Graphical Fidelity vs. Art Style in Video Games

As technology is advancing, games are starting to look more like real life... but do they need to? At what point is the effort to make a game look slightly better not worth it? And why aren't games like Hi Fi Rush and Signalis praised for their visuals as much as Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3? Hope you enjoy :3

[@Shemcat]

The first shot of RE2 is a hyper realistic burger and that takes me out of the experience, as I literally have to leave to get myself a burger

[@cherry__Soda]

GOD DAMN I JUST SAW IT YEAH

[@casheverett6300]

Realism can be beautiful. Like living in the mountains with snowcapped peaks and fog rolling over hills, it can be very beautiful. But one thing that realistic/high fidelity graphics do is make it more immersive, trying to put you in the game. They try to make you feel like you are the character not only through direct story telling but also through the environment.

[@ash9259]

love your editing myself and as you stated, i prefer style over fidelity, 2 reasons: 1. You usually get more FPS and it takes up less memory 2. An art style can make a game so unique and adds a lot to story telling and gameplay

[@LutraLovegood]

Performance depends a lot on the game. The Crash and Spyro trilogy remakes were not realistic but they were still demanding to run. You could make a modern game look realistic and still run on old hardware. It's all a technical question of what hardware and performance you target, what level of detail, how realistic the lighting is, how much time and money you have and so on.

[@ash9259]

@@LutraLovegood bro, photoreal games hardly ever run good in the majority of cases

[@Backfisch5927]

Also a game with a unique art style usually ages better Plants vs Zombies and the original demons souls are from the same year and pvz still looks great today while demons souls is just kind of alright

[@traviscunningham7062]

What about My Singing Monsters?

[@suumeygeths7453]

Right, so what we do is add a button to every game that swaps between high graphical fidelity and a cartoonish art style. That way you can play CoD in the style of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, and I can play Puyo Puyo Tetris in the style of FNAF ❤

[@Doktario_Mystario]

personally i don't see why devs wouldn't use whatever art style they wanted like you gave examples that would make for very unique products that we somehow don't have already i see it more as, the graphical fidelity just means the amount of detail you can put within the art style

[@murryflix]

Definitely prefer style. It holds up better over time and the devs usually care more about the project

[@mantisshadow8990]

Honestly wow, I am extremely surprised that your channel only has a few subscribers. You deserve way more. I was honestly expecting this to be from a big channel and the video to have a few hundred thousand views, you are seriously underrated. Great video dude.

[@zuckmania]

man i just want to say, hella good job. this is a video with the quality matching or surpassing people with magnitudes more attention, you're seriously underrated. i want to add, though, that it isn't one-or-the-other basis (which ofc you exhibited with alan wake ii, but i want to add my own cg nerd spin to it) ray tracing in stylized 2D graphics is probably the next step in elevating the style of lots of games you know, i don't doubt that signalis might be playing around with it. it, in comparison to the vector-based 3D ray tracing logic, is extremely cheap to compute while elevating stuff miles above what was possible before. i definitely think there's still fidelity to be gained in more stylized games; more 3D and cg concepts to be used in them. i'm definitely excited for the future of indie now that AAA studios have clearly shown that their reign of terror is waning.

[@TarnishedZorro]

7:33 Germany mentioned woooooooooo🎉💯 phenomenal video

[@crilll]

my biggest problem with realism in games is just that it seems TOO many games try to be hyper-realistic. It just ends up making it harder to differentiate games, and also begins to make them kind of feel the same when playing. I would love to see a new stylized FPS like Team Fortress 2 come around. mostly because I'm tired of Overwatch, but also to bring some new variation to the scene.

[@jarrodsoos1417]

Keep up the great work man. You remind me of stellar jay and i have no doubt you can get as big

[@5paulo]

Realistic rendering can age badly. And, as you mentioned, the aging also applies to the components and tech required to get there. Style ages much slower. And one cool thing it still can be impressive, because it can relate to how our brains process images. Like with horror games - sometimes showing less leaves space for the imagination and uncertainty.

[@lakshaykochhar6799]

I feel like games with stylized graphics don't age at all, like I can play some game from early 90s with 3D pixel-art and still enjoy it. Also, this rule somewhat applies to games with older graphics too; because stuff like Max Payne or Half-Life could be considered be considered something like a retro-gaming aesthetic like pixel-art. Something that I cannot say for certainty with games that prioritize realistic-fidelity over everything else. But who knows.

[@QuokkaWaka]

Idk, a lot of games that went for fidelity in the past still hold up fairly well today. They're retro in their own way

[@TheCrimsonEpitaph]

I agree, I also love when a game can find a balance between style and fidelity (i.e. MGSV )

[@MuhomonoYT]

Might sound a little narcissistic, but we share a similar editing style therefore I love your video 🤣. Definitely prefer style over fidelity and Alan Wake 2 is a perfect mesh of the two imo. Keep up the awesome work!

[@lewisduke6765]

Wow great vid! Been watching a few of them and I just assumed you had hundreds of thousands of subs

[@jmaster4941]

This is why I love games like The World Ends With You and Xenoblade Chronicles that have great art styles above all else.

[@GamesAndAnimes]

I like all your videos, All 9 of them. 😁

[@tootbender6935]

I think Okami is one of the games that has aged the absolute best visually, that game came out in 2006 and it still looks absolutely gorgeous.

[@traviscunningham7062]

Should I buy it?

[@tas8859]

Yes

[@pickleman_has_urges]

disco elysium has such a yum yum art style i want to eat it and it manages to function well on my dingy little laptop

[@traviscunningham7062]

The first game that made me impressed of the art style was Rayman Origins. It looked so hand drawn and the game is just really charming. Too bad Ubisoft butchered the art style in Rayman Legends.

[@noodl9112]

Another banger from the Legde!

[@suumeygeths7453]

This is a genius comment

[@Katpasniss]

I disagree I could tell that the portal clip was the RTX version... Because its looks worse than the original

[@zer0ishere]

have you played slime rancher 2? it's still in early access but it's like the first one with some quality of life improvements

[@soundrogue4472]

I'm surprised this has so little views...

[@muggerrock2969]

Stamps as 1 of 2 cool Brits HELL yeah 😎

[@chantelsopio5826]

Dude "optimization" isn't magic that'll fix your issues. The reason why Alan Wake 2 needs good hardware is because of mesh shaders. You can also play it on PlayStation 5 which by the way is not a "super computer". They can technically make the whole game again with vertex shaders which the games you listed utilize but it's not "optimization", it's literally making the whole game again. Also, AW1 was the first game that NEEDED a quad core CPU and people thought it was crazy. Now you know, it's normal. Sometimes you need to do these things to move the industry forward. I agree with you on the RTX part, I personally find it gimmicky at best. Also, I don't mind the overwork (as a game developer) because most of us are super passionate about the craft. However, such videos are just disheartening.

[@windowledge21]

Thanks for this comment! I wasn't aware of mesh shaders while making this video, i now understand there is a difference. My computer has an rtx 4070 which i believe supports mesh shaders, and for the most part AW2 ran well but i encountered quite a few stutters while playing (might just've been a personal issue). Having them ironed out is what i meant by optimization, but i get now that i didnt really use the best word. And yeah i totally get that certain games simply wont run if you dont have a certain type of CPU / GPU etc, i wasnt aware that mesh shaders were only supported on certain hardware. Im not gonna pretend im a game developer but from the limited research ive done it seems that AW2 is one of the first games that uses mesh shaders, meaning other games that have come out in bad states recently (last of us PC, cities skylines 2...) might've been the result of poor optimization, but i understand AW2 isnt. I've learnt a lot from this comment so thanks, and im sorry if this video was disheartening to you, that wasnt the goal

[@The_Everything_man]

Someone's actually talking about Hi-Fi Rush?#abouttime

[@LutraLovegood]

Lots of people talked about the game, wdym?

[@Mintyvr282]

Star citizen has NO loading screens

[@antoniohagopian213]

EVERYTHING IS POORLY OPTIMIZED. Everyone who says 12gb of vram is "low tier" and "not enough" is braindead. Gran Turismo 6 still looks better then many MANY brand new games while running on less then a 1gb of vram on PS3. The absolute nonsense of glossy nonsense that new games is exactly that, just gloss everywhere. Ray tracing is easily distinguishable and looks very good BUT why does everything has to become a mirror?? It doesn't look like that in real life so what are they even trying to achieve. While having 0 idea of how to manage the resources of the hardware. Games developers are literally putting all the work on the gpu, cpu and storage instead optimizing. I guarantee that 12gb is more then enough. Even 8gb is enough.

[@CarapuceZehr]

The witcher 3

[@LutraLovegood]

That Portal clip was clearly not the original game. I've spent enough time playing Source games and rendering maps to know the difference. Art education also helps a lot. When you know what to look for it becomes really obvious. I think realism can age very well as long as you know how to hide the shortcomings of the current tech. For lighting practice I made a corridor in Source 2006 look almost like MGS V TPP, a game that released near a decade later that still looks great itself, but some parts I couldn't do anything about myself without fiddling with the engine or shaders (namely dynamic props lighting). But that takes a lot of time and money on the scale of an AAA. That said I mostly play games with less realistic styles, because they're usually more visually interesting on top of having more varied and fun gameplays and often better stories.