Its because they all use Unity, Unreal, or Godot, anon. Its the game engines.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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It's really not.
Thanks for explaining, you added so much context to those downvotes. Writing things in C Assembly and C Sharp Assembly, is different than Input.GetAxis.
As did you.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
- Hitchens' Razor
Let's see, Secret of Mana? No third party game engine
Chrono Trigger? No third party game engine.
Final Fantasy? Hmm, NO third party game engine!
Now its not necessarily the engines themselves that turns pixel art games into the same slop. Its the constant use of the inbuilt systems for movement and things like that. Thats what makes them all feel the same and not.like the games they are imitating. The movement is different because its a system built by the third party companies generically not hand crafted for the game. That alone works miles towards a game feeling unique.
Remake of secret of mana? Unreal Engine 4.
Octopath traveler? Unreal Engine 4.
You wanna know what doesnt feel like shit? Micro Mages, because they had to create it for the NES just like a classic game. Go play it on Itch.io its dope.
Godot, Unity, and Unreal don't provide that kind of stuff, they mostly just provide primitives for things like hit detection, lighting, and physics. Things like movement are generally done by hand, unless the developer is super lazy and buys premade assets from an asset store or something. But then the problem isn't with the engine, but the developer, and they'd release trash even if they didn't use one.
I'm not big into pixel graphics, I'm into good games. Here are some examples of good games I've played that happen to use pixel graphics, and the engine they used:
- Darkside Detective - Unity
- Oxenfree - Unity
- Dave the Diver - Unity
- Undertake - Gamemaker Studio
- Celeste - MonoGame
- Stardew Valley - MonoGame
Those three examples you gave were made by major studios before game engines were a thing. They used pixel graphics because that's all they could afford (FF was notorious for being multiple disks).
I'm sure I could find examples in Godot or Unreal if I looked.
My point is that it's not the engine, it's the devs. Whether a game is good has less to do with the engine used and more to do with the passion, budget, and time of the devs.
Yes they absolutely do provide input detection
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/[email protected]/manual/index.html
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/enhanced-input-in-unreal-engine
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/tutorials/inputs/index.html
Using these in conjunction with their physics or even just their built in systems for positions gives games a certain feel.
Input detection, sure, but even "no engine" games use standard input detection libraries, like SDL. I'm guessing the games you listed likely use the same library for that, and the behavior is probably identical to what Unreal, Godot, and Unity do. There's pretty much no "feel" here.
I've built games, I'm pretty familiar with what they offer here. Input detection just abstracts over hardware differences, so you can check if they pressed "A" instead of knowing that's "controller button 7" or whatever. Most games will still interpret that manually (e.g. if "A" is "jump," apply X force upward for the physics system).
Physics is highly tuned by the developer, regardless of what abstraction they use, especially for simpler games where physics isn't really a thing (e.g. older FF games just had simple object detection). You can achieve pretty much any feel you want with any of the standard physics engines, especially for simpler interactions like platforming.
There's no reason I couldn't build a convincing reimplementation of FF or Secret of Mana in Godot, Unreal, or Unity. Generally speaking, that's not the goal.
You could, but my point is that it is easy to just slap things together using those engines, which usually results in similar feeling, low quality mechanics. Its easy to just use Input.GetAxis and apply some force for an asteroids clone, but now it doesnt feel unique. Thats what I'm trying to say. You dont have to use these, and you can make unique experiences with them. But the ease of access will also increase the amount of low to mid quality games out there, leading to people getting this feeling. So yeah its the devs, but its also the accessibility of these tools.
Sure, and crappy games existed when FF and others were made.
My point is that good games based on engines exist with a variety of art styles and whatnot. A lot of crappy games also exist, because the barrier to making games is much lower these days. The engine isn't the problem, the devs are.
Agree to disagree I guess. The engines opened the flood gates, before bad games were news worthy. Now they're the norm. Not that engines aren't awesome tools, they just lower the barrier significantly and thus more shitty games get made.
Color might be one thing, if you use modern color limitations you have like a million more to choose from than they did back in the day.
OOP should try the Mega Drive (Genesis) ROM of Pier Solar, then. Couldn't "look fake" even if it tried
anon needs to build a time machine and rescue my parents' 32" Trinitron. That shit was top of the line.
What's this game called ?
Reverse image search says it's Godshard Chronicles.
Ty !