I want to get everyone’s opinion on this matter, what are some great advantages and disadvantages for each these styles when it comes to open world games? Think of games like Breath of the wild/Persona vs GTA 5 / RDR2 style
I don’t know much about this but I imagine anime/cartoony style usually gives the benefit of a greater performance due to stuff like textures (correct me if I’m wrong).
I also noticed games with anime/cartoony style in an open world game would have a lot more building interiors that you could walk into unlike realistic ones like GTA 5, where it has to be very selective and would have fewer building that you could enter (maybe due to rendering?).
To be fair, there isn’t really anime/cartoon style open world games with the GTA’s level of map scale. Share whatever thoughts, advantages, disadvantages, or opinions you might have. I am very curious about this and I always ponder if I ever create an open world game which style I would go for.
Maybe one of them has the benefit of having more npcs in the world than the other, or the ability to be more destructive without taking too much of a performance hit.
Not sure the point of the poll. This isn’t a topic where there is a better or worse; it’s a case of what better suits your purposes. What’s your theme, setting? What tone of story are you telling? And what do you just prefer to work with?
I don’t think cel shaded 3d is really any more performant than your traditional styles, as all the same 3d techniques apply. The main difference is the shaders involved, and a few other things that you’ll need to do to accommodate the style (usually lighting).
A lot of Japanese games will use the style as they’re emulating the anime style art the country is known for. Of course a lot of western companies use cel shaded style too.
If you’re making a game with a more serious tone, but you may go for a more realistic style. But you can also do the same with a cel shaded style using the right colours, shading, highlights, etc.
To be subjective, I think a toony style will age a lot better than anything realistic. The Last of us 2 is going to look weird in about 5 years, while old titles like Psychonauts still look pretty good even to this day.
I also just like the cel shaded style more, which is why I use it in my own projects.
Games that chase photorealism, in general do not age well, while something in cartoon style can be played years after the release date with no problem. Games that use pixelart or lowpoly also age better. Photorealistic titles tend to look like blurry mess just a few years after release.
However, in general the art style used by the game needs to have some soul and style. There’s at least one cookie-cutter anime style right now which is not visually interesting and creates pretty much RPGMaker effect when used.
I edited and gave an example, like Breath of the wild/ Persona vs GTA 5 / RDR2 so I guess you could say non photorealistic vs photorealistic, I’m not sure how to describe them when it comes to terms so sorry about that.
Asking which is these styles is better is like asking whether it’s better to be a funny or serious person. People don’t generally choose a game style based on some idea that it’s ‘better’, but because it expresses things the way they happen to want to. If you don’t really know what you want your game to feel like then that’s probably the problem you should focus on.
I disagree with the idea that realistic games don’t age well. Maybe pre-2008 or so, when there were horrific concessions made for performance reasons, like NPC faces looking like they just ran into a wall, but those days are gone. Games only don’t age well if they never had a real style to begin with.
The truth is that all realistic game art has a certain level of space between itself and reality. The job of an artist is to occupy that space with style. The better a game does that (for example a game like Halo, which has a distinct style and aesthetic) the longer its longevity.
Here’s an example, there’s absolutely nothing unpleasant about this Halo 3 port:
Yet it is nowhere near realistic or near the level of graphics games are capable of nowadays, and I would say that there’s a lot of ‘realistic’ stuff even very recently that looks quite weird and unappealing, because it has no real style.
In fact, the space game I like the aesthetic of the most is X Rebirth, which is hardly realistic (and isn’t very good quality tbh) but to me has a very powerful aesthetic style:
Whereas the clean, ultra high quality aesthetic of Star Citizen, for example, has almost no appeal for me whatsoever.
The difference? A clear and distinct sense of style that everything revolves around.
In fact, if you are worried about your ability to produce art (or the amount of work involved) of different kinds, I would stay away from cartoony (and very far away from anime) as the lack of detail makes it extremely clear when someone doesn’t know what they are doing or is trying to cut corners in their workflow. There’s nothing that screams ‘poor inexperienced indie’ more than generic toon art.
In any question of aesthetics, pitting simplicity against complexity is a meaningless pursuit. There are very detailed paintings you could look at for hours, and very simple ones too … and there are very realistic paintings that are utterly bland or unappealing, and simple paintings that convey nothing at all. The real question is, what do you want your game to convey, and how are you going to succeed at that?
Even that isn’t true. People are still playing Resident Evil games and whatnot very happily, no matter if the characters are low on polygon because of technical limitations.
IMHO the graphics style and level doesn’t really matter as long as it contributes positively to the overall feeling. Even if the technique or “level” is outdated.
There’s a lot of wrong here, actually. It looks very dated visually due to repetitive patterns on terrain.
Also keep in mind that master chief collection on pc uses remasters and not straight ports.
Half-Life 2 is 2004, and so is Doom 3. Open them both now, they look very dated. They were both jaw dropping upon release.
In contrast to that, 2d Sega Genesis titles do not suffer such visual degradation, and things that like Virtua Racing look pretty much the same.
The problem is with texture detail, as far as I can tell. The next problem is lighting. Lower texture detail is instantly noticeable and same goes for non-PBR lighting.
Additionally it is not a good idea to cull off games before 2008. That’s majority of videogame history.
I personally find many ‘realistic’ games up until 2005-2008 hard to look at, but I don’t think it’s so much the style as the blurry textures and poor lighting just making the scene a bit unreadable.
But yeah, when the right artistic choices are made, a game of any age in any style is perfectly enjoyable.
Yeah that’s the point, it’s blurry textures not the artistic style. Anything blurry, whether it’s simple or complex, will probably look very unappealing.
Yeah I totally agree with this. But texture blurriness is not an issue any more, and doesn’t belong to questions of style (unless there’s such a thing as the Pentium 1 Style…)
Lighting is, to me, the biggest factor in graphics. Because it makes the experience of looking for things, identifying things, intuiting distances and understanding spaces, much easier. Even realistic textures don’t need a lot of detail to look good, as long as they have the basic features of what they represent and decent PBR values. But any 3D space that is rendered in flat, awkward lighting is going to be hard to look at.
Well, for realistic graphics, it wasn’t exactly the golden era.
Cartoon is better for “flexibility”, but you need a decent art team. People often go for realism, because they are CLUELESS. Realism is FAR easier to understand and judge by managers who approve assets.
The main problem with is that realism is faceless and has no distinct features of its own. So what people normally do while chasing realism is providing a high level of detail. And level of details does not age well. The textures that are blurry looked fine upon release, however, as the world moved on, the amount of detail became insufficient, and it quickly starts to look dated. This is a common thing.
In contrast, a cartoon or anime character has no detail it relies on to begin with.
For example, this is Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne and Another World: Dos version
They do not rely on texture resolution and instead use silhoettes, shapes, etc. There are key elements on character, but they’re not detail dependent. And because of that it is easy enough to get used to the style of the game years later (Nocturne: 2003, Another World: 1991)
We’ve not reached texture detail limit and probably will never reach it.
Because if originally we were increasing texture resolution, there’s still possibility of pushing it further to the point where each object will have 16k resolution texture that is completely unique. And something that does not meet the standard will look older.
That’s why I don’t see a point in trying to chase realism, by the way.
I always tone down the texture details to blurry so I get back that shape legibility instead of that stupid unreadable high frequency mess modern cinematic realist game have become.
There was a forum memebr that was recreating asset store models by swapping the texture, keeping the geometry, and using textures for a gradient. Worked incredibly well.
Realism also limits gameplay design options. That’s because when stuff looks realistic people expect that it will behave in a realistic way as well. With a cartoon you can have a much more unique and wacky mechanics which gives MUCH more freedom to gameplay designers. Realism also requires much more work on details. It also constrains animation options. There are MANY problems with photorealistic games. Only hardcore simulations benefit mostly from extreme levels of realism.
This is a very narrow idea of realism. The idea that game art is either toon/anime or something realistic but faceless and without distinct features, is simply ignoring virtually the entirety of what game artists do in realistic games.
The truth is that there’s a whole world of stylization that can go on with even very realistic AAA games, look at Uncharted, Halo, Assassins Creed Unity, Ryse, to name a few. Everything is realistic, and rich in both detail and style.
There are also games like Nier Automata or Overwatch that lie in completely distinct places on the spectrum between stylization and realism.
Why are 16k textures needed? Nobody is playing games so they can put their face up against a wall to examine the texture detail at nose length. You could probably either double or halve texture resolution in most games and it wouldn’t have any visual impact in a normal playing experience.
That’s why I think most of the problems that were inherent to the early days of realistic 3D games are gone forever and not relevant any more. Texture detail is pretty much a moot point at this stage, as is poly count. The only real advances that need to occur are in lighting and material properties, which in fact is useful for any game style unless it’s unlit.
The reason why I think this way is that as far as I can think back now, I have never in my life seen a realistic game that had a style in visuals.
The number of games I saw is hundreds.
Being indistinct is the very definition of realism. It offers detail. But its “style” is something you see if you walk outside of your apartment and you see it every day.
So, all the game you listed for me are barely different from each other visually to the point where they suffer heavily from RPGMaker effect. In that way there’s no difference between Uncharted, Halo and Assassin Creed, as they merely have different backdrop but the “artist” is the same and that shows in every frame. Likewise Witcher 3 heavily resembles RDR2.
You can have a cool monster, a cool place, but when the style is “realism” that means “bland” and it affects majority of visuals in the frame. When the game has a “Style” they step away from realism.
Honeslty the situation sort of reminds me of “Sin Episodes: Emergence”. Their (main) characters had a distinct design, but the majority of the situation was dominated by backgrounds which were the usual cookie cutter slice of blandness seen in innumerable amount of other games. That’s the main issue with “realism”. Usually people will try to make one cool artifact, one cool character, then they stuff it into the run of the mill everyday world, and most of the time you’ll be looking at the world and not that one unique thing in it.
People do exactly that and that’s why they try to create high resolution texture mods as soon as they get an opportunity. I’m not sure why they do that, but they just do.
