Quote:
Originally Posted by KO Gilligan
I really don't go for eye-candy screenshots as a good measure either, when you get to moving around there is still a toon in a flat environment effect that you can't deny and it still has years to overcome.
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This.
But, I think there is also something subtle that I haven't yet seen mentioned yet, that I think effects the 'realism' of a game (at least from an 'artistic' point of view.
) :
The characters/monsters/enemies almost always look too perfect.
They have no little 'defects,' by which I mean warts, freckles, stray hairs, random torn areas of clothing, etc. They almost always look like clones or have clean skin and clothing.
Duke in the newest screenshots looks like he's wearing a fur cap on his head, in one example. In real life, there is usually a few extra little hairs sparsed on people's foreheads around the main scalp area, where it kind of blends into bare skin. But Duke doesn't have that, so to me he looks slightly 'fake.'
Also, the monsters don't have warts or freckles either, or have clothing torn in differant spots from each other. You're fighting a hoard, but it's a cloned hoard.
In this example, I will use PigCops.
Given that these were once humans, they should be able to be rendered at least reasonably differant with today's technology, if not big differances, then at least little ones. Randomly generated by the computer. Give some PigCops blond hair, really ripped bloodstained clothing, or broken tusks. They should look differant enough so that I can see that the aliens really did mutate a bunch of cops, and not just trot out a set of clones. This helps to 'set a feel' of an alien invasion, because the cops now look like real individuals, and the aliens look like monsters for mutating them.
These little details helps to set some of the 'realism' to me, not just fancy particle effects (though those do help BTW
,) so I wish they were thought about more often.