I’m a huge fan of fighting game art, especially character illustrations and promotional artwork from the 90’s fighting game era. Back in those days all my favourite fighters were 2D, so when the 3D era came, I was a bit weary. However, I’ve kinda grown used to the look and feel of the newer Capcom fighters, even though they are 3D (of course I still wish they were 2D, which is why I make 2D sprites).
One thing that current Capcom fighters still haven’t got right though is screen readability. I’m talking about how the characters pop out of the background to make their silhouettes readable and easy to understand in the heat of battle. The SFIV series was kinda hit or miss in this area for me. Some stages such as the one under the bridge with the kids, and the africa ones are pretty good, but then you get stages like the one with the bouncy cars and the volcano stage. Totally unreadable! You can’t tell what’s going on.
MvC3 had this problem as well, where everything was just really dark, and what stood out the most was the hitsparks and effects, drowning out the characters. Most recently, the SFxT footage made me even more disappointed, as they seemed to have thrown character readability totally out the window by dialing up the grime and dirt up on everything and making everything look muddy.
So I made a couple of tweaks to some screenshots from the E3 build of SFxT to illustrate my point:
I didn’t really change much, just tried to pop the characters out of the BG.
What do you guys think?