“Stylised vs Realistic”

seems quite different from

“Illusion vs Reality”

Personally I’m not such a fan of introducing dogma to a creative medium though. There are so many counter-examples and exceptions that it becomes fairly useless fairly quickly.

Of course, as a statement of intent it is perfectly laudable.

…

You might have a winner there, dear sir!

But yes, I take your point. Horses for courses. Cartoon horses. P0wnies indeed.

But like I said, depends on the game… “Raving Rabbids” wouldn’t feel half as good with hiper realism (heck… the rabitts looked awful with furm just look at the earlier concepts!), and neither would “Heavy Rain” be half as intense with an “Afro Samurai” look.

It’s a matter of context and storytelling.

Although personally, for me, when I hear someone say…

“We should design this feature like this, because in real life that’s not how it would work…”

Then I wouldn’t particularly want to work with them. Ever.

Might be appropriate if we were making a flight sim or something. But I’ll be cold in the ground before that happens.

Perhaps a smarter (but less pithy) way to express the same sentiment is “do what is required to achieve the end result you are after, but no more than that”. All video games “simulate” things – the question is just how deep to go with it (the obvious answer being “far enough to get what you need”).

Even that truism doesn’t always work in the real world. Take a game that requires some flappy cloth – do you fake it with key-framed animation, or invest in making some cloth-sim tech? You might immediately say “fake it!”, but that isn’t always the right decision. That approach doesn’t scale so well should you decide later that you’d like a thousand flappy cloths instead of just one.

To summarise: faking absolutely everything with the most base techniques available leads to inflexible design and wasted man-hours. Simulating everything as realistically as possible is clearly pointless too if you barely see 10% of it on-screen. Somewhere in the middle there’s a balance. However, I agree that’s not as catchy as “illusion, not reality”