If you had to pick between realistic but ugly game environments or beautiful but unrealistic ones for the rest of your life, which would you go with?

[StaceyPowers]

Realism and beauty are not necessarily interchangeable. If you were forced to choose, would you rather game only in realistic but aesthetically ugly game environments for the rest of your life, or aesthetically pleasing but unrealistic game environments?

[m76]

The more realistic the more beautiful. I hate everything that is deliberately made less realistic. Like cell shaded games. No matter how artistic it is, I'd rather have a plain, mundane but realistic environment.

[Shagger]

Depends on the game. When it comes to game aesthetics, there's really two kinds of game, simulation and fantasy.

 

A simulation is, as per the name sake, a game emulating something from real life, like Sports sims', COD WW2 games, historical settings and so on. In these types of games, you call them "good looking" when the graphics and design emulate that real world accurately. There isn't really any sense of creative style, it's all about the quality of the rendering. Some liberties may be taken for practical reasons, but overall it's all about accuracy, not style. When game dev's do this well, it's very impressive in it's own way, but it's also very limiting. There are some games in this category that do have a lot of creative style anyway. Take The Last of Us. for example. That is a simulation of our world, but in a post-apocalypse, so the creators had to create a lot of this world with it's decay, overgrowth and so on, so some of it's beauty dose come from that, but it's mostly about detail and accuracy.

 

One of the great examples of this kind of concept of a "great looking" video game is, Gran Turismo, and that's still going to be the flavour for the latest one.

 

 

Fantasy games are, of course, the complete opposite. The essence of whatever beauty they achieve stems of creative design and artistic merit. You don't necessarily have to have massive graphical fidelity to create something truly beautiful. Child of Light of one of my favrile examples of such a concept.

 

 

Everything here is pure art and nothing about it is really meant to look that that real. The game looks like a watercouler in motion, the music is sublime and even the dialogue is written as poetry. One of the most beautiful games I have ever played and it wouldn't exactly push a GTX 3090 to it's limit. Remember this game was developed by Ubisoft and only came out around seven years ago, so it's not like like is a limited resource deal. There are, obviously, big budget AAA fantasy games that are blessed the same kind of graphical fidelity as games like the aforementioned Gran Turismo (Horizon Zero Dawn comes to mind, and that pretty is the best looking game I've ever played), but for those kinds of games there would be no point for them to accurately render a fantasy world that's dull and boring to look at, it's still about designing some vibrant and inviting environments to explore.

 

Now, neither one of these approaches are wrong, it just takes applying the right approach to the right game. Having said that though, If a developer had to choose between making some look boring, but more akin to reality as apposed to implying some creative liberty to make it more aesthetically pleasing, I would say aesthetics every time. I recently picked up Mass Effect Legendary Edition and, with all due respect to the game's fans, on my god is the first game drab to look at! Almost every planet you land on looks like the same boring mixture of craggy hills, just with different weather. I know the game is well over a decade old, but I still feel it could have been better than this. I don't care that this planet is inhospitable so that's why there nothing growing, it's boring and dull, and that's the end of it.

Edited August 10, 2021 by Shagger

[Heatman]

No matter how ugly a realistic setting is, it's definitely beautiful in all sense because you can easily tap into the real life setting of the game which makes it more real for you.