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What's up with the art style change?


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Just feel like the art is slowly drifting and becoming more bland. Not trying to nit-pick, but seeing the new Powder Monkey enemies walk around genuinely feels like a weird mod, they just don't fit. Update is still in beta, so maybe it'll change. 

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I can feel a change in art style too, and I honestly am not happy about it. I'm not very conscious about art myself, so I cannot elaborate on it. But monkeys and Wonkey don't feel right.

Also the face of Quay. Her smile and her eye brows, feel ... cheap and not DST.

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I guess they make every new person who joins the studio draw these things as an exercise, and since 2018, almost every update has gotten worse and weirder. Just put an Alchemy Engine on the island and you'll feel it almost beautiful as eighth wonder of the world compared to those plastic shards of new machinery.

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i mean, if you wanna talk drifting art styles, I'd love to talk about nearly every vignette they've released in the past few years.... The ones that are frames from the new animated shorts. None of it feels as exciting nor inspiring as the original trailer of Wilson getting sucked up into the constant via his mad experiment with sinister forces at play. It's all so sterile now. And I get that's probably to do with time constraints but it's a shame. Feels like the game lost its flavor. 

But*** for the record; In-game, I don't think I feel the same way.

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It is a shame this keeps getting brought up becuase the artists are trying their best, but at the same time the fact it keeps getting brought up by different people frequently does indicate they have a bit of a problem.

Ive always thought klei had instances of management decisions that were real head scratchers - giving away 16k copies of Hamlet for free, the Shipwrecked DLC vs Standalone debacle, repeating the same debacle with Oxygen Not Included Spaced Out..etc.

If were gonna boil it down to time constraints resulting in the lacklustre artstyle when this is this first new, actual content in 10 months it just seems like a management issue to me.

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The generic monkeys and the queen for me are really good, some more pencil scratchs in a more 'sketchy' way would make them really pretty. But the Wonkey and the paddler monkey are just so bland and raw that it looks like a fanart, they really need some tweaks preferably following the same color palette.

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For the most part, it's simply that this content is new and so you're going to be way more critical of it than the existing content, that's how brains work. Splumonkeys, prime apes and such are all familiar, you've seen them a hundred times, while Powder Monkeys and such are new and unfamiliar, and so they look weird compared to this thing you're already used to.

Admittedly, there HAS been an art style change over time, but that's kind of just the nature of things. Something about early Don't Starve art is that it was kind of... intentionally bad? Not to say it didn't look good, but it leaned very heavily into a scratchy, sketchy style, sometimes going as far as having pieces of art that are basically half finished. But, as someone who has learned to mimic a good few video game art styles over the years... it SUCKS to make art that you're super proud of, looks incredible, and have someone say "it's too good, it needs to adhere to x and y sloppy aspect of the art style" and then have to simply... make your art worse. On purpose. To fit the style. And I think that's what's happening here: the artists at Klei have gotten better and better over time, new artists got brought in who had that better art as reference, and the art just kept improving in such a way that it doesn't quite 100% fit the early stuff, and I can't blame them for that. The more experienced you get at a specific art style, the more you start to push at the limiting rules of it to make something even better.

Either way, I'd like to point out it's not an abrupt change, it's a very gradual process. I've been here since right before SW release and have regularly seen people say the art's been getting worse for... the entirety of those 7 years. I've seen people say the art got worse around ANR, the art is worse in Hamlet, the art got worse in RoT, and now that art is getting worse in the Moon Quay update... and you'll notice that when people say this, 99% of the time they're perfectly fine with all the art up until they started playing the game.

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I feel like the art of DST is a mixed grab bag of a concept.. sometimes the art looks really really really good and fits the darker, I guess you can say more Tim Burton-like tone I expect the franchise to have as a staple part of what helps it stand out from other video games within its same Genre. Some recent examples would have been the Gothic Skin set, or not so Recent examples- Corrupted/Triumphant Wormwood, while there are other arts that just look really really bad and highly out of place for the game- like that hideously ugly skin Glommer got with that Fairy Fantasy skin pack.

In short: you can see BOTH art styles Within Klei’s recent work.

That said- Varglets looked ugly and too clean when they were in Beta too.. but Klei gave them some new Art and now they look pretty darn wicked in the game.

I am not a fan of Wonkeys or Prime Apes look: and the best way to describe that they look like they’ve been Groomed by a pet owner- Their fur isn’t riled and rough and sticking out like a Survivor out in the Wild.

If you’ve ever watched any pirate movie ever, they don’t usually “groom” their hair.. it’s like waking up with a “Bad Hair Day” and just saying screw using the hair brush on it.

I LOVED the look of the Spider-Apes in Hamlet had “edges” where their fur puffed up a bit made them look less like a groomed pet.

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I think that’s why the art of Wonkey and Prime Ape look so offsetting to some people- you just transformed into a random wild monkey, yet you look clean and well groomed like you’ve been someone’s pampered house pet.

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While everyones allowed to give criticism, simply saying things like "Looks off/bad/ugly/cheap/bland" "DS/Shipwreck/Hamlet looked better" "It looks like it comes from a mod/fanart/unofficial copy" doesn't really provide any help or feedback for the artists and only comes up as complaints.

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1 hour ago, Just-guy said:

While everyones allowed to give criticism, simply saying things like "Looks off/bad/ugly/cheap/bland" "DS/Shipwreck/Hamlet looked better" "It looks like it comes from a mod/fanart/unofficial copy" doesn't really provide any help or feedback for the artists and only comes up as complaints.

well the artist already know the problem, many textures look very polished and clean compared to before

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