Realism: Bad For Video Games?

   

  I'm 24, my first console that i owned was a Super Nintendo(SNES), and the first game I ever  recall playing was Super Mario World. I don't remember my experiences with it really, but it gave me a basis for this weird little red hat wearing character named Mario was. Suddenly around my 4th birthday my grandfather got me a Nintendo 64, and a copy of Super Mario 64, suddenly Mario wasn't a little sprite anymore. He was alive, he spoke, he got hurt, he had emotion(although limited). This is the classic rant that people have when they saw the transition from 2-D graphics to 3-D graphics. it was huge. I've seen the transition personally. Many people older than me claim "I had an Atari", my issue with this, is that most of them never really cared for video games afterwards. So some of those people didn't go through this awkward transition of a weird flip in mindset in developers. To make a good game, you need:

• Good Gameplay
• Good Story
• Good Visuals

      Over the last few years our games with human characters have been becoming more visually stunning constantly, however, s, it seemed all difficulty in making realistic people making ridiculous unrealistic things, games become limited, and unoriginal. A lot of these games start to rely on QTE's or Quick Time Events, in which a player basically watches a small cutscene in which at some point they have to hit a pattern of buttons as they show up on the screen. While cool, it's a real disconnect from the game and takes away from the amazing visuals going on in the game itself. Realism also limits story as well, at that point most video games with realistic stories resort to become shooting games. Games become emotionless almost. Character faces usually can never be as expressive as a human face no matter how much motion capture you can use, and it especially doesn't help if you have any sort of bad graphic designers.....(cough cough Mass Effect).

                                           (Dunkey is much more humorous about this)

     Now, I'm not saying that games with hyper realistic graphics are bad, there are plenty of games such as Heavy Rain, that have been praised worldwide, but just to use that as an example, it had more going for it than graphics. Although this is a game that i can also use as an example of realism causing games to work off of QTE's the story was what really made the game, as well as how the story is played. The game plays more like a movie than anything, but the few factors of exploration, and the desire to keep the multitudes of characters in the story alive, make the game exciting.

Although Cartoony, this game is beautiful.

     Realistic graphics are touchy, they want to make things as real as possible, there needs to be a balance of keeping things realistic, all while making a decent disconnect to remind you that this is a fun game, without causing the player to be completely disconnected from the experience itself. If you look at a game like Call of Duty, which people buy because it is a realistic military shooting game, there's also over the top story mode, and an adrenaline fueled multiplayer that go way past realism,
 and therefore making the game, a game.

"Lo0k InTo mY SouL"

   This is overall a very touchy subject, people respond differently, and have different opinions. In my opinion this was a very huge issue up to this year. However in 2017, it seems developers have embraced the idea that a game doesn't have to look like what they look at every day to be a beautiful/good game. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild for instance, uses a more water painted art style that although "cartoony", it's environment are beauttiful, it has a fun story, and a fluid balance of exploration and combat that have all melded together to make it one of the most praised and sought after video games of the decade. There's so much to talk about when it comes to graphics it can be a little bit overwhelming to talk about, even now towards the end of this i still feel like i can rant about this forever....I won't. All i can say is that I'm glad/ still hoping that developers are following the age old rule the community keeps yelling out "GAMEPLAY FIRST"!

                                                          (I had to throw this in)