Look, Oblivion isn't cartoonish in LoZ way, but you have to admit, it's artstyle wouldn't fit with TES, TES wouldn't fit in with Crysis or Battlefield either.

I think all three of those games look nice in their own way. I personally wouldn't even put "amazing graphics" on the priority list of a game. They're nice to look at, but I'd rather play a great game with horrible graphics than a horrible game with great graphics.

Do you refer to things like body dimensions on that character ?
Is that what we argue about ?


I don't say monsters shouldn't look like monsters.
I say that textures should be 2048x2048 instead of 512x512,that there should be more polygons,that there should be tesselation,that there should be DOF, etc.
I'm talking technical not artistic.


Btw,to be honest Oblivion wasn't cartoony. Actually the developers started capturing photos with cameras of real world surfaces and applied them as textures,to IMPROVE REALISM.
A cartoony game is a game like Skyward Sword,where each texture is hand-painted,like that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jPpSldc0XM

I think it's pretty obvious that the two series are heading towards completely different ways.

I'll admit that's true, but I find a lot of modern games either have both or neither. I mean, if a talented studio puts the time in to polish of their gameplay, chances are they are going to put in the time to make the game look pretty.

They also took pictures of new york when creating Bioshock, and that is very cartoony in it's own way.

I couldnt give a [censored] about the graphics to be honest. Without starting a flame war, I've always seen it pretty dumb to judge a game over it's appearance.
A lot of the best games out there, are the ones with low end graphics.
Oh, and Oblivion was cartoonish.

They did so the in-game graphics could have some resemblance to reality, not to aim at photorealism. You can capture photos of whatever you want in RL but without using in-game the very same lighting you had while taking the photo, the texture will always look cartoonish. On the contrary, with the right lighting you can render just about any object and make it look realistic without even taking a single photo of what it looks like in RL to make its textures.

"Believable" and "realistic" aren't necessarily the same thing.


I've got to say.... I really don't understand this modern obsession with labeling everything non-photo-realistic as "cartoonish".

For one - I don't see most of the things people label that as being actually "cartoonish".... i.e, they don't look like cartoons, at least not the ones I've watched.

Stylized =/= cartoon. The art style of a game can be quite distinct, in all sorts of ways, none of which make it look like something Warner, or Pixar, or Disney ever did.

And it's not just bright colors, either. That's the one that really gets me - go back through the history of video games.... bright colors everywhere. People in the 80s didn't look at their games and say "that looks cartoonish", they just thought that they looked like videogames. Fast forward 30 years, make a game the same way, and people start throwing "cartoon" around. Just because something isn't "realistic" (oh look, grainy brown & grey textures) doesn't make it "cartoony".




(Also, back when Oblivion came out? People talked about how realistic it was. Just goes to show how much the perception of graphics changes over time. Which seems like a clear reason to go with a good, solid art style - something that holds up, even when it's tech becomes outdated - rather than trying to push for just mere "realism".)

Cartoonish doesn't have to be spongebob, I mean, I would consider Warhammer 40K to be cartoonish, even though it is not meant for little kids. Cartoonish has to do more with the artstyle than the graphics.

I remember when people raved about the graphics on a snes. When morrowind came out it listed the recommended pc as the one that came out the following year because there was nothing that could really do it justice. I think though we'll hit a ceiling for graphics and they'll start turning to physics and effects to have something brag worthy. Batman used physics very well and tee could have some fun having spells that bounce off of walls or snow that swirls around your character as you run through it. Maybe one day they'll hit another ceiling and a good game will have a good story to tell.

Lots of games have a good story to tell, lots don't. This is true for every medium of art. I don't think that will ever change.

IDC about graphics, where is my cloth physics?

But look at how dark knight changed comic book movies. Quality writing made good movies incredible (Tim burton to Nolan. Don't bring Schumacher into this). The story in skyrim is Passable. It serves a purpose but the draw to tea games is the exploration and the myriad of ways to do things. We laugh at the writing and the acting because the rest of the game is great. If it weren't there would t be anyone here to make fun of it. If tes had a good engrossing story it would truly raise the game to a work of art. I'm sure when Todd sits down to discuss tes6 the conversation starts with "where should we do this one?" not "what will our main quest be?".

Wrong thread mate.

Honestly though, to respond, I think the lore they set up is truly amazing, which makes up for a lack of a great MQ

Oh, and don't get me started on the whole "http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnimationAgeGhetto" thing. That's a whole other topic.

(And we're clearly thinking different things by "cartoonish", because I'd never think to apply it to 40k. Not the official art, not the videogames, and not the miniatures. Ah, well.)


Yeah, to me? A "cartoonish" art style is one that looks like cartoons. Merely being colorful, or exaggerated, or stylized isn't enough.



Just for the record - I do like the various styles that get smeared by the "cartoonish" label. Borderlands - one that I actually would call cartoony; Kingdoms of Amalur; WoW.... all great looking games. And certainly, compared to those, Skyrim (and heck, Oblivion) are all going for a "realistic" look. I don't really see them as stylized.

That's actually my definition. And certainly, something are more cartoony than others. I consider Oblivion cartoony, but it isn't nearly as cartoony as WOW

That was in response to your comment about games having good stories and bad ones. If tes could get a really good one the graphics would be less important.

Returning to cartoony or realistic.
I think honestly the cartoony games will last longer - borderlands and Zelda being good examples of this. But the elder scrolls have set their style and as such they had to continue using it. To switch to a more animated style at this point would only anger all the fans who have been with them from the beginning

agreed

Out of topic but; dinosaurs DID evolve and survive...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Southern_cassowary.jpg

Also i would rather not to buy another high-end pc every year.