It seems today that many indies are inspired the 16 bit era of games (with some working with 8 bit). Everywhere you go there's at least one indie game citing inspiration from (insert snes, genesis, tg16 game here) and it makes me wonder as fresh faces enter the industry do you think we will get ps1 and Saturn looking indie games? And I mean with the warping textures and shaky polygons. It might seem weird to say this but after revisiting so many ps1 and Saturn games its almost like an aesthetic charm rather than a technical limitation. Its almost like abstract art. But anyways I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter. This can include low poly characters with pre rendered backgrounds as well.
Will indies have ps1 throwback games?
We already have voxels, they generally are 3D at least as bad as ps1 days... and modern handheld and phone games also look like PS1 games.
I wouldn't expect them as much.
3D benefits greatly from enhanced detail; if not realism, at least clarity.
16-bit era sprite graphics have a charm to them lacking even in modern 3D. They're clear and expressive without taking it into cartoon land like later era 2D games.
Sprite art in general remains popular for any number of reasons. One is cost. Another is that 2D at works well for 2D gameplay.
3D benefits greatly from enhanced detail; if not realism, at least clarity.
16-bit era sprite graphics have a charm to them lacking even in modern 3D. They're clear and expressive without taking it into cartoon land like later era 2D games.
Sprite art in general remains popular for any number of reasons. One is cost. Another is that 2D at works well for 2D gameplay.
No, I don't think so, thought I already saw some PS1 art attempts.
There are several reasons, but the most important might be, that really old games were made by small teams and small budgets, sometimes only by a single person, whereas PS1 titles already got larger teams (still tiny compared to the team size of modern AAA games).
Well, if somebody does PS1 Era Retro 2D Games like Symphony of the Night, he will have at least one certain customer with me for sure! I just love these detailed 2D Graphics!
As for warped textures and polygon glitches... meh. I am not sold on it as an "aestethic choice", much less than I am sold on forced pixelation as an "aestethic choice". Using technical limitations of the past to hide your monetary / skill limitations of today seems to me like a lame excuse. There are many art style forms to choose from to hide your quality issues, why go with one of the more hideous ones? Of course that is simply my opinion, feel free to disagree.
I on the other am happy to activate 720p and Antialiasing while playing my old SNES games on my RetroN5... I want to relive the awesome gameplay of these games, sometimes also enjoy the quite artful 2D graphics. I do not care much for the crude resolution. Being on a 55" screen instead of my old 30" TV, and in flickerfree HDMI instead of aweful SCART connections doesn't help with making the resolution look like less of a problem too.
Same thing about the PS1 3D games. While, besides the still crude resolution, 2D games were nearing graphical perfection on the PS1 Era consoles, 3D games where just getting playable. Not matter how cool Starwing / Starfox was at the time, it was clear even then, even to the 15 year old me, that this 3D stuff still had a long way to go before it would become anything other than ugly looking.
PS1 Era 3D games started to look like we imagined 3D games should look in the SNES days.
But the annoying glitches and warped textures where DEFINITELY nothing I want to be remembered of! Just like the crappy analog connections of most consoles at the time, I am happy to live without that.
Having said that, recently someone added an asset to the Unity Asset Store to achieve exactly that look in Unity. So you can add your nice clean assets to the project, and have some special shader / postprocess calculate glitches and warp your textures! Ye-haaaaw! Amazing what you can do today... ;)
I doubt it.
8/16 bit graphics (like pixel art and other) are BETTER in some instances than modern graphics (like clarity, simplicity, abstraction, cartoonized style, cutteness, fit small screen better). Low resolution 3D is not better than anything, it's simply ugly.
The pixel graphics in the retro indie games is just an art style that is easy to reproduce with a good pixel artist. It doesn't really require any special coding or engine modifications to work. Just sprites on screen.
If you want a retro 3D game to look like a PS1 game then the problem is that all modern hardware even low end budget mobile phones have a much better graphics capability than the PS1.
To really replicate the PS1 style graphics you'd probably need to write your own software engine that purposely does not include things like perspective correct texture mapping, z buffering or smooth shading.
Hopefully pixelfanatics will die a horrible death so we can get some enjoyable games, seriously. This religious belief that pixels somehow is the all to go to answer for everything is sickening. They don't even try to make the game look pleasurable, "But it's pixals! It's suppooooosed to lewk lajk dat y00! Retro maaaan!". No, back in the days they tried to fit as much detail as possible in what little space they had, you are trying to fit as little detail as possible to get away with doing as little as possible. A big difference.
Anyways, saw a guy on another gameprogramming forum asking about how to make easly ps1 graphics. So maybe you'll see something in the future, and that they will learn from the failure of the pixelera.
Hopefully pixelfanatics will die a horrible death so we can get some enjoyable games, seriously. This religious belief that pixels somehow is the all to go to answer for everything is sickening. They don't even try to make the game look pleasurable, "But it's pixals! It's suppooooosed to lewk lajk dat y00! Retro maaaan!". No, back in the days they tried to fit as much detail as possible in what little space they had, you are trying to fit as little detail as possible to get away with doing as little as possible. A big difference.
Anyways, saw a guy on another gameprogramming forum asking about how to make easly ps1 graphics. So maybe you'll see something in the future, and that they will learn from the failure of the pixelera.
While I am not a pixelated graphics fan, I think you went a tad too far here.
I also dislike their choice of graphics abstraction, but to be fair lots of games would be just to big to create with the teams available if they used the full resolution available.
With using full resolution I mean: If a sprite is big enough on a FullHD screen to fill 256 Pixels, create a 256x256 pixel sprite.... hell, double that even just to be future proof for 4k screens 
That is now MUCH more work if you pick no kind of "abstraction filter" than for example going with a 32x32 pixel sprite and blowing that up to 256x256 pixels.
Personally I would have picked a different way of "abstraction"... like using an image filter that makes all sprites look like oil paintings, which will also hide the low details of the source material, and maybe a wobbly line or two.
Still, I think in most cases the "Style" was chosen because of necessity, not lazyness. It is just a sad fact that the better the graphical cabapilities of computers get, the less can a single person ever max them out, and the bigger the team needed to create something "cutting edge".
It's not that i want 4k graphics, it's that i want any graphics at all. The thing is they don't even try to bring any graphics to their game, they rely on people blindly thinking its retro and cool to show as little detail as possible. There is a difference in trying to be as detailed as possible in the little space given, and what they do, trying to fit as little detail as possible. It's like they don't want you to be able to distinguish that the blob on the middle of the screen is supposed to represent a human being. Just look as old NES games and many of the pixelgames today, an extremely big difference in detail.
It's absolutely laziness behind it, so what if your games becomes 20mb larger with larger sprites and more detail, its not like be are on 56kbit modems anymore. If it would have been anything else they would at least try to be more detailed, but no...
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