For the sake of convenience I'm re-using the slides I made for the short presentation on this task.
I feel the Battlefield series is a great example of how Art Direction can completely change the look, feel and essence of a game.
Obviously over a decade has past since game-play as basic as this was the standard for a gaming experience, don't get me wrong it was fun, the maps were big and the armoury was fruitful but it felt a little empty.
A couple of years past and BF: Vietnam was released, straight away you could see that the environments were better filled, the textures were fuller and the backgrounds much more interesting.
'Backwards' is the only word I can really put to BF2: Modern Combat, it seems like the focus was primarily on the characters alone and the environments where almost completely disregarded, going back to 1942 type maps and scenery. UI did seem to improve but not having played Modern Combat myself I can't say that for certain.
Now, Bad Company really stepped up the game making the fights feel much more real, levels involving major stealth aspects and constant jumps from jungles to snow and marshlands. Destructible environments where also a key feature to the game, nothing felt more uplifting than collapsing a building on top of a whole enemy team.
Released on the market as an arcade version of the popular Battlefield series, this far brighter game sparked a hell of a lot of interest especially to people who had only played CoD before hand. By making a smaller game with less maps, weapons, characters and assets, DICE was able to focus on creating such a crisp, super vibrant new mini game that focused only on Islands, this meant that the maps felt a lot more strict on movement, keeping everyone in the mindset of staying on the land and not venturing to far into the water.
Colour is where the games start to take an obvious path, choosing cleaner flat colours and developing them to be as well organised as possible. Progressing more and more into what I'd like to call a more Tactful pallet.
Bad Company 2 was the long awaited sequel to its predecessor, BC1, obviously it was an easy decision to stick with the bright colours that 1943 had made famous but as i'm sure you can notice the maps started to use photo-realistic textures and particle effects, a new HuD was also combined with DICE's new Neon colour splash theme, focusing on oranges and light blues. Greens too for easy Squad detection.
Saturation is slowly lost through their more recent titles to continue looking into what I previously mentioned about choosing a more 'Tactful' colour pallet. It was evidently discussed that War based games need to feel far colder and more precise, to be able to claim the realest feeling FPS experience hence the title of the colour pallet I gave. 'Tacful' being much sharper movement animations, noises and differences between gunshots.
Looking at the HuD, guns, buildings, vehicles and characters are now darker than ever, losing almost all colour shows what DICE wanted to achieve with each developing game, being able to fully customize every little feature of the game and still keep such a beautifully clean layout makes each new game you play feel distinctively more precise.
