[kibwen]

Art direction makes up for it. By now, photorealism in games is becoming bland. Given a screenshot of most any random modern AAA game, without the HUD, I don't know if I could distinguish them. I won't argue that more graphical fidelity isn't better, but we've reached a saturation point where graphical fidelity alone won't sell your game.

[zackthehuman]

I couldn't agree more. Over the years I have become less and less interested in games as they have become more and more realistic graphically.

The games I still enjoy playing have poor low resolution graphics, but they're challenging and fun.

This is one of the things I respect so much about Nintendo; they haven't given in to pressure to make everything realistic. They keep their focus on the game play and allow players to use their imagination when it comes to graphics.

[__david__]

There's still plenty of room for artistic style in graphically "realistic" games. Dishonored and the recent Deus Ex games (particularly the Human Revolution) are pretty good examples of both good graphical definition and a very strong sense of style. Going back a little further there were the Bioshock games, which also just ooze style (as well as being top tier in the realistic graphics dept for their time).

[eb0la]

Scott McCloud (the comics artist) says something very interesting about that:

The more realistic the character drawings are, they less _you_ project yourself into the story.

If this works for a static medium like comics, it could be much more important for dynamic conten like videogames. No wonder that cartoon-like characters like Mario, Link, or Pacman comes to mind before Chris Renfield (for instance).