Some of my earliest gaming experiences were strategy games. Slowly, as they went from text-mode BBS doors into very visual games – the graphics went from non-existent, to serviceable and then to really quite pretty.
…then, after that, they moved to 3D, but this article isn’t that particular rant. No, this is about colour.
Let’s go back to Dune 2. Colour was a bit limited due to the video cards at the time, but the palette was chosen quite well. Lots of things to emphasise the dry, hot climate of Arrakis. To indicate the different sides, little flags and selected parts of a unit would take on the colour of the house in question. That’s easy enough.
Now to Command & Conquer. While I’d enjoyed Dune, C&C was the game that blew me away. For the time (and, to my eyes, even today) the game had absolutely incredible graphics. The right combination of hand-drawn art over pre-rendered 3D objects gave warmth, depth and authenticity to the world, and as fellow RRQ’er Jay said on our recent podcast, really hit home with its near-future world. You’d be fighting small-scale wars in Bosnia when the news reports showed precisely that happening – and the bleak, wet & muddy forest environments even seemed to have that washed out early-90s TV footage look about them.
And, to show which side you were on, key parts of buildings and units took on colours – just like in Dune 2. These colours were generally pastels – or at worst, a maroon/red. But on these units, they still looked appropriate.
But C&C did have seriously good art direction. It had the right feel for the bleak but frenetic warfare it allowed you to direct, and it was colourful without being too colourful…and that’s the important part.
When film moved from black and white (which really isn’t the right term – it was more shades of grey) many filmmakers at the time weren’t very pleased. Probably for the same reason people still love the evocative nature of black and white photographs. (They got even more unhappy when there was a brief fetish for colourising old black and white films. One famous director famously said something about a colouriser to the effect of “keep him and his crayons away from my damn film!”)
As games advanced further, we moved from 256 colour into a wide palette, allowing a full range of visual expression. But these days, we are able to see a full range of incredible art direction. From cyberpunk-styled noir like the Mass Effect series to the Sin City-inspired mayhem of Mad World to the urban grit of Grand Theft Auto IV.
The latter deserves specific mention because it manages to retain a grungy style while transiting from very different colour palettes depending on the weather and the time of day. If you’re an art snob, it’s an incredible time to be a gamer. Not since the hand-drawn beauty of the early VGA era have games looked this distinctive – or this good.
But while this was happening, most strategy games seemed to suffer from the problem of practicality. Sure, you could make it grungy, hyper-coloured, warm or cool when it’s an action game, but in a strategy game there’s an underlying importance that the player can discern what units are what, right? And whose side which units are fighting for?
Well, that’s obviously a fairly important factor. And so, as strategy games progressed, we got games that kept the basic way of defining these things that Dune 2 and Command & Conquer had used. The scenery got gritter, but the units became so colourful that in some cases they began to resemble polygonal ants-nests with bright colours for each side – the army of hot red striped things VS the army of hyper-colour blue blobs.
You can see this in Total Annihilation, to an extent. The icy, tropical or dull metal terrain are home to powerful, hulking robot armies that, despite the fairly bright colouring of the sides, still seem believable as they literally crash through forests.
And by the time we get to the Supreme Commander series, it’s reached a whole new level again. Instead of robots in jungles, armies in the balkans or Space Marines on the planet Tartarus, we have brightly coloured armies, with friend and foe clearly delineated by colours that could have been ripped off the wrapper of an ice cream aimed at kids or a bad Saturday-morning cartoon.
Now, it’s of course almost certainly true that while for some reason this hyper-colour, Japanese-anime art style was chosen for the game, a probably larger factor still was for players to be able to simply and easily pick out which units are friendly and which need to be crushed.
This is very important, right? This seems to be the guiding concept behind many modern strategy games.
Practical games that don’t immerse you in a world, and as a result leave you cold.
Sure, to go back to Supreme Commander for a moment – it’s obviously a well-polished game. The unit types and sides are well-balanced, and they take the best concepts from Total Annihilation and extend them into would really should, by most old-school TA players, be adopted as the perfect strategy game.
Yet it isn’t – and while it may be the much-lauded zoom-out-to-mini-map aspect that makes the game so impersonal, more than anything else I think it’s the dry, uncreative visual style that’s to blame. Its only purpose seems to be to remind us that we’re playing a game, like children playing with Tonka toys in a sandpit after school.
This is not to say that bright colours or a Saturday-morning-cartoon look can’t suit a game. Just look at the flawed masterpiece that is Mirror’s Edge for a much better use of this sort of colour, or perhaps Borderlands – or even the quickly-forgotten shooter XIII.
But these are distinct artistic choices, where-as strategy games seem to constantly bow down to the perception of “ease of play” and obvious units over a consistent, artistic and immersive visual style.
But I guess that’s only fair. After all, surely if a strategy game employed a distinct style that brought its world alive, it’d be at the expense of playability – and really, it’s the desire to create a tournament-playable game that drives strategy game developers these days.
Right?
That’d be why this game – Company of Heroes – failed so miserably, and failed to draw in any gamers.
Oh, wait. Sorry. I must have gotten that confused with something else. CoH is still widely played, and has a huge and avid base of players online at any time.
Strategy games do not need to look as boring as they often do. And if you argue that CoH has it easy, as many players can already identify the different tanks and uniforms as they’ve been drilled our heads through documentary after war movie after mini-series… just go back earlier in Relic Entertainment’s strategy lineup.
Back to Dawn of War, or to Homeworld. These games are gorgeous, distinctive, and every unit is clearly defined without having to resort to paint-jobs that remind us of the a Fisher-Price toy lineup and maps as bland as crayon-scrawl on a child’s play table.
Strategy games don’t have to be this way. There is no need to assume that strategy gamers are all either blind or incapable of basic pattern recognition – and they certainly don’t need to be the last bastion of cheap, obvious design in an otherwise progressive medium.
Tags: art, colour, command & conquer, company of heroes, dune 2, rohan, strategy, supreme commander, total annihiltion
Loved Dune 2