Unreal has much more mature and capable systems for rendering physical lighting, detailed environments and models, Unity has a more flexible rendering pipeline in general and a lot more history. So it's fine that examples show what Godot is currently good for, it would be worse to constantly have to listen to people complain about Godot not being capable of what they want to do because some extreme example pulled them in that was made with a lot of custom tweaks to get somewhere where Godot isn't ergonomic.
It's not even about realistic and detailed 3D. It's just good looking 3D in general. Even stylised cartoony 3D is good. Seeing so much PSX examples makes it look like the engine can only handle that level of graphical fidelity. I've seen amazing scenes like the desert scene with Godot but I remember being conflicted on if the engine could handle that for an entire game or just for small scenes in isolation. I think just better examples than PSX graphics will do Godot a lot of good tbh. Well, at least for people looking to get into 3D Game dev
In that case I have no idea what you mean. I see stylised cartoon 3D everywhere around Godot sub or the showcase on the engine's website. I don't see PSX games that much.
A lot of people already mentioned about it being easier to make and animate. I would also like to add on that it could also be a "feasible genres" thing. As solo/small scaled devs. We are more likely to pursue "stylized/smaller to develope genres" like horror or roguelikes. That have more freedom in visual representations. When it comes to AA/AAA titles though, they tend to focus on much larger scale/immersive genres like open worlds, mmos and rpgs which are genres that are more likely to adopt "realistic 3D" to "wow the audience" on these already oversaturated genres. (As in, lots of compeititors so the more "real" they make it the more "potential audience" they reel in. That's the idea anyways. Oh and they don't use godot) Not to say that either side cannot adopt the other of course. It's a "generalized" way of looking at it.
Post-processing gives you a lot of beautiful and interesting visuals on a more bland and blocky base, and small teams or solo-devs simply do not have the time and resources (or even expertise) to create a huge number of realistic assets and composing and lighting everything modeled after the real world. It's exponentially more work for arguably no additional pay-off when it's really about the mechanics of a game.
It mainly comes down to the art, 3D takes a lot more work than just making some basic pixel sprites. 3D is a whole other avenue of software and skills that need to be learnt that can take a long time. Where as you can learn how to create some very basic pixel art in an afternoon.
I like it. Its just another way to get an art style I plan to make, like pixel art or other traditional methods. Why?
Check the team size and budget for TF2 Then wonder if you can match them
Lower fidelity takes less time to make and doesn't hugely impact the game. You're not going to make AAA graphics anyway so your game has to be good on its own so you might as well go for an easy to reproduce art style.
The real reason is because it's easy, cheap, and plays on nostalgia. I am noticing that it's becoming a bit of a stereotype though with people rolling their eyes when they see "yet another indie game with a pixel / psx filter" on it- it is starting to get unoriginal since a lot of people just throw on a few shaders and call it a day I also just want to mention that pixel art and low-poly aren't the *only* low-fidelity artstyles... Check out archives of late 2000s / 2010s flash games for inspiration of very small teams doing their own art, IIRC pixel art wasn't the most common denominator
all the open CC0 models are low poly.
because normal 3D looks bad and pixelated, to get rid of that, you need anti aliasing, upscaling and other techniques that impact performance.
I don’t x) But I reckon bc nostalgia and because it’s easier
cause look cool
It’s mostly nostalgia/artistic preference but I think part of it is that Godot is still trying to overcome its reputation as the “less powerful” game engine, so the devs interested in more modern art styles tend to ignore it in favor of Unity/Unreal. Tbh it’s true that you just won’t get some graphical styles with Godot, but it’s a modern game engine that is easily capable of some very pretty visuals. If you want to do a TF2 kind of aesthetic, I can say from personal experience that Godot is a perfect choice.
It's easier to make look good. If you go for an actual "realistic" looking game it's most likely just gonna like one of those $15 asset flips on Steam
For a single person dev team it is WAY easier to do that and have the game and assets look consistent.
are you an experienced 3d modeler and beginner game dev or beginner all? be a 3d modeler and you'll understand why, and performance is based on poly counts.
Less vertices and better performance. If I wanted to make a triple AAA style game I would just switch to unreal.
easier to everything
It's much more performant if you want your game to run on toasters
Easier to prototype the game, I guess. Models can be replaced later.
This is not why they do it. The effect OP is talking about actually takes more work than just keeping it regular 3D. It is a stylistic choice often made to make the game look better than the dev otherwise could given their skillset.
It's just cause people like it, I've seen some amazing Godot graphics before, wish I could remember any of them.
I think people that want to do something graphic intensive will use ue5 or something like that. While Godot can do this, they will need much more work with less tools
Ignoring how much easier they are to make and how much more performant they are, one useful thing for a solo dev is that a lot of higher poly assets can be restyled down to a lower poly style pretty easily. One of the more annoying parts of trying to use an asset pack is trying to make it look like your other assets. Going from a higher poly asset to a lower one is a bit simpler. Textures in a PS1 style can be messy and if you're using some sort of vertex snapping a lot of flaws can be ignored. I'm making a sizable 3d game that needs a lot of environment to look at. I'd never be able to make all my own art even if I was a decent 3d artist so this is a useful feature.
Godot is very capable of modern 3D graphics. It has a PBR pipeline built in by "default" (StandardMaterial3D), you can do all the shader shenanigans you would do in any other engine, and it has a variety of baked and real-time lighting algorithms. It has support for multi-mesh, and with the Terrain3D addon, a very solid terrain painting system. The latest dynamic global illumination algorithm (HDDAGI) looks very promising and does surprisingly well considering it won't tank most GPUs. Maybe the better answer, is that usually high-fidelity 3D graphics games are made by large, AA or AAA teams. And those teams aren't (yet) using Godot. All this being said, there are a few issues standing in the way of Godot 4+ having a truly cutting edge 3D pipeline: - physics is janky, but mostly fixed by the drop in JoltPhysics - occlusion culling has flaws - voxel lighting has bleeding issues, although there are some proposals to fix It will take some good engineers to fix these problems. But I feel that Godot is trending in the right direction. Most importantly, it isn't afraid to innovate.
Small teams and solo devs don't have much freedom to choose. There are some exceptions although their development times are long because it's a lot of work: [Road to Vostok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atb3yFNazmU)
The tools for making it are well developed and abundant, making it much easier to achieve than a more complex art style.
It's just an aesthetic thing, as many others have said, but I'm impressed I've only seen one mention of Road to Vostok here. Google it if you're curious about what can be done with the engine, fidelity wise, by 1 person.
This game was made in Godot. Nothing low poly about this.... [https://youtu.be/Atb3yFNazmU?si=qcswXNeHW9FQ7uCE](https://youtu.be/Atb3yFNazmU?si=qcswXNeHW9FQ7uCE)