Not really. Look at Inquisitor, Driftmoon, the Eschalon series, the Avadon series, et cetera. All of these are done by folks with varying degrees of artistic ability, but none of them look like they were made with 8-bit sprites copied from games made for Nintendo systems of the '90s. You don't need a fancy studio to make a game that looks nice. You do need talent.
Not to harp on this excessively (unless it's too late), but this is what I'm talking about. This is from a game that was released in June 2013:
And here's another one that was released in April 2012:
And one more, released in May 2010:
This is one of my pet peeves with modern indie RPGs. Look, I've never been one to argue that graphics are
the thing that makes or breaks an RPG because that's a ludicrous argument. Nevertheless, there is a definite trend in this segment of the industry to declare something is made in a "retro" style as an excuse to justify crappy graphics. To say that you have a small studio with a limited budget with 1-2 folks providing the coding, graphics, animations, sound effects and music is a grossly-inadequate justification for having an ugly game. The game on the top is an ugly game and you can argue that this particular studio has a signature "style" that demands this look, but it's just BS--it's an ugly game because as far as anyone can tell, this is the best this studio can do in terms of quality of artwork, and it's kinda pathetic.
Now I could have pulled a couple of screenshots from games that had large teams working on them for a couple of years but are 15 years old, like Planescape: Torment, but seamoss rightly stated that this would have been comparing apples to oranges. The above represents an apples-to-apples comparison.
I probably unfairly singled out RPGMaker just because its use in recent years has been so prevalent and transparent. However, even RPGMaker has enhanced the quality of assets that are available for use in its software. Here's an example of an asset pack you can buy through Steam:
and here's another one:
So I'll just put a mea culpa out there because clearly you
can make attractive games with RPG Maker (as a matter of fact, I'd buy that Cthulhu Mythos game that may or may not exist in these screenshots for the Mythos Resource Pack). Unfortunately not that many people actually do.
ed me all up. My browser had me signed in to the wrong Steam account and instead of getting the code as expected, it simply redeemed it to that wrong account. And I'm pretty sure they won't give me a replacement for the correct account.
(
