>The best part of Battleborn is its prologue cinematic. That's not to say the game itself isn't any good -- in fact, it's a wonderful single- and multiplayer experience for the fantastical first-person-shooter crowd. However, the opening video is divine. It's evocative, rich and effortlessly cool, built on a base of smooth hip-hop and anime-inspired, neon-coated illustrations. When I think of Battleborn, my mind is immediately saturated in the cinematic's soulful rhythm. >This is a new brand of video game artistry. As a game, Battleborn doesn't feature cartoon characters; it's a fully realized 3D experience from Gearbox, the creators of Borderlands. In the same vein as Borderlands, Battleborn is highly stylized, but it looks nothing like the opening cinematic. >That was on purpose. >The cinematic's energetic animations and its mellow soundtrack balance each other perfectly. >Video games are art, and experiences like the Battleborn prologue help demonstrate this aspect to the wider world. Video game have always been an artistic expression but it wasn't until they stopped being the domain of cis white men that they became high art. >Today, the potential for wild and diverse artistic experimentation exists within gaming, But large studios are mostly focused on creating lifelike worlds so it's our duty as gamers to support artistic endeavors like Battleborn instead of run of the mill games like Overwatch.
Why aren't you playing Battleborn, the first high art video game?
It's nice to know that when my children go to an art museum, next to the Mona Lisa and Van Go will be Battleborn and other artistic games
Jaxon Myers
Anyone who tries to justify videogames as art is insecure about their hobby so they try to pass it off as being some glorious masterpiece where "it's more than just a game!".
Blake Nelson
actual art coming through
Parker Rivera
shame ingame art looks like it's designed by a bunch of interns
Jordan White
>The best part of Battleborn is its prologue cinematic
If that isn't a condemnation of the game, I don't know what is
Robert Davis
The Battleborn animations are crap. Seriously. This is coming from someone who enjoys the game itself.
Jeremiah Perry
>'Battleborn' turned gaming cinematics into a 2003 Clone Wars cartoon AMV
Levi Harris
Reminder that this turd cost some $70+ million.
Lucas Powell
You have to admit that the los-res/setting Battleborn models look rather statuesque
Brody Garcia
Anyone who thinks video games don't have the potential to be art is a pretentious shitter who thinks art can only be what they define art as.
Jose Miller
>"The best part of this game is the cinematic... it's still a good game though! >The cutscene is so stylised and different... s-so is the game itself! >It's a artistic endeavour and not like Overwatch in any way!" >Actually using cis white men
Is that article actually real? It's a custerfuck of backstepping after every point.
John Ortiz
Yes but at least it's not shit like the game
Owen Morgan
Its horribly directed and only decently animated. Quite cringy, but looks okay. No way near being art, just regular commercial video for a shitty game. Copies a lot from afro samurai but fails to capture what made it good. 5/10
Christian Bell
>Try to compete with Overwatch It fails because Blizzard >Try to target the "muh art" crowd It fails because it's a dumb loud shooter
Can Gearbox do anything right?
Jose Myers
Serious question : what is the difference between art and high art?
Matthew Cook
>all this hyperbole for a ugly flash animation set to Deltron
Dylan Anderson
Its like a job change I think. Your art has to hit level 20 and pass a trial
Hunter Green
>cis white men will never let games be art Well yeah, western games are trash. But games were already art, when they were made by cis Japanese men AND women.
Dominic Wilson
it's like gal-o sengen but meant seriously
Daniel Lewis
> ugly
You have to be at least 18 years old to post here
Kayden Smith
Hard to tell. It's like you can easily when a wine is delicious and when its not, but try to explain it. More so try to explain it to someone who doesn't have a good palette nor understands wine tasting.
Trying to classify art is like trying to solve ethics
Xavier Gonzalez
What is "high" art?
Dylan Allen
It isn't ugly but the animation falls flat in quite many places and it's horribly directed. It's more cringy than cool
Juan Young
Japs are honorary whites
Angel Hughes
>what battleborn intro is trying desperately to be but with none of the style and attitude
>High art. >Looks like Galo Sengen with a bigger budget.
Jaxon Ramirez
art that smokes a lot of weed
James Ward
>shit nobody said
Blake Ward
That was nice, never seen another video game have something like that or is there? Someone link
Gavin Rogers
>The best part of Battleborn is its prologue cinematic Should've just ended there
Jack Peterson
Randy plz go
Dominic Mitchell
It is fucking ugly, moron.
Camden Parker
>those stick legs
Caleb Gomez
kek
Owen Fisher
The opening cinematic is pretty awesome, gotta agree that it is the best part of the entire game.
being better than the rest of battleborn isn't much of an achievement though
Leo Jones
I thought we agreed Inafune was a jew.
Noah Morgan
Oh shut up. I'm sick and tired of trolls and Blizzard fanboys crapping on Battleborn spreading lies non-stop. Battleborn is a good game and arguably better than overwatch.
Julian Taylor
Yeah it's real. There are no comments so it flew completely under the radar. But hey, Battleborn fans are fun to laugh at.
Leo Green
Come on man just buy it.
Luis Campbell
> >Oh shut up. I'm sick and tired of trolls and Blizzard fanboys crapping on Battleborn spreading lies non-stop. Battleborn is a good game and arguably better than overwatch.
Kek
Someone post the ui pic
Nathaniel Gomez
I did 2 tours of duty in Afghanistan with the Army and have seen some shit in my day, but this. This really fucking irritates me for some reason
Jonathan Hill
Lol okay Randy.
Jayden Young
Battleborn is not a good game
Xavier Lopez
randy plz you're drunk
Daniel Peterson
The opening cinematic obviously had a lot of work put into it. The problem is that the artist was forced to work with the awful character designs and artstyle Gearbox had made.
Isaiah Smith
Gotcha senpai
Jaxson Carter
Shame the game is unbelievably ugly and unlikable in art direction
Brandon Hall
On a serious note, is there a better contender for the true high art game than Pathologic?
Angel Nguyen
HIGH ART
Nathan Myers
Undertale
Noah Thompson
>Openly admitting to serving Israel's interests Fuck off welfare queen
Isaiah Hall
>we want the BR audience
Isaiah Perez
Cry some more scum.Sjw ideology isnt toxic, its fucking corrosive.
Isaac Miller
maybe other ice pick loge games. specops the line and mgs2 were nice but not high art enough
Cooper Jones
EYE Divine Cybermancy Undertale Quake Planescape: Torment Fallout Deus Ex The Sims
Grayson Evans
tfw when all these western studios are incorporating japanese animation tropes... yeah it looks nice, but nothing amazing - it's a pretty average action sequence at best, not even drawn that well. Game itself is good but let's not push some college animation level material with negro music playing over it on some artistic pedestal.
Asher Thomas
desert bus
Daniel Ramirez
Borderlands opening cinematics were actually good. Batlleborn visual designers should be hanged though.
Grayson Lewis
I would only pick Quake as the ultimate manifestation of FPS genre
Caleb Gonzalez
How predictable. You don't have an argument so you have to resort to crying about "muh sjw boogeyman
Ayden Taylor
No. The intro is art. It wasn't programmed and it isn't playable. It also isn't even that good.
Luke Edwards
Video games can contain art, just like a board game can. However, that doesn't make a video game art any more than having a radio makes a car a symphony.
Samuel Gomez
The atmosphere and setting alone is artistic in its madness and incoherence.
Josiah Russell
>Support artistic endeavors like Battleborn! Not Run of the mill games like Overwatch!
Except if you are looking at it from an artistic perspective, Overwatch has better composed settings and designs that are more aesthetically pleasing and technically balanced. Battleborn is a class A case in not fucking understanding color theory and environment composition.
And if you REALLY wanna go the animation route, Overwatch uses squash and stretch animation along with smearing, traditional animation techniques that are rarely used in games, making animations seem more fluid and dynamic, in comparison to the clunky static animations in Battleborn.
Josiah Price
Thank you for your comment! $0.05 has been deposited to your account! We appreciate your hard work!
This keeps coming back to people thinking this has to do with Overwatch. Why are people even comparing the two vastly different games? I just hate Battleborn it itself. Its way too silly and goofy, the art style in both cinematics and ingame are ugly to me as well. The characters are just way too forcefully strange and diverse. Its like they said "Fuck it lets make the weirdest thing possible." Sometimes you gotta play it safe with some elements.
Connor Hughes
>E.Y.E
This
Benjamin Hughes
Anybody that believes this thing is anything but mediocre doesn't know jack shit about animation or videogames. I believe the Chinese bootleg tier running at the start makes my point for me.
Ayden Lewis
You're gonna have to gimme source, fampai.
Aaron Moore
Games CAN be art in the same way a soup can can be art. It's all opinion based on the "artist" and the viewer. Some games lend themselves more to the term "art" than others. Example, The Witness, it's a game that faced much discussion, love, and hate for a variety of reasons on release and all in all, it wasn't a great game, but it was an interesting artistic piece, combining a myriad of concepts to turn your head and world details to shift your mentality, everything from the way the landscape is molded to the way the two things might line up to show something new, like the Mountain Goddess and the Swamp Statue looking as if they're holding hands from below. Etc. Most games don't qualify as "art" because they weren't designed to be. They were designed to be either entertaining or a quick buck, depending. Which is also comparable to "art" today. In the form of commissions and Requests via Drawthreads, as a form of entertainment/enjoyment or a quick buck for the former.
Ian Stewart
What is it with video game writers and not understanding the medium they're writing about? If you're going to push video games as art (something I'm not opposed to), you should focus on what separates the medium from others, not that the best part of it could be entirely unrelated to it.
Parker Morris
Overwatch is the first Blizzard game I have ever touched, I wish Battleborn/Gearbox fanboys would actually accept criticism pointing out how terribly designed the game is from the ground up and that their marketing campaign is in complete damage control because Overwatch is the more well put together game both technically and visually.
Battleborn could have been decent, but they were lazy as shit about it, didn't even try in some aspects, shat it out to try and beat Overwatch's launch date to try and cash in (And then got fucked because Overwatch got pushed back), and didn't try to run a "We're thoughtful and caring developers and have been wronged when we are trying our best" tier marketing campaign
Matthew Barnes
Mostly this. While they're different games and play massively differently to the point of barely being comparable, they're still compared and judged, and the result is Battleborn is shit all around, could have been great if not for a myriad of glaring mistakes, and due to timing.
Luke Diaz
>art I hope that this pretentious bullshit killing gaming ends soon and the gaming industry crashes and burns.
This is exactly what is wrong with gaming since the fucking mid-90s. Style over substance bullshit.
And it's sad that you kids never knew what gaming really was. You were born having Nintendo and Sony brainwash you into thinking garbage games were actually good. I pity you all and ask you to please take a year or two to play NOTHING but pre-1995 games.
You'll understand when you do.
Daniel Ross
those rhymes sound like they were put together by a 5 year old, it's jarring how poor his flow. It sounds like he's trying to emulate the mid eighties poetic jazz influenced hip hop but failing to capture what made that style so great.
Jayden Nguyen
>Art is killing the gaming industry >Not the myriad of companies and publishers who just want to shit out games as fast as possible for as much as possible to get them as much money as possible without making a "good" game I'd rather have far less games specialized for groups of people so it appeals well instead of a mountain of games that appeal to almost all "gamers."
Noah Garcia
Video games aren't art, but something more. There isn't plenty of art within a video game - the models, the textures, the music, the writing - but taken alone, those things don't make it a game. A game needs theory, structure, and rules. It's the combination of art and mathematics that makes a video game, and that's why they're truly the highest form of collaborative artistic expression.
Nathaniel Perry
Here's something I don't understand: Games LITERALLY consist of things considered art. So why are games themselves not considered art? Are games less than the sum of their parts?
Aiden Miller
The cinematic is cool but it isn't well-animated. They tried to stylize it like FLCL and TTGL and it just didn't work.
Carter Campbell
see
Jose Rogers
Name/source?
Lincoln Sullivan
I like this explanation.
Logan Gonzalez
sauce?
Charles Morales
That cinematic literally just damn near put me to sleep. Overall the whole cinematic feels slow and the music they picked didn't help matters. I think they tried to do a Borderlands opening but failed to realize that what made those work is that they where shorter and didn't waster their time with shots that held on to them doing literally nothing. As for it turning cinematics into high art, I would argue Shadow of the Colossus did that way before this game was even conceptualized.
Jordan Rogers
There is*
John Cooper
The more complicated and complex a work of art becomes the less focused it becomes. It becomes diluted, art is supposed to stipulate an inherent thought or convey a single message in it's entirety, and because videogames are by nature diverse to hold our attention, and complex in many aspects from visual message to story etc. it's harder to denote them as art.
Not to say they can't be art, but these are the same excuses to claim 2d/3d animation can't be art and many art institutions still have a stick in their ass about it. The best way to disqualify your thing as art though is to profit on it in a massive scale and having that as the intention from the start, as in they cram all this artistic stuff in it to make it seem deep so it sells better, instead of being designed from the bottom disregarding said artistic stuffs marketability.
Basically most artistic games are only artistic pandering, because at the end of the day the intent is to sell
Noah Gonzalez
The art/entertainment dichotomy is a lie. Art made for a purpose is still art. A chair is just as much a piece of art as a sculpture.
Connor Wilson
The levels of irony involved. Beethoven's 5th symphony is art, Anal Cunt's picnic of love is high art.
Ian Lewis
>mfw people still arguing about what is art
Cameron Jenkins
Visually Overwatch's cutscenes are almost modern Disney film tier
Battleborn's cutscenes are saturday morning cartoon tier
I can't understand how anyone could prefer Battleborn artistically in any sense.
Grayson Foster
Art is the language of the soul.
Jace Cooper
As far as I know, it started because Gearbox started shit on Twitter towards Blizzard. After that the drones and viral marketers went into full-force with the comparisons.
Julian Foster
Looks like Republican Space Rangers from GTA.
Jason Gutierrez
Battleborn was marketed as a crazy team based shooter like Overwatch, instead of more of a strategic MOBA style game.
It's only natural consumers would make a direct comparison with the release dates being so close together. Gearbox likely knew this too, they just decided to take the risk for some stupid reason.