Realistic 3D Graphics Look Amazing
First of all, let me preface with this: yes, realistic 3D graphics DO look amazing. I've only played a few games with graphics you could call that, and this was years ago, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but I was blown away by how beautiful everything looked. It's no overstatement that I spent a lot of time walking near rivers because I just loved how pretty they looked, specially the waterfalls.
However, even though the scenery of Skyrim is beautiful due to its high degree of realism, the same can't be said about the character models.
Naturally, as technology progresses, the characters, too, became more realistic. I argue that the more realistic a game gets, the worst it becomes in several areas for reasons intrinsic of realism itself.
Asset Costs
The first and most obvious detriment of realism are the costs to produce realistic assets. In order to make a game realistic, even if it's not 3D, you can't just make one thing look realistic and call it done. The whole thing needs to be consistent. Therefore, any increase in realism makes every aspect of asset creation more expensive.
Fortunately for developers, the degree of realism eventually reaches a point where it should actually become cheaper to make realistic assets than to make cartoon assets, which brings us to the next problem:
Cheaper Assets Cheapen the Game
If a game is perfectly realistic, why do we even need to pay 3D artists to make 3D models for the characters? Just create a body of a person at realistic proportions, rig it once, and then you can use the same body and animation rig with minor adjustments no matter what game you make.
Copy pasting is the greatest thing about computers—data can be cloned indefinitely and instantaneously at no cost—so I do believe that this is a great idea, business-wise. Reuse assets. Purchase assets from asset stores. Eliminate production costs you would have hiring artists.
Although this may sound bad for the consumer, these methods provide developers with opportunities. It's possible that, without these methods, some games that have been made couldn't have been made. It's possible that creating the assets themselves, realistic or not, wouldn't have been commercially feasible. So I do think that this is a great thing.
This is something that it's only possible because of realism. When everything looks the same, and has similar sizes, you can easily take an asset and use it across different games with minor adjustments. Having common standards always saves time, and in this case the "standard" is "how big can a human body be."
However, that's not without detriment, because now every game looks the same.
Yes, you can make games look different from each other—and even pretty cool, actually—by adding effects, using camera tricks, etc. One may even argue that by fixing the way the models look, limiting the artist's canvas, that stimulates the creativity of the developer to work with the parts that they can change.
But still, at the end of the day, every first person shooter looks almost identical to every other first person shooter. And that's what I believe to be the biggest problem about realistic games.
Realism Imposes Hidden Constraints on Gameplay and Game Design
What I've observed that sounds obvious if you think about it, but normally you don't even realize that is the source of all your problems, is that if you have a character with realistic proportions, you need a game world with realistic proportions.
Walking Simulators
Imagine that you have a player character in a room. They just descended the stairs from their bedroom to the first floor. They want to leave their home. How long should this take?
If we're talking about a 2D top-down game like Pokémon, the answer is probably less than one second. The door is a few tiles away and the character moves faster than one tile per second. He'll get there very quickly.
If we're talking about a 3D first-person game like modern version of Fallout or Grand Theft Auto, the answer is probably more than one second. The entire room is realistic, which means that there must be a realistic distance between the stairs and the door. The player character must walk toward there at a realistic pace. Even worse, what if the door is closed? We must realistically open it with a realistic door-opening animation! In a 2D game, this animation could be just a single frame, if the door is shown at all.
The same idea highlighted above applies to every aspect of the game. In order to leave the town, you need to walk. In any Pokémon game you can leave the town in just a few seconds, but in any realistic 3D game it's going to take you a whole minute just to get there. Can you imagine how much time players have wasted going from one side of Megaton City to the other? Players even call some games "walking simulators" these days because they spend most of their time walking around with nothing happening.
Note that you don't need to be a 2D game to get rid of these problems, you just need to stop being realistic. A 3D game in cartoon style can just put the door right next to the stairs and nobody would think about it. They could also have much smaller rooms if the characters' proportions just look shorter than humans in general. Additionally, the movement speed of a cartoon character can be much faster than a realistic human speed. They can dash away all the time and it won't look weird because they are a cartoon character.
Quicker Travel and Vehicles
Naturally, there are ways to fix travel distances in realistic 3D games. You can, for example, add a way to quick travel to different spots on a map. But this generally only works for fixed points in the world. You can't just teleport to arbitrary locations without having to walk.
Even if you have a vehicle in a 3D game, it's STILL going to take too long compared to what you could have in a 2D game. In Pokémon, you just pull a bicycle out of your bag and start cycling. And there is no animation for this because you can barely even see the bag anyway. How would you make a car spawn out of nowhere in a 3D game? Even pulling a foldable bicycle out of nowhere would have a realistic animation for it. EVERYTHING needs an animation, and every animation is seconds wasted through a gameplay.
It would be interesting if these animations were something players wanted to see, but nobody wants to see this. Everyone knows it just has to happen because it would look ugly otherwise. And yet 2D games manage to look pretty good without having to waste time on these ceremonies.
Level Design Issues and Costs
Realism doesn't simply raise the bar for what assets should look like, it also increases their number, and this affects not only the cost of levels, but also restricts what level designers can do with the levels.
The Minimum Room
Imagine the simplest game room imaginable of some RPG game. It's just 4 walls with a chest in it. In a 2D top down game, you can literally just have a few tiles forming a rectangle, a few tiles for the floor with maybe some variation between them for style points, and then the chest, and that's it. But a realistic game can't get away with this level of detail.
The room can't just be "a room." The room must be realistic connected to some place, so there must be a realistic reason for it to exist. It can't have just a chest in it, because it isn't realistic to have an entire room anywhere completely empty except for a chest. If it's a storage room, there are probably all sorts of things stored in there, and only the chest can be interacted with. If it's a locker room, there will be lockers, and perhaps the "chest" is actually one of the lockers. If the room is a secret room behind a waterfall, there may even be some water and vegetation in there.
A 3D cartoon game can also get away with having a lower level of detail. If you're playing a 3D cartoon game and you encounter a completely empty room with just a chest in it, that doesn't break your suspension of belief, because it's not supposed to be realistic. In a realistic game, you assume the role of a real person in a real fictional world. In a cartoon game, the idea that it's really just a game where you collect coins or bananas is far more evident. It isn't weird at all that whatever supernatural phenomena keeps placing all those bananas in the air is also capable of creating a room somewhere with just a chest in it just for you to open.
The Cost of Angles
Free 3D camera movement, the sort of which always exists in first-person games, is also a huge cost to level design.
Imagine that you enter a store in a 2D game, there a counter, and a cashier behind the counter. What's on the wall behind the cashier? If it's a top-down game, you won't be able to see it a tall. If it's a platformer, you can see the part above the counter. You can't see, for example, what color are the pants of the cashier, because he's behind the counter, so there is no need to make that asset. The developer can just have an asset for the torso and cut development costs in half.
But if you have the ability to look EVERYWHERE, now the designer must fill the entire wall with something, they even need to fill the counter from the cashier's side with something in case you are able to jump over. They will always have to, in particular, do something with the ceilings. Because the ceilings are always there. You can't see it in 2D platformers or 2D top-down games, but they're always there in 3D games, so you need assets for them.
In my sincere opinion, it just feels like a lot of wasted effort. Nobody is going to look at the ceiling. Why is development time being spent making sure every room has adequate ceilings? Every realistic 3D asset will need to look realistic when viewed from any angle even though it won't necessarily ever be seen from every angle. Every single car, vase, chest, and box has a bottom, even if you never look at it.
Jumping and Vertical Moment
What happens if we want vertical movement? What if the player needs to go upwards?
In a 3D cartoon game, the player can just jump. You press the jump button, then BOING, the player character, like a spring, jumps six times their own height upward, and then they fall a bit slowly like they're a balloon full of air.
In a realistic game, that's just not going to happen. Jumping gives you a half meter, tops, because it wouldn't be realistic for a human being to jump any higher. Jumping over your own height? Humanly impossible, according to game developers who spend most of their lives sitting on a chair in front of a computer. If you jump, you need to grab on a ledge, then spend 2 seconds struggling get on top of the platform.
If you need more height, no problem. You can have a ladder. Just grab one bar at a time to go up the ladder. This always has the most confusing controls imaginable, but I'm not sure if this has anything to do with realism. If it was a cartoon game, the character could probably run up the wall where the ladder is and nobody would even complain about it, they might even say it's funny that a character than can just run up walls only does so when you have a ladder.
Of course, you can only have a ladder if it's realistic to have a ladder where the ladder would be. Otherwise, you'll have to come up with something ladder-like to put in there.
Meanwhile, a cartoon game could just have floating platforms and nobody even cares that the platforms are floating. What kind of technology or magic causes them to float in a game universe that is neither scientifically advanced NOR mentions magic anywhere in it. The thing just floats, okay? It's a floating platform. It doesn't even need wings or turbines to float. It just floats.
Why would a floating platform need a reason to float? That's like asking why a gamer needs a reason to game. It's their nature. Don't think hard about it. Just enjoy your platforming.
Realism changes our expectations of what levels should be, and causes us to think differently when we encounters elements in a game that aren't the way we expect them to be. If something isn't realistic in a realistic game, we imagine there is some in-game explanation for that. Maybe it's a hint about the story, or it's telling us where we should go. Level designers have to deal with these additional expectations by making sure everything that is unimportant looks properly unimportant.
If you have played enough games, you may remember a few times where that didn't go well. There is always something that looks a bit different, and you imagine that's because it's special, but it ends up not being so. It was just the level designer that failed the enormous task of making everything look perfectly consistent and realistic. This just happens. You can have hundreds of maps in a game, thousands of people who played, someone will get the wrong idea about something.
But with cartoon games these things are just less likely to happen because you have less detail to begin with.
Ability Design
Just as with jumping, all abilities a character may have are limited when the character must be a realistic human-shaped model.
For example, humans do not have wings, so they can't fly, unless you add a jetpack or something. Meanwhile, dragons do have wings. You can fly in Spyro, easily. But okay, that's a minor issue. We can add wings to a human, no problem. Just make them an angel or bird-man or something like that.
Even if you do this, you can't escape the fact that, in a third-person game, you're still going to have a human model on the screen. Pretty much every cartoon model is shorter, in other words, more compact than a human model would be. This makes things like aiming abilities and seeing what's on the other side in front of the player character more difficult because they occupy more screen space than a cartoon character would.
For instance, when Spyro is flying, he occupies more horizontal space on screen than vertical space. If you did this with a human body, the only way to make the character less vertical is to make them lean forward, and that probably means they have to go forward faster, e.g. if they have a jetpack on their back. Otherwise it wouldn't be realistic.
These are considerations developers are forced to make on the gameplay because they chose to have realistic graphics. Realism isn't just graphics. Realism affects all parts of game design.
There is a game called Gex where you play as an anthropomorphic lizard who walks on their two feet. They can use their lizard tongue to hit things far away, because they're a cartoon. Imagine if this was a realistic lizard-man opening their realistic mouth to fling their realistic 2.5 meter long tongue at things. That would be horrible to see.
Genre Choices
Not every game needs unique, fun, creative game mechanics. There are all sorts of games in the world. It's worth thinking about what sort of game should a developer that emphasizes realism aim for in order to reduce the impact of realism in the quality of the game.
We can imagine there are two extremes in the game design spectrum.
One one side we have puzzle games, which are entirely mechanics based. Puzzle games often involve abstract concepts like color and shape, and have nothing to do with realism. Some do take advantage of real concepts like gravity and momentum, e.g. Portal, but abstract puzzle games are far more unique and varied than physics-based puzzle games, often requiring the player to combine multiple abstract mechanics together in order to achieve game goals.
On the other side we have story-heavy games. In this case, the game is a book. In fact, there are even text-based games, such as text adventure or interactive fiction games, that have no graphics whatsoever, just text. Not even ASCII art. Just text. In this case, the value of the game comes from the dialogue between characters and other means of storytelling, e.g. by examining objects in the environment.
Many complex games combine elements of these two opposite ends of the spectrum to create an experience that can entertain all types of players.
Considering the above, it's good to think that realistic games make terrible puzzle games, since the game mechanics that you can implement in the puzzles will be limited by realism. On the other hand, realistic games make make good story-oriented games.
Unfortunately, most gamers would consider a story-oriented game utterly boring, since it's just text and nothing ever happens. Consequently, to make a story game attractive, you would have to insert some action parts between the key story points to keep players from sleeping during the cutscenes. Although what really tends to happen is the opposite: you have an action game with some story parts in it instead.
As proven by all 3D action games that already exist, you CAN make an action game with realistic graphics—I'm not saying you can't—however, what I am saying is that if you wanted to make the best action game possible, whether it's fighting game or a shooting game, you would have started from the game mechanics first without establishing what the graphics will look like at the end.
By choosing to make a realistic game, the game mechanics are limited. You can't realize the full potential of an action game or of a game of any genre if you restrict yourself to realistic graphics. The realism is always going to be detrimental to something.
Conversely, the only thing that realism ISN'T detrimental to would be a story-heavy gameplay. It's hard to imagine why would a game developer invest so much in realistic graphics for a genre that isn't really popular with gamers to begin with, but if they did do that, I imagine, their game design choices would suffer the least from the fact they chose to have realistic graphics.
But that doesn't mean realism has no effect in such case either.
Story and Plot Restrictions
When a game has realistic graphics, it follows that it has a realistic story, otherwise the graphics and story won't be consistent. This means that by choosing to have realistic graphics you also limit the breadth of your plot choices.
Things you could get away with in a cartoonish game, and that would in fact entertain the player if they were present, are counterproductive in a realistic game.
Final Fantasy VII's characters have cartoonish proportions [...] Final Fantasy VIII's characters have realistic human proportions. [...] This makes the characters into real people, rather than cartoon characters, which imposes upon them the bounds of reality. This means that when they start talking about demons inside their head messing with their memories, our bullshit alarm goes off. If this plot point had been present in Final Fantasy VII, we would still have the same reaction, but it would be shrugged off for the most part.
https://socksmakepeoplesexy.net/index.php?a=graphics (accessed 2025-03-03)
An example of this that I can provide is A Hat in Time. The game has one of the greatest horror scenes in video-game I've ever played, mainly because I don't like horror, so I never play horror games.
If the game was realistic, something so out of place would be just odd, weird, it wouldn't make sense, but because it's a cartoon, we say it's "whimsical" instead, it's funny.
Things that are a minus in realism suddenly become a plus when you are a cartoon. It's strange, but it's the truth!
Visual Issues
Realism, despite being though of the "best graphics ever," also has some severe visual detriments compared to non-realistic graphics.
Contrast and Emphasis
If a game has realistic graphics and lightning, it becomes harder to tell apart important game objects from scenery. For example, in first person shooters, it becomes harder to tell apart the characters you can shoot at from the background.
Once again we have a loss of control imposed by realism. To be realistic, we can't just make important things appear lighter than they should be, or add outlines where there shouldn't be any. However, if you want players to enjoy your game, that's what you should do.
Nobody wants to waste time walking around trying to figure out what part of the environment they can interact with. Just highlight it in some way even if it isn't realistic.
However, in some cases a clear outline is too much, and you need more subtle lightning changes to guide the player, even if those aren't realistic. This is something that is important, but that may be missing from games that simply take realistic assets they purchased and put them together in a game without properly tweaking the graphics.
Forgettability and Character Design
Realism creates forgettable characters, which is something very sad.
One important metric used by artists to measure whether a cartoon character design is good or not is to look at its silhouette. If you can tell what character it is just from its silhouette, then it's a good character.
When all characters just look like human beings, then their silhouettes are all the same, or practically the same. If the silhouette doesn't distinguish your character from other characters, then what does?
This is a common issue with human characters in general, by the way. You don't need perfect realism to suffer from this. Simply having reasonable human proportions, e.g. like a in a superhero comic, will cause your character to look identical to other characters of similar proportions.
This is the reason why I personally believe that non-human characters are better for branding, e.g. the character designs in Hollow Knight are more memorable than the characters in Slay the Spire, for example, because they are made out of simple, easy to remember components. If your character wears a shirt and a pair of pants, players won't even be able to remember what colors they were. But if they wear a single piece of clothing like a cape, or just some generic armor, or a green tunic, that makes it a lot easier to remember.
Consider for example Lara Croft. I'm not really a fan of Lara Croft, but I did play the PS1 version, in which you jumped around and used guns. I didn't make it far in that game, it was too hard for me. I thought she wore green pants, but I just Googled it, and they were shorts. And I thought she had a pony tail, but at the top of her head, but it looks like it was on the side instead. Anyway, I misremember a lot.
In any case, pony tail, green pants or whatever, guns. That's Lara Croft in my head.
The only other game I played was Tomb Raider (2013), and that felt very confusing to me, because that Lara Croft just didn't look like Lara Croft, the character, it just looked like a woman. You could show me a picture of this Lara Croft and I'd never have guess it's supposed to be Lara Croft because it just bears no resemblance at all to the character I knew.
I say that this is a problem of realism because realistically, people change. You don't wear the same clothes every day, your hairstyle changes, sometimes how you feel about things change, your opinions can change, your voice can change, you can become fat, you can become thin, you can hit the gym and come out buffed, you can grow your hair or cut, or change your hairstyle. A character's design is supposed to be eternal, but humans are ephemeral. It's impossible to conciliate the two.
The more a game pursuits realism, the harder it becomes for the game to design impressive characters. It will be very easy for the character to become just another human.
Depreciation
Although this may not be as true today, as we seem to have hit some plateau, realism as an art style has always been something that depreciates fast in the game industry.
A new game comes out with cutting edge realistic graphics, then in 2 years everyone forgets about it and moves on to the next cutting edge realistic graphics game. This cycle has been repeated for a very long time.
The game doesn't stop existing, however, when then when you look back at it, you'll notice that the "realistic" graphics of its era aren't very realistic from the perspective of graphics of the current era. What was once called "realistic graphics" becomes called "dated graphics" in a matter of mere years. All the advantaged it had over other games suddenly becomes a disadvantage. How is this possible?
When you look at games that use cartoon styles, the visuals do not depreciate at the same rate, because the developer isn't trying to achieve realistic graphics. If they were trying to achieve realism, and it looks like they failed, that would look bad, which is what happens when we say "dated graphics." If it was a good attempt, for the time, but now it just looks dated, using dated techniques, for weaker, old hardware. Meanwhile, the cartoon graphics achieved the look they were looking for, whether exactly or within a good margin. No matter how many years pass, we'll never be able to compare their visuals to other games in a negative way. It doesn't look dated. That's just "the style" of that era.
Even the first 3D console games have a unique "style" associated with them due in part to the hardware limitations of the time. No anti-aliasing, low resolution textures, lack of shadows or shading. For realistic graphics, these are severe issues, but for something that doesn't attempt to be realistic, this is just a different art style that existed during that era.
In particular, observe that when we have pixel art games, whether or not they're calling themselves "retro," we assume that this is an artistic choice of the developer. The developer WANTS the game to have pixel art. This what they think is going to look good. Nobody wants to mimic the levels of realism from the 2000's, unless to satirize it. Nobody thinks it looks good. It's not a niche. If you're making a 3D game and someone tells you it looks like it was made in 2009, you don't take that as a compliment, you take that as criticism.
Today, it does feel like we've reached a limit on what's physically possible to achieve in terms of computer graphics, at least considering whether it's possible to turn those graphics into a game product with a price people will actually pay for. However, nobody knows the future.
What if some computing breakthrough or asset creation breakthrough makes it possible to have even more realistic graphics in games? Then all current generation graphics will look "dated" in the world of tomorrow. What if in 2100, virtual reality really becomes commonplace, and the gamers of then view all first-person games played on a flat screen as not having visuals of enough fidelity?
None of this matters for the people making realistic games today, and selling them to gamers that are alive today, but it's interesting to note how realistic graphics have most value only when the game is new and the technology novel.
They don’t age well, but that’s really not necessary - most games are expected to have a lifetime of maybe a year or less. The percentage of players still playing a given game a year after launch is incredibly small compared to the number that buy it. This means that the visuals really only need to hold up for about a year before the game is replaced by something else.
https://www.tumblr.com/askagamedev/66904722876/every-year-it-seems-aaa-game-graphics-improve (accessed 2025-03-03)
Conclusions
While realistic graphics do look amazing, it can't be overstated the insidious negative consequences they have on all areas of game design. Many games and game mechanics simply can't be created with realistic graphics at all, which means that when you decide to make a game with realistic graphics, you're locking yourself into a path of altering gameplay to serve realism.
Although it may be possible to somewhat balance gameplay and realism to create a fun, beautiful experience, doing so requires a lot of skill, effort, and creativity, and success isn't guaranteed.
I worry that the impulsive pursuit for realism limits game design choices in ways that neither players nor developers realize, specially indie game developers.
Surf the Web
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LplgYMiLhM (accessed 2025-03-03)