So you’re telling me that I’m a magical being who can shoot fire out of my fingertips and slay dragons, but I can’t carry one more wheel of cheese because it’s too heavy? Yeah, I’m not buying it. Take, for example, the inventory limits in Skyrim.
Nothing annoys me more than design choices that are made for the sake of realism, only to find them as hindrances rather than being helpful. If taking away a sense of visual realism makes your game unplayable, then I’m sorry, but you might just have a bad game on your hands.īesides the visuals, then there’s the actual design of the game itself. When the storytelling or gameplay is strong enough to carry a game on its own, that’s what I really care about. The pros just don’t outweigh the cons in my eyes. We’re at a point now where you can easily find a balance between making things look how you want, while also not crunching your developers into oblivion. We also can’t ignore the fact that the more “realistic” you want to make your game, the harder your designers, artists, and animators need to work. The art style can set the whole tone for a piece, and since games are such a visual medium, there’s nothing I love more than seeing devs use the art to help build on the game’s tone, because I believe that’s one of the most powerful tools they have at their disposal. Even when you want to go for a more grounded feel, you can still use the art to help achieve that feeling. Personally, I’m a big fan of stylized art forms. They were great at creating atmosphere and a sense of place, which to me is so much more important than a one-to-one feeling that I’m in the real world. Those games are far from photo-realistic, but the art style actually mimics the cell-shaded style of comic books, where many of the Telltale IPs got their start. If a developer wants to go for a more grounded style, I think it works better to lean ever-so-slightly into some stylization. Remember, there was a time when people thought the first Metal Gear Solid game was the most realistic thing they had ever seen. Something that we think looks real one year will appear outdated in the next due to constantly improving technology. Look, I would never be one to diminish the hard work that people have put in to make that happen, but at the same time, I don’t think that it’s all that necessary.įor one thing, hyper-realistic games don’t age super well. There was a time when a few blinking pixels on a screen were cutting-edge technology, and now we have games that are so photorealistic that we can see every grimy pore on our player character’s face. One of the most impressive things about games is just how far they’ve come technologically in only a few short decades.
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