RANT: Why's it always a tradeoff between style and gameplay?

[Mischief Maker]

I recently bought Urtuk: The Desolation and I fucking love the gameplay. It's everything I wanted I wanted Battle Brothers to be. Battles are still nail-biting affairs where a character can suddenly permanently die in a moment, but there's (almost) no RNG involved. You live and die on the quality of your tactical positioning.

It's also the ugliest fucking thing I've ever laid eyes on. People who say its graphics resemble Darkest Dungeon are levying a HUGE insult at DD:

Spoiler

Brown, grey-brown, green-brown, punctuated by the occasional gross red obstacles. The titular character Urtuk is on a quest to find a cure for his strange disease and he's displayed in loose-fitting robes to best show off the disgusting pustule clusters all over his skin.

Compare that to something like Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus, which has one of the best videogame soundtracks since Mechwarrior 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tDpoLXD3Js

But the actual gameplay is garbage. it's a drool-bib simple tactics model made complicated by the overlaying "cognition gauge" system that gives a gameplay reason for your tech-priests to poke as many Necron artifacts as they can, at the cost of everything else. It makes the simplest things a pain-in-the-ass in the early game, but once players level up their tech-priests and use the systems that unlock the game becomes a cakewalk from the mid-game on, often seeing you move a single tech priest move from one side of the map to the other and wipe out boss-tier enemies in the first round of combat.

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There are plenty of more comparisons: Sanctus Reach vs Battlesector, Black Future '88 vs Scourgebringer, Operencia: The Stolen Sun vs Tainted Grail: Conquest. And I'm not talking about limited resources here, all these games have talented art teams behind them, they chose to make their games that ugly. A kickstarted team of 3d modelers and animators intentionally made Tainted Grail that ugly when they could just as easily have used the same resources to whip up something as beautiful as Operencia.

That new Binding of Issac spin-off "The Legend of Bum-bo" looks like just the kind of game I'd like, and clearly a lot of artistic talent went into making the game look like a puppet show with cardboard puppets. But you're literally playing match-3 with piles of shit and drops of urine! I don't wanna spend my free time doing that!

What is wrong with the brains of game developers that whenever they have a great idea for gameplay systems, they immediately set out to make it as ugly as humanly possible?!!

[Randorama]

I guess that you can define it as a game design problem.
My 0.02 of any currency you prefer (zenny coins?), on this topic, are these random ruminations.

It may be that:

1. There is a limit to how much information you can pack on the screen, that a player can follow and remember ("this colour means what?" "these characters attack how?");
2. Style may be a selling point, but it may also have next to no weight on the quality of game system ("looks gorgeous, plays terribly");
3. Developers may struggle to integrate the two aspects into a cohesive product for many reasons. Say, "different teams not working in a synchronized manner" might be a reason.
4. Developers may know about 1., but getting the balance right and packing a game with "gaming information" is really, really hard. Most teams must simply become better;
5. Design goals might matter. The spin-off you describe seems targeted to someone who actually would enjoy...scat play in their free time, so...I will stop here, OK;
6. For the WarHammer case, it sounds like the programmers simply didn't bother with the consequences of their early design choice. Or: "How many hours it takes to reach this issue?" "Oh, 20 hours of play" "Forget it, we're not fixing the problem. Nobody plays games for more than 20 hours, these days!".

...and so on.

Game design is now a research field, as companies and universities have an interest in better understanding the topic.
Companies, because they want to sell and they would probably like to design games that sell; unis, because game design degrees are a thing (my current employers offer BA and Master degrees on this).
I suspect that you may find quite a lot of interesting papers on the topic, and you should have the background knowledge to read them without any particular problems, from what I recall.

...of course, if you just want "shmups.com banter", anyone else's comments should be much more to the point that this one.

[Mischief Maker]

Yeah, I'm just ranting. I want to love Urtuk unconditionally, it's such a fun game, but the intentionally ugly graphics make it so unpleasant to play.

[Sima Tuna]

I'm confused which game has the good gameplay between Scourgebringer and Black Future. I haven't played either games and I've seen people shill both. I usually write off games I see people shilling unless I trust the source.

A lot of games have really poor art direction, so the game ends up not hitting the right audience because of the way it looks. It's shallow, but looks are all most people have to go on when a game is first unveiled.

[Mischief Maker]

In my opinion, Black Future '88 is gorgeous but shallow. It's the absolute most synthwave/darkwave game ever made, and the synaesthesia of it all practically puts me in an altered state. But the actual gameplay is really slow and basic and it's not until the second loop when the enemy population ramps up that things start to get challenging.

Scourgebringer hits several notes for me, not the least because it's practically an accidental beat-for-beat recreation of an idea for a sidescrolling devil-may-cry-alike I made up in my head years ago. I also really appreciate the option (under accessibility options) to use autofire and not have to destroy my mouse buttons while playing. But of course the graphics start out bland and grow increasingly ugly the further you go in the game. Note that like Devil May Cry, several key gameplay mechanics are hidden behind unlock cancer at the start of the game as a kind of stealth tutorial, I guess.

God, what I would give for a title with the gameplay of Scourgebringer and the aesthetics of Black Future '88!

[Randorama]

Eh, I forgot this one:

7. You never know if and how developers have access to beta-testing groups.

I mean, I loved many Amiga games even if it was obvious that the programmers never actually tested them, and would judge their own artistic output with very rose-tinted glasses.
Maybe you need to find your inner "fugly lover" persona and embrace the unpleasantness? (Ack, tall order, I know...).

A tangent on WH40k: I played the table-top version during the 90's, as a teen, and I had access to the early versions.
I played again the game in brief stints over the years, and I always felt that the system was hideously unbalanced and full of holes until the third edition or so, and slowly improved over the years.
Maybe the Mechanicus programmers went for that vintage feeling?
Of course, when I will retire in my small city in the middle of the Italian mountains, I will spend my days playing vintage WH40K with my old-time buddies, because of course I like gorgeous miniatures and completely bollocks mechanics

[Sima Tuna]

Scourgebringer hits several notes for me, not the least because it's practically an accidental beat-for-beat recreation of an idea for a sidescrolling devil-may-cry-alike I made up in my head years ago. I also really appreciate the option (under accessibility options) to use autofire and not have to destroy my mouse buttons while playing. But of course the graphics start out bland and grow increasingly ugly the further you go in the game. Note that like Devil May Cry, several key gameplay mechanics are hidden behind unlock cancer at the start of the game as a kind of stealth tutorial, I guess.

God, what I would give for a title with the gameplay of Scourgebringer and the aesthetics of Black Future '88!

I'm not a huge fan of games that hide their core mechanics behind unlockables. It smacks of cutting content out of your game so you can "sell" it back to the player for rpg unlock currency. Like putting a block or parry behind skill points so your game can have "rpg" content. "See? My game isn't arcade! It's an action rpg! Don't you want to rate it highly, IGN? It's an RPG, just like all those other games you mainstream guys love!"

It's one thing if the unlockable skills are upgrades to the existing abilities, or alternate weapons or something. But don't chop out a mechanic and hide it.

[Mischief Maker]

I'm not a huge fan of games that hide their core mechanics behind unlockables. It smacks of cutting content out of your game so you can "sell" it back to the player for rpg unlock currency. Like putting a block or parry behind skill points so your game can have "rpg" content.

Well it's nothing as dramatic as that.

You start with the ability to block projectiles, but need to unlock the ability for that block to reflect those projectiles. That sort of thing.

In theory it's totally possible to win on your first try.