Realism or Stylistic Aesthetic?

[ro9ue]

So what do you prefer more?

I think growing up with NES and SNES, trying to achieve realism was really cool:




But it's kinda at the point now where some of this stuff looks so real, that it's now all looking the same:






It's like, as all these game devs march towards more and more realism, they start to get farther and farther away from having their own identity.


Now I much more prefer things like:



(And all of Blizzard's games)








And all of those games seem to hold up much better over time.


What do you think? Do you prefer to see games as realistic as possible or do you want your games to have their own unique art style?

[Realsykes]

It's heavily dependent on so many things.

It's not just graphics, it's the whole package.

[Deleted]

i also prefer the art style of the second load of pictures, the more cartoony stuff. think it looks a lot nicer, don't really like games that go for realistic graphics, it just seems really uninteresting to me.

[Ryzek]

Stylistic Aesthetic hands down.

[Deleted]

The artstyle should follow what the game tries to depict in their theme, so high fantasy games should for the most part be stylized seeing as they portray something that isn't real and therefore trying to strive for it would tend to obscure it and look out of place. Whereas games that go for a more realistic themes, should go for more realistic depiction.

[ro9ue]

The artstyle should follow what the game tries to depict in their theme, so high fantasy games should for the most part be stylized seeing as they portray something that isn't real and therefore trying to strive for it would tend to obscure it and look out of place. Whereas games that go for a more realistic themes, should go for more realistic depiction.

What about lord of the rings? Shadow of Mordor is "High Fantasy" but it goes for realism.

[Deleted]

What about lord of the rings? Shadow of Mordor is "High Fantasy" but it goes for realism.

Well the only high fantasy about that game really was orcs, which is also running together with the theme that the franchise have run with for years.

[Irian]

I've always preferred stylized graphics by a landslide. It shows more creativity and style and is a lot more of a gamble than realism.

I think it could be because I grew up playing 16 and 32-bit generation games like Mario, Sonic and Zelda but I've always thought the advancement of stylized, semi-cartoonish graphics blew me out of the water far more than realism. When I see a really realistic game, like you said, it sort of just blends together because...well, at this point video games can almost duplicate real life pictures and that's not really that impressive to me. I don't look at many pictures and think "oh man look at the graphics on that shit" but I will look at a game like the ones you showed and think about how impressive it is.
I lean towards "semi-stylized" these days, World of Warcraft would be a perfect example of what I mean by this; it's somewhat realistic or kind of includes realistic elements with a touch of artistic fantasy in it. Not enough to alienate someone (looking at you wildstar) but enough to make it clear that the graphics are supposed to resemble something we've never seen.

And you're right, it's practically proven by common sense that games like these stand the test of time. A realistic-looking game from many of the old console generations just looks choppy and awkward and often touches down into the uncanny valley here and there, whereas a stylized game never really ends up looking outdated in my eyes.

[Afrospinach]

Stylistic Aesthetic hands down.

Mmmmhm.

If there is anything to be learnt in the last decade it is that realism ages TERRIBLY. Even crysis kind of looks like ass now, and besides, stylistic can mean more imaginative and stimulating while being less of a hardware hog. Crysis sort of looks like a brightly lit touched up postcard now.

[Post]

I like both.

[Antereon]

Depends on the genre. I prefer realism for darker games like Witcher 3.

[Calfredd]

Depends on the genre. I prefer realism for darker games like Witcher 3.

I think they could do more darker games in the stylized art more often. I found Twilight Princess to be a very good game and it definitely had a darker theme than usual.

[Pull My Finger]

I dislike the "realistic" graphics of modern games in most cases. It often gives me an uncanney valley experience and it's just so devoid of imagination, artistic direction and proper design. Utterly uncreative. You can tell how it's a product made by nerds and mouse monkeys, although ironically, in the industry they're referred to as "artists". Got to know a whole bunch of those back at university. Bunch of software cracks with good modelling skills and no idea of anything else, at all.

It also makes a lot of games look really, really similar. And one thing that really hurts me eyes is the ridiculous glow and the surfaces. In a lot of games, everything looks like fucking plastic and synthetic foil. Terrible.

[Fencers]

Usually I prefer realistic where possible. Not a fan of overly bright and cartoony aesthetics. But I tend to have a dark personality- stuff like World of Warcraft or Ratchet & Clank looks like someone vomited crayolas. Not too into this type of thing.

I am more tolerant stylized graphics such as in Diablo 3 or Borderlands though. Again, this may simply be due to those respective art styles having some 'grit' if you will.

Loved the way the last Tomb Raider game looked. I thought it was gorgeous and captivating.

[Arewn]

I find that realistic styles have reached a certain plateau at this point. A point where they look good enough that they'll hold up well over time. They've passed the uncanny valley, they've reached a standard of looking "realistic enough" that further graphical improvement won't cause them to stick out as bad in comparison a few years later.
A realistic game of 10 years ago looks bad by today's standards due to graphics constantly improving. But a realistic game of today, I think, will still look good 10 years from now.

In effect, realism is a stylistic aesthetic to take, one that is much harder to achieve due to the detail required of it. A now that technology is able to adequately fulfill those requirements, I don't think "stylized" art will hold the same advantage of "aging better".

I still like "stylized" art, I don't think it's inferior to "realism". I just don't think we'll be seeing as much of the "it ages better" arguments going forward.


Put another way: a graphics style like WoW's was built to suit the limited graphical capabilities of its time. It didn't demand high quality graphics in order to look good in the first place, though of course higher poly count and texture rez will still make it look better. It was a look designed around the limited graphics capabilities of it's time, the same way chiptunes sound good even though it's just 8-bit music.
A realistic style on the other hand demands high quality graphics, because you can't achieve a good realistic look without them. Attempts to do a realistic style have thus far looked good "for their time", but would get outdone as soon as something with higher quality graphics came out and was better able to fulfill the realistic look. And the old stuff ends up looking like garbage by comparison, thus it "not aging well". At this point though, graphics have advanced enough that they can achieve a "good realistic look". Higher polycount and texture rez will make it look even better, but graphics have reached the baseline for what's needed to make a realistic looking realistic style now.

[Vankrys]

cartoony style does age too. Perhaps slower, because of our suspension of disbelief, but it does. Even the acclaimed wow graphics, at least before the revamp, looks terrible, but it does works well in an MMO environment, which can be taxing on system resource.

there is one thing that still pictures cannot show: animation. While i agree, improvement on graphical fidelity might go unnoticed or barely noticeable today (except going from 720p to 1080 to 4k, yeah that's noticeable), the real improvement is on the realism of the animation of body parts and how they interact in the world.

Do they reach for for a door handle and pull it down to open a door or you just press a button and a door magically open? do they raise hand as they are running toward a wall to avoid head on collision? do they break their pace as they suddenly arrive at a cliff? If the ground is shaking, are they loosing footing, are their lowering they center of gravity to stabilize?

Next step in realism will be in animation within a dynamic context i believe.

[vrsick]

The more realistic the better.

[Wildmoon]

I generally prefer stylistic art but there are some stylistic art style that I don't like such as Dota2 for example. Too washed out and blurry for me. Everything in that game seems to blend together. I like style which utilize bold colors.

Realistic style can be good too but most of the time it doesn't look that realistic. It breaks immersion when it's trying to be realistic but it's not because my eyes are used to real stuff and it's easy to tell them apart.



Thing like this will never get old for me. You can do stylistic art like that without being too cartoony. D3 is also like that too.

[Scufflegrit]

Both work in their own way, and a balance of both is good. I don't mind stylized graphics, but if it gets to be too cartoony... yeah. May as well pull out the paper and crayons at that point. For something like WoW, I wish everything in the game was closer to the graphics in the cinematics. Still very stylized, but much more realistic looking at the same time.

And for something like the SC picture above, I also agree that the colors need to be there. If you look at it from a real world perspective, the terran units would probably not have any bright red paint on them, so as to try to camouflage themselves with the surrounding metal plating. But that would look completely boring.

[Deleted]

to me games that try to look realistic end up looking ugly and just that