'No Rest For The Wicked' Creator Trashes AAA Games Industry's Generic Art Styles, Uses 'Highguard' As An Example
Thomas Mahler, the creator of No Rest For The Wicked, lampooned the current state of the AAA games industry and its lack of originality especially when it comes to art styles.
In a post to X, Mahler wrote, “It’s always fascinating to me how many large studios employ incredibly talented artists - you see amazing concept art, great color keys, strong mood boards - and yet the final shipped product often lands in a very safe, very familiar visual space.”
From there, he used the recently released Highguard game, which has seen its peak concurrent player counts decline by over 99%, as an example, “The problem is that games like Highguard, for example, don't even look 'bad'. Instead, they really just end up looking very bland, basically generic.”
To highlight this point, he asked readers to compare Highguard to Halo 4 and see if they could tell the difference in the art style.
He notes this is not exclusive to the AAA games industry, but is also happening in film and TV, “We’re seeing something similar in film and TV right now. ‘Netflix lighting’ has almost become shorthand for a very flat, hyper-readable, algorithm-safe visual language.”
To that point, one need look no further than Lucasfilm and The Mandalorian. The concept art that the show shared at the end of episodes was better than the actual final product and in many cases even promised a better story than what the show delivered.
Obviously, there are a number of examples of this generic art style both in video games as well as in film and on television, but there are some examples that stand in contrast to Mahler’s critique. For example, his own game No Rest for the Wicked features a gothic dark fantasy art style. Unicorn Overlord also features a hand-drawn painterly art style.
NEXT: Former 'Highguard' Artist Blames Gamers For Game's Failure
The beauty of art and creativity is the enemy of those in power. You cannot have things that inspire hope in the masses. That's why everything is bland and sad now, even McDonald's - the food may have been crap, but the restaurants used to scream fun to little kids. Now they all look like insurance agencies.