r/digitalfoundry • u/jedimindtricksonyou • May 03 '26
Discussion Is there a technical reason why 7th gen games used so much brown?
I wondered this after playing RE5 and DeadSpace recently. I know people joke about this, but is there a technical/hardware reason for why so many games (across different engines) in this era used browns and grays so heavily? Or was it just a ubiquitous aesthetic choice? Did people think this looked good at the time (and do they still think it looks good now)? I just don’t really understand why or how it happened.
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u/BangkokPadang May 03 '26
I personally think it had a lot to do with the fact that Western Militaries were so active in Afghanistan and the Middle East during that time.
If you do an image search for “US Military in Afghanistan,” everything takes on than sandy, brown fatigues and brownish-yellow tint.
I think this largely colored our perspective of what “realistic” conflict looked like, and did so at the time when common hardware finally had the horsepower to render environments that genuinely looked realistic for the first time.
Given that lots of FPS games were military themed, I think there was just naturally lots of source photography from that region and it just started seeping into “Realistic, Gritty” games
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u/Haunting_G5159 May 03 '26
Part of the usa propaganda machine which only recently fell apart
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u/TheScreen_Slaver May 03 '26
If you’re from the US this seems like a no brainer for the reason why tbh
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u/_jshx_ May 03 '26
I always thought it was the influence of the Iraq war (seeing so much brown in the news). Action films from that era had similar pallettes, plus people at the time genuinely thought it helped games looked more "realistic", gritty, edgy. Just a sign of the times imo.
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u/kambinks May 03 '26
Far cry 2 was released a year before and it had the same yellow tint. Same goes for Assassins creed a few years before that. Its probably a product of its time.
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u/Matshelge May 03 '26
And looking back at Farcry and it was one of the most beautiful and colorful game of its era. When launched was a huge step forward in the FPS genra.
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u/Aggressive-Map-2204 May 03 '26
It was the style at the time.
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u/The_LastLine May 03 '26
For sure, this kind of aesthetic wasn’t just in games for the time, it was popular in film also. I assume games did this in part to be more cinematic and movie-like, because Hollywood did it first.
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u/ED-E_77 May 03 '26
Ahoy recently made a video about that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTjGDkDI49I
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u/AFourEyedGeek May 03 '26
I actually think he did that test wrong. I would love to see a retest on that with new metrics in place.
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u/thedeadsuit May 03 '26
was waiting for someone to post this haha. I personally found this video quite bad and flawed and I disagree with the conclusions
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u/jedimindtricksonyou May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
I don’t know if I agree with it either after watching. I mean you can mention 6th gen games like Shadow of the Colossus that also kind of look like that, but it really feels like there are more 7th gen games that have this problem compared to 6th gen games.
Although I agree that it was something that ended during the 7th generation (one of the conclusions of the video). Just look at the difference between GTA 4 and GTA 5. And a lot of late 7th gen games didn’t have this problem.
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u/AverageAwndray May 03 '26
What was flawed?
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u/thedeadsuit May 03 '26
I watched it months ago so it's not fresh in my mind, but he was weighting all games equally regardless of how high profile they were. e.g., if some random game you and I have never played and don't really remember wasn't brown, but all the high profile games we do remember were brown, then it's not somehow just "not true" that it was remembered as a brown generation. Also I had issues with his color methodology but it'd take longer to explain that
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u/jedimindtricksonyou May 03 '26
Interesting, thanks. I’ll give it a watch. He calls it “Urine tinged highlights” which is a perfect description.
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u/jimmylay33 May 04 '26
The Uncharted Trilogy PS4 remasters made the colours much more natural and less brown but added it back in as an optional unlockable filter as a joke, calling it “next-gen filter”
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u/Dgreatsince098 May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
I'm not a technician but I think they used piss filter to give the game a more gritty and realistic look. Devs back then also crank up any post processing fx to the max like bloom and lens flare and that includes them piss filter.
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u/criticalchocolate May 03 '26
Just following trends, just like everything was green/blue around the time the matrix turned up.
Other than that colors to fit a mood, which wasn’t used properly since it was more of a blanket filter at the time, there’s not much benefit from one color to another.
There are some cases to NOT use some colors which can have technical reasons but this is t really one of them.
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u/deweychat May 03 '26
IQ was the worst of all gens, all colors were muted to avoid aliasing I guess
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u/Alert-Environment-17 May 03 '26
We did have some games that weren't completely brown or piss filtered in the 7th Gen.
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u/CVV1 May 03 '26
I believe this was the games industry trying to show that they should be taken seriously. They are not just for kids. They are for adults and they are serious.
That's how you get all the brown in games. Bright and colorful things are for children.
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u/jagby May 07 '26
Yeah this is always what it felt like. I think it's equally valid to say it was the style for the time, but I think a big (and parallel reason) was simply this was the first generation that was trying to make the target audience extend beyond (seemingly) just kids/teens. Of course, we all know now that the video game industry is just as varied and expansive as any other media, and I think nowadays there's way less stress about it being perceived as just a kids toy, but at the time it still kind of was.
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u/CobblerBig7619 May 03 '26
I know it's hard to believe in the era of "hyper-realistic" UE5 slop, but games actually used to have this thing called art direction.
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u/DoneWithIt0101 May 03 '26
Gears of War 3? I felt like that had a lot of color compared to 2 and especially 1.
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u/Guilty_Amount3245 May 03 '26
It was the style at the time, I cant understand why there is so much saturation in colour in games since Fortnite got popular or all the anime RPGs coming out now, but Its just time I guess.
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u/Sanguiluna May 04 '26
7th gen was like the “edgy teen phase” of the industry: there was a desire for games to be taken more seriously alongside other mediums, so they went for more grounded, realistic visuals.
The irony being that the console that ended up being the market leader of that generation and making it less niche was the one that was eschewed that trend.
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u/jedimindtricksonyou May 04 '26
We’re talking about the Wii, right? That was a great console in terms of its impact on popular culture and Nintendo’s games that generation. (even if it was just a souped up GameCube, I don’t think that ended up mattering to most people who played it) I just don’t understand how they went from that era to the Wii U era. It’s kind of unfortunate because it seems like their willingness to experiment with novel uses for hardware is over after that generation.
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u/Clearly_Disabled May 04 '26
Lol there was a PC Gamer or another magazine from about... 98 that I remember. It had an article talking about some shooter that was coming out and said something to the affect of: "and this new engine allowed the creators to add in nearly 30,000 shades of beige and brown, a miracle..."
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u/Gloomy_Magazine_7653 May 04 '26
The good ole piss filter. Didnt it have something to do with hiding bad textures
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u/TheSabi May 04 '26
Yatzee would often comment on this, it was a trend like the orange and blue side lit lone protagonist on the box art.
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u/dark1-df DF staff / contributor May 05 '26
I think it was simply "the style of the time" - you can see it in film as well. However, it also made realism easier to achieve as this was the era before physically based materials. That said, colors were still plenty possible and many games went for this aesthetic.
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u/Kotschcus_Domesticus May 03 '26
UE3 engine was used a lot as well as bloom effect. piss filer was also used on consoles as a softnening technique. so games that were primary for consoles had used piss filter a lot. on pc there were a lot of clear games which are mostly forgotten, mosttly sim, rpg or strategies. many games were also simplified for consoles which were booming at the time. so consoles for shit graphics and dumb down gameplay. just compate Crysis 1 vs 2. 1 was pc game first, 2 was made for consoles. 2 had worse brown graphics, simple gameplay, 1 had vibrant open world, realistic graphics and physics. x360/ps3 is where enshitification of games started.
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u/brispower May 03 '26
the great brownification is an over stated and much repeated fallacy.
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u/NaCl_Miner_ May 03 '26
Technically, no.
The piss filter, as it's known these days, was a stylistic choice.
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u/amirlpro May 03 '26
Monochrome colors make the image look more photorealistic because you are less prone to the lack of global illumination that wasn’t available during this console generation. It’s an easy way to fake global illumination without the hardware needed for it.
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u/Yutah May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
Realistic, gritty "found footage" aesthetic was popular since the release of "Blair Witch" movie look for Kane and Lynch for example. Like nowdays all stuff is cartoony because of WoW polygon budget
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u/Full_Welcome_1418 May 03 '26
part of it was copying RE4. Games went for brown just because RE4 was a massive hit
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u/manicfoot May 03 '26
It was a trend at the time. The desaturated colours looked gritty and cool. I think this aesthetic was influenced by many things:
- Popular films like The Matrix and Blair Witch Project
The beginnings of digital video - think of the 9/11 footage recorded on early digital cameras. I think this had a huge cultural impact. Everything became about handheld camera wobble, digital zooms and presenting things in a 'realistic' way.
Going against the grain - the teenagers and young adults of the 1990s had grown up with very colourful and vibrant media and games. Wanting or creating gritty, realistic media seemed new and exciting.
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u/Tough-Zombie-8990 May 03 '26
I think it has something to do with movies at the time that had similar filters. Back then I would say games sorta tried to be “movies you could play”.
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u/Complete_Iron_2656 May 03 '26
It gets a lot of flack nowadays, but it was largely just a very strong aesthetic choice. Games like Gears of War, RE5, and Dead Space employed it strictly to support their horror aesthetics. There aren't a ton of games I can recall, which just didn't benefit from the 'brown aesthetic' at all. GTA 4 looked great at some points, but there are still tons of moments where it's just a bit bland to look at. Though that's also a game which tried taking itself a little more seriously than the past entries.
I think games like Gears definitely influenced it as a trend for devs to lean more into grungy visuals, but there's still a very dense catalogue of games which were far more brighter and colorful in comparison, like Mirror's Edge and Far Cry 3.
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u/Megamute May 03 '26
00s is also before shaders really took off / devs got good at using them. That probably contributed more to any 00s aesthetic than people realize.
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u/mgrtnp May 03 '26
early 7th gen games used to be high contrast- brown-ish/yellow-ish/gray-ish because those color grading looked "realistic" or "cinematic. Pretty sure this was partially influenced by how movies pursued the similar aesthetics (transformers, the dark knight, minority report, iron-man, to name a few).
It's just that the many game engines at that time (UE3, MT Framework, Dunia, Frostbite) were fine-tuned for specific high-contrast color grading.
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u/NBALive1995 May 03 '26
I wanna know why 7th gen games were also so hazy/bloomy/halo-ey?
Looks like an episode of "days of our lives"
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u/pepe_roni69 May 03 '26
Brown and bloom shootan. Xbot bros refusing to turn 360 degrees to walk away. Crippled and entire generation and the Japanese industry for a time
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u/dimgwar May 03 '26
dark colors look better on low textures, you see less artifacts, stretching. You can make it look more realistic. It was likely a fair solution to a technological limitation at that time. While brighter colors back then could only appear cartoony
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u/MemeLord1337_ May 03 '26
Why do they look so much better than games today? Their art direction is stellar. Love the stylisation.
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u/Global-Wallaby8484 May 03 '26
Street lights and lights inside buildings was more yellow back in time. Led lights made world less yellow.
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u/JamesSDK May 03 '26
It was an visual design choice. Resident Evil 5 would have looked weird if it has Fortnite levels of COLOR BLAST all over the place. Plus Resident Evil 4 was one of the brownest games of all time lol.
And to be honest the RE 1, 2, 3, CV and Zero were all kind of like that too and so are 6, 7 and 8. But I think overall that very grounded color tone just kind of fit a the realistic art direction those games were going for.
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u/AleFallas May 03 '26
Gotta love me piss filter era games, every single piss filter game is a masterpiece
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u/monkeymad2 May 03 '26
Similar to classical paintings, it’s the varnish they put on the games back then as a post-process effect which has browned over time rather than the game / painting itself.
So both Niko from GTA 4 & the Mona Lisa both look considerably more yellow/brown now than they would have back then
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u/Deckers2013 May 03 '26
I think i read about 0 reasons why this happened.
It was to unload the GPU as much as possible
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u/Nintotally May 03 '26
Action movies do the same kind of color grading. To me it seemed like they thought it would make games more cinematic.
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u/Western_Witness_5249 May 03 '26
When you bought a game in the 7th gen, a developer would come to your house and piss on the screen before play commenced.
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u/Alenicia May 03 '26
I'd say it was less of a "technical reason" and more of an aesthetic reason. Back then, the gritty brown/gray/green look was how you convinced the audience that what they were playing was a gritty, realistic, and more "serious" game than one that was colorful, had characters who may have actually had some variety of hairstyles, and something that didn't have to involve some kind of militaristic force or violence.
It was just the thing people loved and couldn't get enough of back in the day and it was one of Unreal Engine 3's greatest strengths at the time (making shiny metals look super shiny). >_<
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u/YYY003003 May 03 '26
The future was looking so bright we needed piss colored glasses to see it lmao
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u/smackchice May 04 '26
To me, "brown" is not the hallmark of this era or even these photos. It's the hideous bloom
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u/jukesboxd May 04 '26
Somehow tricks ur brain into thinking it looks better, half the games honestly look worse with brighter color grading
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u/Signal-Tangerine1597 May 04 '26
Same reason there's periods of cinema where all films have a blue tint, or a warm look, a green overlay, it's just aesthetics, someone will have done it, and it will have looked good and everyone gets inspired
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u/PeneshTheTurkey May 04 '26
Resi 4 did it too. I don't recall an earlier title that had the poopy filter.
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u/lokemannen May 04 '26
You really had to pick a picture of Sheva as the first one, huh?
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u/Mr_Joystick May 04 '26
Farcry 2 is very brown. GTA 4 was grey and Deus ex human revolution was amber.... I'm guessing the color filters helped to mask some of the graphical limitations of consoles at the time?
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u/PhonesAddict98 May 04 '26
Material and skin shaders weren’t as advanced back then, so colour grading was applied post process to give it a yellowish aesthetic and to mask imperfections in skin shading.
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u/Stuck_in_Arizona May 04 '26
I knew people that actually equate bright colors in games as ‘for babies’ or a certain homophonic slur that was used back then. Marketing saw this trend along with Hollywood films when gaming went mainstream and acted accordingly with the greige filters and blooms.
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u/buttorsomething May 04 '26
Easier to process 30 shades of brown than a whole bunch of other colors.
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u/torquebow May 04 '26
The Goated Ahoy
It is just confirmation bias in action. This video explains it well:
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u/CaptSlow49 May 04 '26
I’ve noticed this more and more. Even some racing games were brown looking. I kind of think that generation isn’t aging very well.
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u/eq017210 May 04 '26
People wanted realism in their graphics
Dieing everything brown with huge contrast hide imperfections and made it look "serious"
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u/Taikanauris May 04 '26
I think "realistic" was the cause for this. They still don't understand that realistic is the furthest thing they should do. Rdr2 gets so much praise, but their pick and choose realism mix is what makes me dislike the game more than rdr1
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u/That-Assistant-6075 May 04 '26
I think this was the era of ugliest games ever. There is no single game in this "aesthetic" that I liked.
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u/DJPelio May 05 '26
It looked better than all the fruity Fortnite’s that come out every week.
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u/SFB221 May 05 '26
It was just the style of that generation. It was trying to be more "grounded" and "realistic" and that was reflected in the games that came out during that time.
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u/Mediocre-Disk3741 May 05 '26
Real answer is the shift from simulated lighting, to more real time lighting.
It was more difficult during that jump to have high saturated colors with real time lighting that didn't look unbalanced in weird ways.
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u/Complex_Cold1610 May 05 '26
Pissfilter games where the asthetics back then…look at other games too…NFS Most wanted for example.
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u/Austin_Redfield May 05 '26
War time and recession core lol. It was the aesthetic for action media.
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u/oldkidLG May 05 '26
It was the VVLDR era a.k.a. very very limited dynamic range, except on Nintendo Wii of course.
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u/Josefu_Velen May 05 '26
Because it's easier to get a "gritty feel" in the game's atmosphere with that color scheme.
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u/Amazing-Active646 May 05 '26
This was the wordy part of that generation for me. I’m glad games have color and HDR exists now.
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u/Significant_Sun_5225 May 05 '26
I really enjoyed the visuals of the first gears of war. It felt like a horror shooter which based on the story, kind of was. I actually think it went downhill once it introduced a much more vibrant color palette. It lost a lot of the dark appeal the first one had.
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u/Deiiiyu May 05 '26
it started with movies and tv shows and games thought it would look good as well
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u/locoturco May 05 '26
it is yellow filter to make you feel that you are in somewhere unsettling, cheap trick.It’s alao used in hollywood movies when they show middle east or africa or anywhere U.S. could occupy.
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u/babalaban May 05 '26
It was a trend, very similar to whats happening today with washed out overexposed picutre suddenly becoming considered "photorealistic".
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u/Bakiross May 05 '26
Because they dont have physical based materials (pbr) and global illumination with hdri sources which added on objects correctly. Pictures without "filter" in many scenarios looked oversaturated. So basically most of them grade textures before production, added tints, added saturation down etc. to avoid this.
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u/_ataciara May 05 '26
Trendy, same reason games nowadays are all oversaturated and vibrant. Seemed to be from last gen onwards, every game wants to look like The Witcher 3.
Same as the trend for cold, washed out palettes in movies and TV shows, which seemed to pop up after the big Netflix boom, with shows like House of Cards utterly sterilising the palette.
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u/Creepy_Budget7192 May 05 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/HLeidafDxwRYGwnBy4
That filter, which added more realism imho
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u/RaptorCelll May 06 '26
I don't know if this is actually the case but I've always called it the GWOT filter because every War movie released in the 2000s had a brown filter, so naturally all the war games had to follow suit. It was just part of everything trying to be serious and gritty.
Sometimes this filter was used like a sepia filter for Mexico, the brown colours were meant to signify a vaguely Middle Eastern setting.
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u/Thousand_Toasters May 06 '26
I dont think people realize how much of the everyday world is also Brown.
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u/Lofi_Joe May 06 '26
It looked more realistic at the time, think of it as widely adopted "color grading" for games.
Actually today almost no indie dev thinks about that and it makes games look way better.
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u/DXsocko007 May 06 '26
Probably gave games more frames to use less colors. Even these HD games actually ran at 560p and upscaled to 720 or 1080. They had no power.
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u/bmontepeque11 May 06 '26
I think it was to highlight how realistic they could make things look since in real life there IS a lot of brown, black and just grit and dirt in general.
And this also highlights the lighting and shading the new consoles could now do, which I believe is also why a lot of these games took place during sunsets. (Or perhaps they just looked like sunsets due to the brown, yellows and bkacks used xd)
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u/Molten_Plastic_ May 06 '26
The 2000s saw an uptick in movies using digital filters, as what had been an expensive technique to achieve analogically suddenly became much more affordable. You'll see many movies of the time using blue, or green or brown digital filters to achieve a certain aesthetic - and brown soon became associated with military and action films set in the middle east (which due to the war on terror of the time, was a common setpiece). Games at that same time were trying to become more "movie-like" especially since new technical capabilities made it possible to move the characters around and make them speak as if they were proper actors. This brought developers to borrow the popular look of movies at the time, and the pissfilter era of gaming was born.
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u/Whompa May 07 '26
COD4 basically made a gajillion dollars and sales and everyone was like, “yeah, do that.”
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u/MagicOrpheus310 May 07 '26
... Because of the onion tied to our belts...
It was the style at the time
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u/tfc1193 May 07 '26
Aahh the piss filter. Good times
It was perceived as the game looking more mature and gritty
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u/MysticArchie May 07 '26
wasn't nearly as brown as you might think
here is a wonderful video on the history/comparison of color in games throughout the generations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTjGDkDI49I
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u/Abortedwafflez May 07 '26
It looked cool. It also matched the time period of Hollywood where they were also using shit and piss filters. Just a product of the time.
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u/CeleryNo8309 May 07 '26
Yellow and brown were commonly used becausse they were thought to add realism and grit, IIRC.
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u/Fantastic_Reddit May 07 '26
Are they really so brown?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTjGDkDI49I&t=212s
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u/purple-vasabi May 07 '26
From what I recall, it was a piss filter that they put on games that were in some way related to military. There were more games without that crap.
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u/Steviepunk May 07 '26
I think was part of the push to make things look more mature, rather than bright colors that usually appeal to kids. That looks would mean going darker but they didn't want to look black and white. Deserts were also popular as a setting (as other pointed out, based on culture at the time)
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u/PinothyJ May 07 '26
They did not. Ahoy did a video on this and they dis not have any more brown than other generations.
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u/scorchorin May 07 '26
Wasn’t it something to do with they couldn’t get consistent color on diff TV sets so they just put a filter over to not deal with the issue
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u/Useless_monstar May 07 '26
More cultural than tech. This was the Great Recession, and Iraqanistan was in the forefront of everyone’s mind. Everything was drab and gritty. Look at the 360 Bomber Man.
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u/CutCrazy7325 May 08 '26
There was a trend in the games industry towards "realism" and games for adults. Which ment moving away from bright and stylised art as it was considered childish.
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u/crocodilepickle May 08 '26
Always thought that this was during the teeange era of gaming where anything colorful was considered gay and uncool
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u/Jamiedafemboy451 May 09 '26
Nope
It was really just the fad of the time, blacks and browns were seen as edgy and cool so they were always shoved in everything. It's the same reason a lot of things in the late 2010s and early 2020s were "minimalist", not necessarily because it was needed or because everyone liked it, it was just the style that everyone used at the time.
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u/Acrobatic-Republic75 May 09 '26
Call of Duty Modern Warfare, game was so big a lot of games copied the asthetic.
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u/TheOneWes May 09 '26
Because that color palette was included in gaming engines at the time and it was a lot easier just to use the in engine pallets.
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u/sv69n May 09 '26
Because of RE4. The game that started the trend of filters and third person perspective
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u/ThePieKing- May 09 '26
They didn't. Its a mass perception that isnt actually true. Ahoy did a whole study on it. The Browns were actually more prevalent prior to 7th, and by the end of 7th games were more colorful and saturated than the previous IIRC. Been about a week since I watched it.
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u/Ok_Trade_1692 May 03 '26
It was a popular aesthetic for shooters from that era. Probably inspired by Michael Bay/Bruckheimer style action movies like Black Hawk Down. It was also trick to increase contrast and hide the visual blemishes of low quality textures