No, almost every graphic (when used effectively) can help create a masterpiece. The “eye candy” you refer to can help the player get engrossed into the experience and even storyline.

“Eye candy” is not what MM was talking about here.

Sheldon: I’ve found an emulator online that lets you play classic text based computer games from the 1980s.

Leonard: That’s pretty cool.

Sheldon: Oh yes. It runs on the world’s most powerful graphics chip, imagination.

p.s. Le Petit Prince rocks!

However it’s hard to prove if it’s a matter of taste or willingness to use our imagination. New generation gamers aren’t much into that, while stylish retro art is what I’m looking for. But I’m an old school gamer.

KAG’s artist is doing an amazing job btw.

At first I thought I was lazy by not doing more intricate artwork and making it look nice. I’ve seen so many indie games get the review: “Well it looks like an awesome game, looks fun, but the graphics need major improvement.. not enough detail.” Personally I hate that. In my opinion it’s very rare for eye candy to work well with a game. For instance, 4 of the greatest rpgs on the SNES: FF3, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana and Zelda: Link to the Past have beautiful artwork that worked well for the games. It really helped set the atmosphere which helped tell the story. The graphics were also functional somewhat. Lastly, of course even back then developers wanted top artwork in their games, but due to the systems limitation, the artists had to be creative.. you only had so many pixels to make a piece of wood look like a piece of wood.

However, I’m still drawn back to simplistic and minimalistic graphics. I still play Adventure for the Atari 2600 for hours at a time. I even have it on my DS via StellaDS, I can never get enough, and… your hero is just a square.

I guess I call it functional minimalism.

Let’s take DF. I know you play that game since you referenced it somewhere. It’s cool the way it is, being free and all. But I think you’ll agree that simple, functional graphics would only benefit that game.

That said KAG doesn’t have weak graphics. It has perfectly adequate graphics. I think the important part is to differentiate functional graphics from eye-candy. Functional graphics serve to convey information about the gamestate or to define gameplay. A realistic red-dot scope with the red dot being actually colimated is functional. Fog or dust is functional as long as it actually obscures enemies or otherwise has an effect on gameplay.

Eye-candy serves mostly to market a game because it looks nice on trailers. After a while people don’t even register the eye-candy or even turn it off.

Michał you always seem to have a good point and then take IT TO THE EXTREME END+1. Or at least that’s the way you present them.

Yeah, im ok with that.