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For all of gaming history, as technology has evolved, so has the capability to do things graphically in video games. The notion of virtually every game being a set of screens with sprites pasted on is long past, and is now mainly the domain of indie games. In the mainstream, we've reached the point where games can be nearly photorealistic, or they can go a very different route. Shall the twain ever meet? Is one objectively better than another? What games benefit from what kind of art direction?

This week's CoNcast features Death Penalty, Tiddles, Neal, and laszlow talking about these issues and more, and also why Pokemon should be more like Tamagotchi. And you don't have to listen to me for the whole thing, so, wins all around.

Source: The CoNcast Subscription Feed, The CoNcast on iTunes

Good discussion but the intro had my ears bleeding

Ah, really sorry about that. I didn't do the editing in the way I usually do due to the same reason I couldn't participate in the recording myself - I think quite a bit of the sound mixing probably isn't quite as good as it usually is. I'll pay closer attention next time!

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

One note about graphical style and realism: There's a difference between graphical realism and and setting realism. The two are correlated, especially for a lot of prominent "gritty" series like Call of Duty and GTA, and there seems to be at least a current consensus that you can't really put cartoony/anime/cel-shaded/otherwise-stylized graphics into such games, with a few exceptions (such as the noir aesthetic). That said, there are definitely both fantasy series with "realistic" graphics (most notably the Final Fantasy series), and modern/urban/realism series with stylized graphics (think basically any anime series set in the modern day, though I can't think of any such games off the top of my head).

My personal opinion on all this is that I think that the whole idea that graphics should be realistic, especially for grittier games, along with the contraposition that non-realistic graphics are for kiddie/non-serious/niche-fantasy games, is a misguided one that's led the industry down the path of trying in vain to create virtual reality and instead just spending tons and tons of money to create a perverted vision of reality that merely further panders to unrealistic misperceptions like locking swords, jiggling boobs, and Hollywood portrayals of military action.

That said, for what it's worth, there's quite a bit of variation even among the "realistic" styles. Someone on the podcast pointed out color palettes, and there's also things like (as I mentioned above) the noir variant and a more comic-book-styled variant (such as in The Walking Dead). And heck, if we allow a bit more cartooniness, we could even throw in something like TF2, though that's really getting to the point of quite clearly not typical realism.

Anyway, Tiddles kinda touched on this with a question late in the podcast. If you cel-shaded GTA, I think that you'd suddenly get a noticeably differently-styled product, which could actually bring in more consumers, though it might also alienate some current ones, since people have come to associate certain styles with certain content.

I agree with the broader point that graphical verisimilitude is probably hitting a ceiling, and visual style is probably a bigger deal at this point. In a way, it's like hyper-realism is now the budget-breaking standard and that's unintentionally caused a rift between retro/indie on one side and "professional" on the other.

This isn't to say that retro/indie graphics with their sprites are necessarily better -- if anything, one reason that a lot of indie games use stylized sprites is not because of hardware limitations but because of budget limitations, when they don't have graphic designers on staff to make stuff look super-detailed. This isn't to say that those stylized graphics don't work -- stylization is inherently very subjective, and for that matter, a highly successful game can make a trend out of a style that prevoiusly seemed awkward and aesthetically lacking, as someone pointed out in the podcast.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 3rd November 2013 21:40

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