Watching the graphics quality of the Zelda demo, I can't help but think: If only this weren't on Nintendo. The graphics look equivalent to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (2002). As with so many Nintendo demos; I find myself wishing they were a cross-platform game studio rather than a lagging hardware company.
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.
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.
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).
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).
Your memory of Morrowind is way off. It's fairly common to remember games as looking far better than they did. This looks competitive with games that came out just a couple of years ago on the latest generation of consoles.
> The graphics look equivalent to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (2002).
What?! Okay so it might not look quite as pretty as The Witcher 3 or Uncharted 4 but it still looks modern. The explosion/fire/smoke effects are beautiful. The art style isn't for photo-realistic but to have a unique-yet-familiar style that allows them to make use of exaggerated/cartoon-like presentation.
Saying it looks like a 15 year old game is extremely unfair and totally wrong.
Yes and this Minecraft game looks like it was made in the 80s...pretty horrible as well. It's not just Nintendo, the subpar graphics have spread everywhere.
Do people really care about graphics that much? My guess would most casual gamers actually don't. Gameplay > all.
