Looks... interesting. I've never been a huge fan of levels based around "real" locations, but it does look like a good romp based on the trailer.

Some parts of it really do look quite quake-like, don't they? The only thing that makes me doubt that idea is the player movement. I can't say i've ever seen anything quake1-based do that much with the player controller before, although that hardly means it's impossible... Maybe it's more quake2 based, or something. 

the ability to do flips in the air is pretty cool, though it didn't seem like the guy was in the air long enough to use it much. if you have a rocket launcher and more air time, you could use thse jump pads to clean up a crowd of enemies before you land, which could be pretty cool. The arcade tank game Assault had a thing like that.

https://youtu.be/vrG9ZRrSrT8?t=55 

It looks pretty neat, wish the gameplay snippets were longer though. The dual-wielded shotguns are giving me Marathon flashbacks. (I really wish those games held up better these days.) 

 

https://twitter.com/4AGames/status/776450712343486465 

... Should I be hype?? 

 

I might have to play them again. I bought them cheap on Steam a couple of years ago, but only played through once. They're not perfect and some things were very annoying, but overall pretty good. 

I started playing the first one but quickly put it down because fighting waves of those annoying, badly-designed melee enemies that were all over the start of the game was not really fun for me. Plus I didn't didn't like exploring the settled areas very much. I should give it another chance, though, if everyone seems to like it. I've heard Last Light is better.

STALKER is one I've had for a while but haven't got around to. Thing is I have two other lengthy RPGs I really want to play (namely Pathologic and d-d-Dark Souls), so it may take me a bit. 

Fucking listen and pay attention next time. Proper good modern FPS games, for the atmosphere and style especially (yes the melee monsters are chaotic and frustrating, but there's more to it than those).

Also that Dusk game looks fucking awful. Retro = too lazy / cheap to use a decent engine and using nostalgia as an excuse to churn out utter fucking dogshit. 

then it probably would be retro inspired. Hell, I make Quake maps for funsies, and making a really detailed game is time-consuming and therefore costly. It's not lazy to make low-fi assets, it's economic. 

Also that Dusk game looks fucking awful. Retro = too lazy / cheap to use a decent engine and using nostalgia as an excuse to churn out utter fucking dogshit.

It's got nothing to do with using (or not) a decent engine. They are probably using Unity or something (I wouldn't even be surprised if they are using Unreal) But yes it's obviously a lot cheaper to make art assets that look like they came from 1996 instead of 2016.

Dusk looks awful because the art is just shit. It doesn't look as good as games like Quake or Hexen, because those games had talented artists behind them. Good artists can create amazing-looking retro games and the low polycount / pixel density does not have to be a barrier to how stylish/awesome you can make a game look. 

Dusk looks like shit next to quake and that's inexcusable to me. It looks like shit next to doom.

the gameplay seems fun though 

According to someone in YouTube who said to have tested an early version of the game, Dusk is made in Unity.

The sad truth is, most people who makes "retro style" games don't truly care about retro technology. They act (I'm judging their actions, not their words) as if "retro style" was a purely deliberate artistic expression, but it isn't.

I was googling for opinions about such stuff lately, and I agree with these:

"good" low poly, it's the kind that hides it's polygons well and doesn't look low poly unless you look really hard.
Dusk doesn't even try to fit this criteria.

It's funny because new techniques could greatly enhance stuff like this game, that mouth I assume is a flat texture made to be viewed from the camera's angle but with current tech we could fake a low poly flat textured mouth and make it appear to have depth making it look consistent from any angle. we could even make it so that the edges of a model appear to be unailiased but match the texture resolution making characters appear to be 3d pixel art in a sense.

You will never see indies do anything like this.

Pseudo-polygon and pseudo-voxel textures, through something like relief mapping. This could be really cool to see, indeed. And requires thinking outside of the box, which people can't do when they define the "box" as an end in itself and not as a starting point.

Retro hardware was just a platform, a starting point, its constraints didn't dictate style choices despite of limiting the variety of tools that could be used. The styles developed back then were almost always the results of artists exploring the technical possibilities; they were results of exploration, not of mere deliberation. And this exploration, this act of discovering new possibilities, is what made them charming.

There will be a shift soon in the indie community to make low poly games.

But careful what you wish for.

A long time ago, making an indie 2D title was absolutely fine, but then more and more devs started to do it, a lot of devs just started to do it out of lazyness, not respecting the graphical style or having a set artstyle in mind when approaching 2D pixel art, resulting in both the 2D pixel art indie level to fall to miserable depths in terms of quality, and at the same time a massive kneejerk reaction against all 2D indie games by [...] in part the general public itself.

As more and more indie devs gravitate towards low poly in the future, you will see the same exact progression:

-A couple of main titles that become the posterchild for low poly modern indie games.

-Tons of titles will try to copy that.

-Many indie devs will start making low poly games out of lazyness.

-The market will be flooded with low poly indie games.

[...]

-The average person will start to associate indie games with low poly and start to dislike them in general.

-The next visual approach will become big and the cycle will start over again.

Screencap this, you'll have plenty of threads to post it in the coming years.

Sadly, I also see this coming. This is why I'm not too enthusiastic about my own retro game development. The public is already getting burned by "retro style" games that ends up being more like a parody than a homage. There's no way to be successful offering something of which the audience have already got a bad taste in their mouths.

I've got a lot more respect for low-fi indie games that don't try to compare themselves to something else. Games like Pid, which despite being not excellent in visuals or technology, managed to think outside of the box and push its possibilities in an amazing way that truly fascinated me. Or games like Sonic Robo Blast 2, which paid homage to the Sonic franchise by exploring new possibilities, rather than just remixing what had already been done. 

Well unfortunately, there are very few artists in any given industry. Swathes of uninspired copycats are bound to pop up every time someone does something fresh, and will continue to do so for as long as there's money in the equation. 

Retro = too lazy / cheap to use a decent engine and using nostalgia as an excuse to churn out utter fucking dogshit.

Them's fighin' words. 

But I agree that awful art direction / lack of any fucking direction is as big a problem as retro-for-the-sake-of-retro. 

Come on. It's not great-looking for sure, but it's still easier on the eyes than Heretic. The color palette in *that* game is eye-gouging. 

What is referenced now as "retro" was at the time cutting edge AAA that pushed hardware to its limits and made for awesome screenshots that people couldn't believe. And it was largely done by amazingly skilled artists, not programmers keeping their team small.

Regardless of the resolution, detail, and technology you use, you need a consistent art direction. Once you enter the world of the game, it should feel like it is made of the same Stuff (this was one of the initial selling points of Doom 3's lighting, it was a unified lighting model between the world and actors within it). I'd wager Torchlight 2 as it looks today will look just as good to me in a decade. 

To me it's not as much about a horrible palette or crappy models/textures as it is about that weird perspective on the weapons in the player view, something I haven't seen since Half-Life 1. It looked like shit then and it looks like shit now. 

That's what happens when they draw a realistically proportioned gun with a quake-style FOV. Quake's guns are fat and stumpy to avoid this problem