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.
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.