Creatures Caves

This will probably end up sounding mostly negative, as I think we can all agree that the world simulation, interactivity and AI got generally better over the series, so I will be glossing over those and focusing on what I feel got worse over time, instead. But despite this, know that Creatures is one of my all-time favourite series, and that includes even the games I am about to poo-poo for various reasons below.

I feel the graphics took a sharp dip after C2, when they started relying on primitive 3D models as the basis of most of their graphics. The move away from hand drawn art happened prematurely, at a time when the tech simply wasn't yet good enough to provide good-looking, realistic graphics for organic or complex shapes. C3 norns look ugly to me, and I still genuinely can't believe Creatures Village/Adventure norns shipped looking like they've been bred with their own parents for the past twenty generations. *shudder*

The environments, too, became progressively more crowded and claustrophobic and just... way too busy. This process started in C2, but got particularly bad in C3/Exodus. There were just so many objects, critters and details packed into so little space, and there was no clarity to the colours or values used.

Compare the visual readability of this scene (C3) to this one (C1).

Now, granted, that first image (courtesy of Kezune.com) includes a few custom cobs which - ironically enough - are actually the things that stand out the most clearly. Kudos to the creators of those COBs for that, but sadly, that means they don't fit in with the rest of the decor. This is because absolutely everything else in that scene has the same depth and value, the same crispness, the same contrast. As a result, it all gets lost in a sea of visual noise, where individual objects (and even creatures) are hard to make out without squinting, and it's sometimes impossible to tell whether something is part of the background or not.

Would you be able to see the hummingbird nest in that pic if you didn't already know where it was? Or even the hummingbird itself, for that matter. I know where it is and I still have to take a second or two to find it with my eyes.

Now look at the C1 image, and note how the backgrounds are generally softer than interactable objects and creatures. Look how scenery further back fades into a kind of blue mist, a common technique applied in landscape art to give the illusion of 3D distance on a 2D rendering surface. Look how every individual carrot can be picked out easily by the eye, and how obvious it is that the sunflowers cannot be interacted with, but the ticking clock and the elevator buttons can.

And look at how gorgeous and non-goofy the norns look! C1 sprites are absolutely adorable, and C2 norns are some of the most striking and beautifully rendered of all.

For C3 and beyond, it looks like they decided to use those awful 3D renders they'd been using in the marketing material as the basis for the in-game sprites, and good lord was that a bad idea. In my very frank and honest but wholly subjective opinion. ;P

Even the original 3D norn render from C1 didn't look that bad, now that I really look at it. I mean, it even looks like it has a bit of bump-mapped texturing on the face, as opposed to the smooth plastic polygons of the C3 Bruin; how did they manage to get it looking so much worse? It's not like computing power had to be taken into consideration. Remember, these were converted to sprite images. They could have been as pretty as you like. Instead we got bulging bellies, googly eyes and spaghetti hair. Nice.

I suppose I generally don't have a lot positive to say about the later games, and I think a great deal of that is due to how they stopped being Steve Grand's pet project and became just another franchise for the publisher to churn out game after game. You can almost feel his creative control slipping away as the series progresses, until it's hidden under so much bright colour and graphical bloat. That's why C1 and C2 will always be my favourites. They are the closest to embodying the heart of what Creatures was ever meant to be, and their art direction was clearly handled with great care and attention to detail in a way that served to enhance the base game, not upstage it.