Further down in here I’m going to compare Gears of War and Seinfeld. Are you ready for that?
Chris Perna from Epic Games recently said he blames shooters that came out after Gears for the reputation his studio’s game has of being formulaic in aesthetic style.
“When Gears came out it was fresh, it was dark. That’s what it’s meant to be, right? No apologies there. It was a brutal game – it was meant to be. Then everybody copied us and copied our look, and the market was flooded with Gears clones, which hurts the original.”
If we forget that games had been using a darkened tone for decades before Gears, this is an entirely relevant point. Their game did use a restrained colour palette to attempt to better affix with the narrative. It’s a grim story about grim characters with grim outlooks in a grim setting fighting grim enemies with grim tactics. The only possible style you can use to best convey that is grimdark.
There’s a pre-existing case study for the original of something seeming like it’s just melding in with our expectations rather than being a shining example that can be drawn from. If you were to go back and watch an episode of Seinfeld (I told you) now without having seen it before you wouldn’t recognise it as being this genre pedestal, you’ll see a comedy that conforms to what you believe a comedy is now.
Something influential informs the creation of new things. Those new things then begin to shape our understanding of the genre as a whole. Going back and trying to look at the emergence point without experiencing it first is just seeing something that looks like everything else.
I guess, sorry people liked your game once, Epic?
