Artistic Styles

Artistic Styles in Video Games

Photorealism- This a type of style that creates a realistic effect, call of duty is well known for this sort of effect. The term photorealism is used when the artist creates work based on a picture or video, and the resulting piece of artwork is highly realistic, photo-real-ism. In games photorealism is used with characters in games, the designers for the games want the characters to look as realistic as possible to allow the player to think of them more than just an NPC, as an actual thing, to allow the player to feel emotions towards that character.

Cel-Shading- This type of style makes the image feel like it has been drawn or sketched, games like these are the very popular Borderlands franchise. Cell-Shading is a common in animation and cartons, but this is to do with video games........ So let’s start again. Cell-Shading is a very uncommon thing to see in video games, it is not rare, as some designers prepare the style, but it is not the norm for games, one of the most famous games that use cell-shading are the "borderlands" games, these games are quite popular and come away from the norm by using the cell-shading technique.

Abstract- This type of style is used to create a more cartoon based style to the game, such as Arkeon. Abstraction is an art form that doesn't want to be realistic, it wants to stand out, be different. The work produced in abstract may resemble some things but will have a lot of differences to it, or a lot of strange things in the game. An example of this art style in the new "Botanicula"game, as you can see in the picture, there are 5 main protagonists resembling a: leaf, feather, mushroom, poppy seed and a twig, yet the art style of the game is unusual, and the black creature on the right is unlike anything you've seen. .

Exaggeration-The exaggerated visual style is loosely based on photorealism, the arts style has been enhanced and modified to represent something that could be realistic but is heavily overdone. In a lot of the Japanese developed games there visual style is over exaggerated in games such as Tekken where they are overly muscular with big and outrageous hairstyles and in the Final Fantasy series they have exaggerated weapons, hairstyles, levels etc. Also some western games also used the exaggerated visual style, games like Batman Arkham City & Devil May Cry.

A good example of exaggerated graphics is Rock steady’s Batman Arkham City, what makes this scene exaggerated is Batmans overly muscular body. Although he is designed to look like a real human his features are exaggerated to make him look stronger to fit the stereotypical look of a male protagonist. None of his body parts are good representatives of an actual human he is purposely made to look twice the size.