Digital Art Zone

Hey guys! As some of you may know, I am a Masters Degree student at the University of Huddersfield. I am currently doing a Masters Degree in photorealistic and stylistic rendering in computer games, particularly the way each style is treated by the gaming community (both creator and consumer).

If you wanna help me out, please consider taking my survey. It’ll only take a couple of minutes to fill out, and you will be playing a big part in helping me complete my Masters.

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=e34tmuyb69suuts

Thank you for reading!

Yeah, sure. (done)

Done

Done! I liked the message at the end. Maybe it’s not too relevant to your research, but I was a little surprised not to see a question about how avid a gamer you are, or something along those lines.

Sure NP, (Done)

Interesting Survey… Completed.

Done.

done and done!  interesting topic, hope you’ll let us in on what insights it provides for you…..

Done! Good luck with your Masters!

It’s an interesting topics and I completed the survey but I wanted to go ahead and post my thoughts here in hopes we might get a conversation going. 

I think the art style has to match the game you’re playing.  If you take a look at a lot of the games with realistic art, many of them wouldn’t work with stylistic art.  Some would.  Batman certainly could have gone with a somewhat stylized approach or completely realistic but they couldn’t really go very far in the stylized direction.  Unfinished Swan had to go stylized.  The art has to serve the game it is in.

Certainly games like the one shown at the end of the survey have not been doing very well.  However, I don’t think that has to do with spiky hair and anime art styles.  I think it has to do with a serious lack of player freedom to define their own character, control their own destiny in the game and go out and do what they want to do.  Instead, they play through the game watching what some whiny teen decides to do.  Often times with enough text to fill a few dictionaries with.  I don’t think its a matter of art style.  Its a matter of open world vs playing a linear path.  It’s player progression that lets you chose what kind of character you will play as vs player progression along a per-determined path.

An interesting survey, thank you! Good luck with your work!

My thoughts about immersion, just in case. I’m mostly an “oldschool” gamer (shopping at GOG.com and finding stuff through Abandonia). The first game I’ve ever played by myself, on a PC, when I was about 14 years old, was that free first episode of Raven Software’s Heretic. It hardly ever gets any more stylised than this, it’s 2.5D, sprites and 256 colours. But to this day, it is the most immersive game I’ve ever played/seen others play. I guess it’s largely because of well-thought sound design as well.

If we compare two games from the TES franchise, Daggerfall and Oblivion, I find them equally immersive even though they look totally different (sprites & 256 colours vs. a capable Gamebryo-based engine) Though, I have to say, Oblivion had several major immersion-breaking drawbacks in its unmodded state: like, say, when you pick a flower, the flower mesh remains on the stem. It would have gone unnoticed in a sprite-based older game, but when you’re dealing with a world that wants to be photoreal, it’d rather behave realistically first and foremost. The way characters “teleport” from cell to cell, dissolving into thin air in front of a door that never animates as if being opened, totally bugs me as well. And the way fighting animations are done, with swords just moving through the enemies as if they were thin air, is also very unimpressive, compared to, say, Heretic II videos I’ve seen (and Oblivion is eight years younger than HII!) They may have fixed that for Skyrim, but I will not buy it for many many reasons (some of which I’ve expounded on in the survey =) )

Having said that, I’ve just bought Morrowind, and now I’m downloading mods like Better Bodies. I can live without bloom and HDR, but a human body should look like a human body, not like a corpse of an alien insect, especially if your game characters insist on being shirtless -behold the difference: http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/fms/Image.php?id=34497 . Funny, given that Bethsoft’s older sprites look 3D-generated, yet have always been quite pretty =D Some examples below:

http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/tsobs_part02image05.jpg
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:DF-SS-Group.gif
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:DF-SS-Chars.gif

What you’re talking about could potentially be grouped into the uncanny valley. We usually refer to the uncanny valley with characters, and how the more realistic they look the more their flaws become noticeable. From what you’ve said, the same can apply to the environment as well. In a stylised environment we don’t expect it to behave like in the real world, but when the game attempts to be photorealistic it becomes more noticeable.

BishounenTaurus - 31 July 2012 08:37 AM

What you’re talking about could potentially be grouped into the uncanny valley. We usually refer to the uncanny valley with characters, and how the more realistic they look the more their flaws become noticeable. From what you’ve said, the same can apply to the environment as well. In a stylised environment we don’t expect it to behave like in the real world, but when the game attempts to be photorealistic it becomes more noticeable.

Oh yes, exactly!