There’s always been a race to develop the best, most realistic graphics. Avatar (2009) is a testament to how fast people will flock to the biggest development in the race to hyper realistic graphics. Even look at the fascination with the hyper realistic art style, often depicted or exemplified by including water to bend the light and still look realistic.
It’s not a bad thing to enjoy hyper realism in art.
But when it comes to games, not all of it needs to be realistic. Just as people loved Avatar’s graphics, people still enjoy watching claymation or 2-D animation or stylized 3-D animation.
Games are expensive. Anyone that follows the triple-A game industry knows the pros and cons of the fall when all the big games start dropping in time for the holidays, when you look at your bank account and realize, shit, I’m out of money. Sixty (USA) dollars has been the standard price for big games for a while now, and as games get bigger and more advanced and take more people to develop, I can understand the desire to somehow squeeze out a few more dollars either by in-game purchases or holding out a carrot on a stick with pre-order deluxe bonuses.
I might argue that to keep costs down, not all triple-A games need to strive for that next big breakthrough in hyper realism in order to get noticed and bring in the big bucks. With a lot of triple-A games being a big disappointment for placing an emphasis on graphics at the cost of story (Fallout 4 comes to mind here) or mechanics, I’ve seen a push in the PC community towards stylized games.
They’re lower cost and more often made by indie developers for that exact reason. Some of it is because of the stories they tell or the mechanics they choose to present that makes a style fit. Stardew Valley would look ridiculous with a hyper realistic style. One of my favorite parts about The Banner Saga is the hand drawn art, and I wouldn’t change Transistor’s art style for anything.
This could be an unfair comparison as the games I just mentioned are also not first person shooters or stealth games in which you typically want to take seriously or the goal is to at least somewhat depict something realistic. Transistor could function as a first person game with perspective toggles and a hyper realistic 3-D style where we could ohh and ahh at the hair physics, but it wouldn’t add a lot to the game for the work it would take to make it.
Video Games Deconstructed 