Sg3 on 6/8/2012 at 09:12

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Deliberately unrealistic-looking character models are always a huge immersion-killer for me. I can take some moderate surreal-ness in the art style, but outright caricature is a turn-off because it breaks my suspension of disbelief. But, as you said, it is, really, a matter of taste. : /

Sg3 on 6/8/2012 at 09:43

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Correct. I hated Deadly Shadows--I didn't try it out for very long, as a result of the manifold idiotic design choices, and to this day, I don't even consider it a Thief game, personally. So many things wrong with it, and the cartoony character models were indeed a deal-breaker in D.S.'s case.

Bioshock is a bit different, as the art style for that was (judging by the gameplay videos) surreal rather than caricature, and, as I mentioned, I don't mind some surreal. The two Thief games had more than a little bit of the surreal (in the cutscenes, for example). However, I lost interest in Bioshock somewhere around the time that Ken Levine announced his intention to dumb it down, and so I never ended up playing it. Wouldn't be averse to trying it, but I'm not going out of my way to do so.



I don't know that I disagree, but if the cartoony games are a majority, it isn't a very big one. There are plenty of photorealistic-style games out there, and popular ones: Skyrim, Left for Dead, and Mass Effect are just some of the relatively-photorealistic big-sellers which occur to me at present. Not that I much care about popularity--I play games regardless of their popularity (or lack thereof).

All of the hundreds (thousands?) of games which I've enjoyed do have a photorealistic art style, or nearly so--although many of them have low polygon counts and texture resolutions and such, which doesn't bother me. For example, I played the original Deus Ex for the first time a few weeks ago, and for the first few hours, I was kinda annoyed by how dated the graphics were; but a few hours into the game, I wasn't even noticing it. Quite enjoyed the game, and was immersed; low graphical quality, but reasonably believable art style.

Muzman on 6/8/2012 at 10:15

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No, I'd put it close to half and half as well. But it depends where you draw the line really. Taking all games that depict people you've got all the Marios and Zeldas in the cartoony pile for instance, but I'd say that Gears of War is more that way than t'other. Is Rayman in the running, since he's not really a human as such. You end up with some funny questions like that.

Anyway, I wouldn't call Bioshock surreal. It's just because the people you generally meet are messed up. But even those who are not entirely disfigured are presented in a fairly stylised way. It's the main reason I think people said Dishonoured looks like Bioshock when they first saw it: pipes and slightly caricature-y people. Infinite looks to be the same.
It's becoming more popular because, I think -one it's interesting and -two it's good for ducking the ol uncanny valley. The old style games got over by being low res and detail. The player can fill in the blanks. Now everything's got to be mo-capped and animated to match the res and they hit logarithmically diminishing returns pretty fast.

Sg3 on 6/8/2012 at 10:37

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Hum, I can't really respond to that one way or the other, because I've never played the game. The "Little Sisters" looked a bit weird, but I gathered that they were supposed to be mutated or something. Well, either way, I can't say I was crazy about the aesthetic of Bioshock--Mass Effect was pretty close to my ideal for what a current-generation game should look like (if slightly bland in terms of architecture--but I only played the first one).



I think that ol' "U.V." has already been pretty much conquered. I've seen plenty of ultra-realistic C.G.I. characters which don't strike me as odd--the only thought which might prevent total immersion is my pleasant surprise that they look so lifelike, but that's hardly U.V. Of course, that's pre-rendered cinematics--gameplay is another story. But something like Mass Effect does a smashing job of not being remotely U.C., while still being very highly detailed and almost photo-realistic.

Now Left for Dead, on the other hand, has the other problem you mentioned--great disparity between quality of the graphics and quality of the animation. L4D has the most photo-realistic faces I've seen in any game, period. Unfortunately, the game's animations are generally pretty bad, and this makes for a big and confusing gap in the S.o.D.

Dresden on 6/8/2012 at 10:59

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I don't mind it being cartoony looking but they should go all or nothing instead of Bioshock's plastic people look. I think the game's style would look great with shaders that make it look like a 2D animation. I guess that's hard to do with ancient console hardware.