History Main / RealIsBrown

* ''Enslaved'' takes place AfterTheEnd, meaning that it's setting is...''green''. Lots and lots of green, from the plants that have taken over man's natural structures.

** Any zone that's got a predominantly "evil" presence is like this. The Plaguelands (green/brown), the areas around Blackrock Mountain (red), Felwood (green), Duskwood (grey), Hellfire Peninsula (orange), Shadowmoon Valley (nigh-radioactive green), and most recently, Icecrown (washed-out blue).

'''NOTE''': This trope does not apply to a game taking place in an environment that actually would be gray or brownish in Real Life.

** Feralas, however, is a beautiful, mostly-untouched rainforest that is almost entirely a bright, vibrant green. Players who are new to the region will be pleasantly surprised by the incredibly green environment since the two areas next to the rainforest are ''desert''. Which are, of course, brown.

*** You're ''right''. It would be ''far'' more accurate ''and'' sensitive to the poor to insinuate that they live in ''goddamned mansions''.
*** Of course, [[GameMod if you're making your own buildings]], you can avert this trope, but, [[StopHavingFunGuys serious players]] will tell you that you can't make little purple houses or incredibly dark structures, despite the fact that in RealLife, many buildings throughout the world have a broad range of colors, because it doesn't flow with the game's style.
**** Which is silly because it's possible to use bright colors and shade them in a way that lets them blend in, this Troper one time made a series of brightly-colored flats that turned a city into Cork, Ireland.

** This troper one time ripped textures off the game and noticed that in Bioshock real is kind of a greenish-blue... being underwater of course.

** Except ''ModernWarfare 2'', which is quite vibrant in places. Particularly the Rio de Janeiro levels. Naturally, there were complaints about the game being too colourful.

* ''AdvanceWars: Days of Ruin'' has this on many maps, but it's justified by the plot: with [[AfterTheEnd dust in the air blocking out the sun]], you couldn't really expect colorful landscapes. The map unit sprites are still colorful though, and the side and skirmish missions can have the more colourful palette of the previous games.

** Of course Diablo 2 featured such locales as the entirely pink Worldstone Keep. And even its 'realistic' areas have exaggerated colours due to the bright 256 colour palette. Not the fault of the palette, however, was the conspicuous ''neon blue'' night in Direct3D mode.

** ''CallOfDuty 4'' has a similar filter which turns down the contrast quite a bit, everything is suddenly colourful, the grass is green the sky is blue and moonlight turns things a stark shade of blue. Only thing is, the black is also blacker, making it hard to see after hours.

* ''Left4Dead'' was predominantly set in dark, greyish settings. So when ''Left 4 Dead 2'' trailers showed that it would be brighter and more colourful, presumably someone somewhere cried RuinedFOREVER.

* ''{{Killzone}} 2'' runs the gammut of colours with this, earlier levels are a dank sickly green colour with mixtures of yellow thrown in while the later ones run a mixture of brown orange and towards the end an almost blood red, though in all fairness you ARE on another planet known for its very harsh conditions

** It's also somewhat averted in the one level set off-planet on a spaceship, which mostly uses blue and other non-brown colours.

* The town in ''{{Pathologic}}'' is this ''most'' of the time. In its normal state, the town is a drab and depressing array of brownish colours ([[JustifiedTrope justified]] in that the town is in the steppes, where it's naturally dirty all of the time). However, when the disease comes, infected districts will be hit with a green filter that makes everything look sickly, which later gets swapped for a yellow filter before finally returning to normal.

* Justified in ''BreathOfFire V'', which actually uses this trope rather well. Without making everything consist of the same colour palette, the backgrounds (at least most of them) are brown and gray. The characters thankfully give a nice contrast...and help you actually ''see'' them. Thank goodness they didn't pass a law against wearing primary colours.
* Played with, but generally averted in HeavyRain. The beginning of the games starts out with such bright lighting and colours that it almost makes your eyes water. After [[ItGotWorse it gets worse]], the colours are dark, dingy brown-greens and rusty reds. However, the colour later returns, and there's several bright and/or realistically subdued colour schemes throughout the whole game.

* Averted in ''[[MirrorsEdge Mirror's Edge]]'', which takes place in a totalitarian future that's largely a sterile white, with the occasional splash of color. The colour also works into the gameplay: Since there's no heads-up display, the game tells you how much health you have by desaturating your vision.

* Largely averted in ''SeriousSam 2''. There are only few chapters with brownish colour scheme (Planet Kleer).

They've become good at simulating shadows, and how light interacts with objects. This allows games to have some degree of realism to their lighting. But they're not so good with ''colors''. Colors also reflect from one object to another, in a process known as radiosity. For example, if you held up a red ball up to a sunlit, white wall, part of the wall would turn a shade of red. This is very difficult for a computer to simulate, and a colorful scene without it looks pretty fake. The general lack of proper use of high dynamic range only helps to magnify the problem. Most games that try to incorporate radiosity have to "pre-bake" it - compute the radiosity on a more powerful computer, then use the pre-computed values in the game, instead of doing it all in real time. But this means nearly everything has to be static - any object with radiosity applied to it cannot move around, or the values would need to be recalculated. This works fine for, say, ''SonicUnleashed'' or ''[[MirrorsEdge Mirror's Edge]]'', but in most games it's too impractical to do. Besides, you wouldn't able to use that [[WreakingHavok snazzy physics engine]] you paid for.

See also MoodLighting. The use of PostProcessingVideoEffects makes Real even Browner. See also the sister trope WhoForgotTheLights, which deals with a shortage of light in general.

*** I did, and Twilight Princess is slightly less colorful. That seems to be less this true and more Twilight Princess trying to please the fans that moaned about Wind Waker.

* ''Halo'' has inverted this from the very beginning. Most Covenant technology is purple, blue or pink, energy shields are mostly bright orange or blue, some high-ranking Covenant wear shiny gold armour, plasma fire is blue or green and the needler's projectiles are hot pink.

* ''Human Revolution'''s pre-release screen shots show that everything is a [[SincerityMode nauseating]] [[SicklyGreenGlow green]] with the odd splash of yellow. Contrast ''DeusEx'', the game it is claimed as a prequel to, where the only prominent color on the palette is blue (and only for tech items)

*** Strangely, version 9.10 went [[ZigZaggingTrope back to brown as its primary color scheme.]] As of version 10.04, however, brown has been all but eliminated in favor of a dark purple/black theme. A refreshing change, [[MacOS though it's vaguely reminiscent of something else...]]

*** And as of version 10.04, brown has been all but eliminated in favor of a dark purple/black theme. A refreshing change, [[MacOS though it's vaguely reminiscent of something else...]]

[[VGCats http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/realisbrowngo1.jpg]]
[[caption-width:320:The ''VGCats'' explain video game graphical techniques in "[[http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=222 Gaussian Blur]]"]]

-->"''I long for the sweet peace of the pasture... but the bright colors of the world taunt me!''
-->''Why must all things be so bright? Why can things not appear only in hues of brown!''
-->''I am so serious about this!''
-->''Dull colors are the future!''
-->''...[[TakeThat The next generation]]!''"
-->- Bullet Bull, ''[[PaperMario Super Paper Mario]]''

* ''{{Freelancer}}'' goes with brightly-colored lasers, glaring suns, and vivid backgrounds based on pictures taken from the Hubble space telescope whose dominant color also varies depending on which part of the Sirius sector you are.