[The uncanny valley debate is something that continues to go on, and Tron's got a nice point here with his GTA 4 argument. I'd certainly love to see the game cel-shaded, as the appearance of the game is something that really turns me off to buying it. It's just not appealing anymore. Enjoy the post, all! -- DMV]
A conflict of two styles. Which do you think looks "better"?
How you answer this question detirmines what side you are on in the "good graphics" debate. Do you see good graphics as whatever is closest to replicating the looks and actions of real human beings? Or do you see good graphics as those that are easy on the eyes, sending a clear message while remaining visually interesting?
I think that Grand Theft Auto IV should employ the cel shaded look. The in-game graphics shown so far for the game are ugly as hell -- far uglier than anything seen previously in the series. Sometimes too much detail and a near miss at realism is far worse to look at than the more rudimentary alternative. This isn't only true in video games, but in all forms of visual art.
Let's look to Mike Mignola's Hellboy as an example:
On the left is the proper Hellboy -- Simple. Expressive. Genuine. On the right is a broken Hellboy, from the game shown at E3. Overly detailed. Lifeless. Fake.
Mignola's Hellboy is punk rock. Punk rock is music by guys who weren't trying to play any better than they could. They embraced what they could do and they did it. And the fact that they did it with such passion, such expression, made it "work". If they had applied their same technical skill to trying to play another band's style of music, like the Beatles, they would have sounded like crap. All their mistakes would stand out like farts in a Christmas Carol.
The first GTA IV image is punk rock. The second is a punk rocker trying to sound like the Beatles. It's a fart sound in the middle of "Silver Bells". It's a video game attempting to look like a movie with real actors. And it's failing. Hard.
You've all heard about the Uncanny Valley by now. If not, here's a wiki link and a link on how it applies to video game graphics. This theory is a big deal. It could in part explain why (despite all critics and hard core gamers predictions) the DS beat the PSP, and why as of today the Wii and the PS2 are the the best selling home consoles in the world. It's not just price or the "gameplay innovations". It's because for a lot of people (not just kids), simple graphics area actually better to look at.
If Rockstar is smart, they will throw a cel shaded filter all over GTA IV before it's delayed release next year. They will see that the Uncanny Valley Liberty City of GTA IV is much less appealing and more alienating than the city and characters of GTA III. They will accept that right now, games cannot achieve graphics that climb out of the Uncanny Valley, and that they may not for a long time. And personally I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Take another look at how awesome GTA IV would look with the cel shader. It's beautiful, expressive, and emotionally real. I hate to be a graphics whore, but cel shaded GTA IV looks like a work of art, like a painting. I've always thought that the least tacky thing about GTA was the production art, and with a cel shader that production art can come to life. Simply incredible.
Regular GTA IV makes me feel nothing. It's like looking at a crappy puppet show. It's like looking at a bad actor wearing an ugly mask in an Alan Smithe movie. It's like looking at a cheap commercial for an art school's CGI department.
"In just four years, you too could be making video games instead of just playing them!" Yeah, games that look like total garbage, with plastic skinned characters covered in pock marks.
Anyway, it's something to think about, eh Destructoid? What are the future's "good graphics" going to be? Will we see a continuing push for photo realism, or a continued move towards non-realistic uses of CGI ? Right now things are simultaniously going in both directions, and I figure the one that makes the most money will be the "winner".
If tv and movies can be used as a predictor for where games will head, games in the coming years will have less and less focus on realism. In the late 90's and early '00's, there were tons of cartoons, commercials, and short animated films attempting photo realism with CGI. Then around the failure of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within, the entertainment community as a whole realised, "Wait, realism is not what CGI is for. That's why we have actors. CGI is best for what we'd used to use puppets, stop motion, and 2D animation for. Except CGI looks awesome".
Now the only CGI characters you see in movies are virtual stunt doubles or monsters that in past movies like Clash of the Titans and The Voyage of Sinbad were only possible with stop motion animation. In tv and commercials, CGI characters are always cel shaded, animate 2D in flash-esque style, or otherwise abstracted. No more attempts at realism.
Not until that James Cameron movie Avatar comes out, some day.
Rut Row.
But again, I digress.
Back to you, Destructoid. Where do think graphics will go from here? Where do you think they should go? You know where Tron Knotts stands. Where do you stand?
Contest:
9:20 PM on 08.20.2007
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Awesome read.
What I'm saying is I'd rather GTA IV look like A Scanner Darkly than this...
which would you prefer?
Myy long winded rants like this usually sink to the bottom of the C-blogs with only one or two comments. So it means a lot to me that not one, but three people actually commented so far.
And thanks Lemon! Are you related to my friend Sherron? You look sort of like her, which is a compliment. She's hot.
And I was aware that the car graphics are concept art. But I'm also guessing that with the power under the PS3/360's hood, they could replicate those graphics pretty closely with a cel shading filter. With my limited knowledge of CGI production, I'd guess that they'd even save a lot of memory.
oh, and FF: Spirits Within isn't the latest example of CGI approaching the uncanny valley - what about Polar Express, or the upcoming Beowulf?
As for Beowulf, I didn't think I should mention that because I thought only Grendel would be CGI. Is there more to it than that?
Also, what the hell!?!
Yeah, I agree with your points. I'd much rather they focus on style than realism.
Somebody does need to really explore what can be done with cel-shading using modern graphics technologies though. Everything that is released now, is still just a higher res version of what we saw five years ago.
I'm definitely in the camp of art design over realism.
So, I don't think there will ever be a set standard for how the graphics should look, it's all in the presentation :)
However, for GTA:IV, I personally would have preferred the cartoony look it's always had before, cel-shaded would have been nice.
How do you feel realism affects immersion, and could a non-realistic style hinder the creation of an immersive atmosphere in a game like GTA:IV?
I am not completely convinced that cell-shading is going to appeal to all gamers, or that it is the best way to go- perhaps it would be more attractive to the anime crowd but that could hardly be represenative of the entire gaming population. For example, XIII, by most accounts is a solid game, and used a very unique cell-shaded filter, yet it was a disappointment in sales- perhaps indicative that it did not appeal to a large proportion of the gaming market.
Then look at games such as Gears of War, a game that a lot of people praise for its life-like and realistic graphics.
I know I am sort of comparing apples and oranges, but I am not sure that Gears would have sold as well if the game used some sort of image filtering.
I'm more for a game looking tangible and realistic within it's own limits than a single-serving push for realistic graphics. Dead Rising is a perfect example of what I mean. It simply feels realistic more because of how tangible and heavy it feels while playing, and less so because of it's (admittedly great) visuals.
I'd always assumed that when Rockstar got the power, they'd make GTA look like the boxart. That's what it seemed like they were striving for on the last gen systems..NOT what we ended up with..this realistic mismash of amazing environments and characters that look like paste.
Ah well. Perhaps we can cross our fingers and hope this is what the delay was for.
It's my opinion that climbing out of the uncanny valley is still at least 15 years out. While high poly count models and high res textures are a step in the right direction for photo realistic games what people seem to forget is there is so much more into making a game realistic. You have animation systems, artificial intelligence, shading, shadow engines, light mapping and on and on. I think we'd all agree that Crysis will be the high watermark in graphics for some time, but all that immersion goes right out the window when you spot a hinky texture, or an enemy that gets stuck on a corner, or an animation is a bit too clunky.
It's like Mxy mentioned above with the World of Warcraft analogy. As much as I hate the game, the graphics are top notch in terms of immersion. Everything is bigger than life, colorful, and full of personality which ends up in a fully realized game world. Never mind that the game can be run on a Commodore 64, it succeeds where games that eat up trillions more processing cycles don't.
This article really hit it. I have been saying for a while now it isn't just about photo realistic graphics, it is about style, and what style would be best for each specific game. A game like Gears does well with its over emphasized details and gritty everything and lots of blood. By no means is it realistic, but it is BELIEVABLE.
If a game needs to be photo realistic for what the game is trying to do, then the developers should do that. But if would be better off using a different style, then they should really go for that style. I always though GTA would be need if it were cel shaded, all of the loading screens are hand drawn images that look really cool, and then the game looks nothing like it.
all in all, great article Tron
Now I do like cell-shaded graphics A LOT, but only when they are used really well. I think that new Hellboy game would look 10x cooler if they just went with the Mignola style for it. But GTA is different. Though there is a lot of tongue and cheek, GTA's setting is pretty serious and I think cell shading would detract from that a little instead of help it.
Take for example Crackdown which is more or less a cell-shaded GTA. It looks great and all but the tone of the game is shifted to something more artificial and comic-booky to suit that. A lot of the time I was playing it I was thinking "How cool would this be in a more realistic setting.". I'd love to see graphics like the concept art you've shown but it's just not possible yet in this generation of consoles (or pc cards) especially in an open world game like this, and I'd rather see it in a different series.
I personally just don't feel like we've even entered the uncanny valley yet so I've yet to be bothered it. Either way there's room for both, and I like both styles as long as they're implemented right.
Let me first say that I don't think realism makes for better looking games. And I posit that the reason a lot of game developers try to achieve realism rather than artistic style is that game development is primarily technology-driven. I'm hopeful that when (if?) this pursuit of technology slows down, there will be more visually interesting/expressive games.
As for you citing GTA IV as an example, firstly, you are citing concept art as being more expressive and evocative. You may find that that is exactly the purpose of concept art. They're meant to capture the essence of the work, that which the developers will aspire to.
Also, concept art are still images. Mignola's Hellboy is a still image. A game has much more to consider as it needs to convey a lot more to the player to be successful, things such as orientation, space, etc. And I find it odd that you are comparing artistic style to realism in a videogame with only stills too.
While that picture of Hellboy taken from the game looks horrendous, there's every chance that placed in proper context of the environment and gameplay, it makes sense. I'd wager that if they'd stuck to Mignola's absolutely minimal design using lots of shadows, they would have to make drastic gameplay changes to make the game even playable.
As for your simpler graphics = bestselling and complex graphics = niche argument, I find that problematic also. It's pretty much fact that simple games have more mass appeal. And simple games don't often require complex/realistic graphics. I don't think the graphics is what is influencing the sales of these games.
So, yea, while I agree with your sentiment, I'm not sure many of your arguments are valid.
Defuniak.
So I'd probably be a little biased here.
Where's my Bushido Blade Wii!??!?!
Nonsense aside, its the natural order for GTA's realism direction to go for the trying-too-hard realism. I kind of liked the para-pastel, cardboard drab of the PS2 games. They were just real enough to make the world familiar, but bad enough to run at a decent clip and afforded the satire and comedy of the games room to breathe a little bit.
While they always took them as fun games to "blow shit up" in, I always took them for what I believe them to be at their most sincere: scathing political/societal caricatures of American culture. It is to this end that I have always believed the game cover art served the purpose of this theme better than the actual graphics themselves.
From the day GTAIV was announced I wished with all fingers and toes crossed that Rockstar would hear my prayers but unfortunately my wishes fell on deaf ears. I feel like the last-gen versions strove to straddle that line between the real and the cartoon and did so amicably, but now I feel the next-gen systems could do so much better to push them into the realm of artful and genuinely breathtaking. I am glad to know someone else feels the same way.
I never found the games to be too highly rooted in realism anyway, so why force them to be graphically speaking? They are supposed to be over the top and satirical in nature. Why try to make them mimic the real world so closely (and arguably badly)?
Very good post. Highly enjoyable. Keep up the good work/insight. I appreciate it.
Personally, I think both ways are the way to go, considering the fact that CGI evolves.
Taking a look at Call of Duty 4 and GRAW2, those games seem to me like they're not heading towards the artistic look, but more towards the realistic one. And I have to say, the models and textures in those look very good.
However, yes. Sometimes there are projects which would have one fitting it better than the other.
GTA4 would have the cell shades fit it better than the graphics we've seen so far. Not only because it would look better, but moreover because it would fit better with the entire sense of the project.
That's just me anyway.
on a side note the rotoscope look might be very cool, or it could detract from the rest of the gameplay. i really couldn't say.
http://www.superrune.com/gallery_3d/2003_hellboy.php
Or even this looks better, although it is more like the film version
http://www.kolbyjukes.com/gallery/main.php/v/personal/Hellboy.jpg.html
GTA IV on the other hand is a departure from the games previously cartoony graphics/animations, so I'm eagerly anticipating testing it out and seeing how it feels after several hours. Either it will get boring and have its illusion of realism rapidly chipped away at as it goes on... or I'll occasionally be questioning running downstairs after 8 hour play sessions, to clean the blood and various limbs off the windshield of my car.
I've never really considered GTA to lean very heavily on the realism side myself... The tongue-in-cheek humor is a hallmark of the series, and, to me, indicative of the fact that it's not intended to be taken very seriously. None of the other games have ever been terribly dark or really seemed to even take themselves seriously, so why would they really worry about compromising realism?
Great article, btw.
Holy fu...
I can't believe this made the front page! And days after I posted it. Wow, this is awesome. But a lot of pressure. I want to respond to everybody but I only have about ten minutes before I have to go to work. By the time I get home from work 9 hours from now, this will surely be bumped off the front page. But I took notes on everyone's posts, and will try to respond to at least some of you.
Wedge- I don't think we have yet seen a game studio put a lot of money into a cel shader on the 360. Crackdown looked ok, but not half as good as it could have looked if Rockstar or another Big Bucks studio made it. And no one has attempted cel shading on the PS3 yet. I think that with the right amount of time and money, someone could make a game that looks like this GTA concept art on the 360 or the PS3. They came close to it on the Dreamcast. fer christ sake! But of course, I'd have to ask Rockstar that to know for sure, which I plan to do when I forward a link of this thread to them later today.
Mech Monkey- Personally I believe that Scott McCloud and Art Spiegleman (of Maus fame) were right when he said that immersion can reach almost dream like levels of emotional reality when a simple, consistant and emotionally evokative visual style is used. They have sort of an "anti-Uncanny Valley" idea about visuals. More or less, Spiegleman said that our memories are not visually detailed. Our mind cuts corners in order to save time and effort. Sure, we can remember that there were details about a give place or thing, but if we try to close our eyes and visualise what those specific details were, we will likely get nothing. People experience dreams and visual hallucinations in the same way. I know, I work in a psychaitric hospital (that I have to be at in now 5 minutes. Yikes!)
I want graphics that are a vivid and emotionally real as some of my patients visual hallucination. Cel shading, in theory, can come close to that.
Blackbear- There is a theory about graphics that achieve anear miss at realsim being alienating. I used to call it "The Bizzaro Effect", named after the near miss at a Superman clone. Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame calls it "The Masking Effect", because of the mask like feeling we get from looking a nearly human faces. But most people call it the "Uncanny Valley".
See the links in my post for more info.
Andrew- I agree that realism can be great in CGI that depicts mostly monsters like Gears and Half Life 2. It's also great in Resident Evil 4 and 5, where you are surrounded by people that you are supposed to see as vaugely inhuman. In games like this, it's ok that even your "friend characters" look vaugely inhuman as well, because seeing any friendly face is better the aliens and demons your normally threatend by. But in a game like GTA IV, I'm still not for it.
And realistic CGI backgrounds can be incredible. For the longests time, Disney's 2D films always had incredibly detailed backgrounds with simple moving characters, giving the viewer the best of both worlds, a sense of "being there" but not feeling alientated from the films characters. This technique is something that I hope a big money game studio give try sooner rather than later.
2D films that have tried to do the opposite, like the roto-scoped Lord of the Rings cartoons and the epic Fire and Ice, for the most part came up short. These were some of the first 2D filsm to suffer the effects of the Uncanny Valley, which is a shame because they are both quite well made.
Defunct- To me, concept art should be the bar that the games graphics are trying to meet. The closer a game's graphics come to it's concept art, the better those graphics are. And I didn't embed video because video because A) every time I try it fails and B) there were no video examples of the types of "unrealistic" graphics that I wanted to see. And I think a Mignola looking game would be incredible and not hard to play if done right. But I respect your opinion and appreciate your thought provoking points.
Thanks to every one that posted and read my off the cuff thoughts, and thanks to DMV for giving me front page status. It's a day I wont soon forget.
I don't know how long it is going to take people to realise what artists realised thousands of years ago? It just seems as if every era thinks it's doing something new...it's not. Photorealism is a fad based on new technology which seems cool right now, photorealitic graphics is the 21st century's version of magic eye pictures, and just like those 90's fad, photorealism will just get dull when better, more expressive visulas start coming out.
The point is this, if reality was satisfying enough, then why would anyone bother creating visuals in the first place? Humans feel the need to create visuals which go beyond the mere photorealism and into the territory of human expression and feeling, this will always be a craving, whereas visuals which showcase new hardware will become boring very quickly, they do not satisfy human needs. End of dabate.