Imagine this: you’re making the sequel to Dragon Age, a huge breakout original IP fantasy hit for PCs and video game consoles. You’ve got a publisher that’s scrambling to get a sequel out the door as fast as possible, so you trim the scope down from a world-spanning adventure across a wide variety of beautiful areas down to a lean personality-driven story about a single family swept up in the exact same conflict depicted in the first game. You want to throw players into the action right away, while also giving newcomers to the series a fun action-filled intro that lets them know the stakes and sets up the circumstances of your fantasy world.
So, you decide to have your little family go on a panicked jog over the muddiest, blandest, brownest mountains imaginable. Just a fun little sprint through the muck, chased by monsters. Doesn’t that sound good? No? Oh dear.
How did this get through even a single meeting?
The Xbox 360/PS3 generation of video games became derisively known for its overuse of the color brown. This was the era where modern military shooters like Call of Duty and cover-based games like Gears of War dominated the sales landscape, and their drab “photoreal” aesthetics powered by at-the-time new pixel shading techniques permeated into the rest of gaming.
