This is something that I thought with Baldur's Gate 3 as well even with the race customisation and everything. People were noting in the character creation how the male/female characters look exactly the same. That's not really the worse of it though. When you start examining them in a bit more detail you realise for the most part, they really do look generic. Sure, they've got horns or tails on them, but that's about it, the artists haven't really spent any time trying to edit their curves and features beyond that and it shows.
I'm also going to throw some shade at Starfield now since I hadn't realised thankfully but that's going to be releasing in about 3 weeks since September is coming up. Sorry guys because I know some people are looking forward to it, I was willing to give Baldur's Gate 3 a chance too and it failed hard.
https://youtu.be/OtXlygBDX4M?t=755
If you advertise customisation as one of your biggest features, this is not what I want to see. Even No Man's Sky with their aliens and everything has so much more variety than this. If you asked me a few weeks ago whether graphics matter I would have said no and really, it still doesn't. I think though art design matters and what is surprising me is that this is yet another heavily hyped big studio title all the normies are looking forward to but I'm just not impressed.
I would rather see something like 6 unique and interesting companions that the artists took their time with designing rather than whatever generic NPC customiser this is supposed to be because even the characters they're giving you brief glimpses of in their trailers don't look remotely interesting.
Well, there are probably multiple reasons why the art goes more and more generic, one of them is the idea of trying to emulate the reality rather than the ideal, the other is we know the corpo culture does not incentive risk taking and the globohomo culture ensure that all risk goes in the wrong way.
This is precisely why I despise realism in games. I play games to go to fantastic places, do interesting things, and become something different then I already am. They're so obsessed with recreating the real world, when I'm here to go anywhere else.
That's not to say you can't have realistic games that do interesting things and have interesting places. But it definitely makes the developers have to work that much harder on the setting and characters.
Exactly, I'm the same now, if I see realism and open world being advertised to me I immediately assume it's going to be shit and I'm almost always right to think this way.
Realism is fine, when it truly means "internal consistencyism", which is what a lot of people mean by it when, in example, they're talking about a universe with magic in it. Unfortunately, others do actually mean real-ism, that magic shouldn't exist in a high-magic setting.
I mean "Trying their hardest to make the art style look as true to life as possible." That is what I'm decrying here. And again, I'm not saying it's all bad, but the more "grounded" you make the game, the more effort goes into all the nitty-gritty detail, and the less goes into making something that's actually fun to play.
Modern shooters are the place for realism.
Fantasy/SciFi are the places for some degree of stylization, even if its minor. Even BDO is stylized, and they went for realism in their human/elf models+environment more than not.
I think they do it because either their artists suck and the company is now filled with diversity hires so they don't even have 'gud graphics' going for them or they do it as a cost cutting measure so they can rapidly churn out characters.
There's also projects becoming so distended in AAA studios that it becomes hard to create a cohesive product, let alone stylized art direction, without really good leadership/organization.
Did 2000+ people need to work on D4, as an example? Probably not.