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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting. Modern graphics is beginning to make his character look dated, rather than stylized. (Not because we are 'used to better', but because of a more realistic background) They can't really change how he looks much either, because everyone and their brother knows what he is supposed to look like.

That's really an interesting puzzle. What do you do when graphics outstrips your content?

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You either up the realism on the character model or scale it back on the environment, physics, sound, story, gameplay, etc..

The Team Fortress 2 art style would be perfectly appropriate to keep him looking smarmy and impossibly perfect.

A grittier character model like what you see in most modern war games would work too. You can still give a guy blonde hair, huge muscles, and dark glasses without making him cartoony. You'd just make him look like Ivan Drago or something.

I think that Dolph Lundgren has all the necessary qualifications:

In January 2009, Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[Wikipedia]

Full link to the passage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren#Personal_life

Funny you should mention that, because the new developer of DNF is Gearbox software, who previously released the game "Borderlands" which was a very stylised, comic book-style game.

Even more interesting is that they first developed Borderlands as hyper-realistic, Crysis-like game and then moved to the new art direction during development.

The box cover art [1] had a more realistic version of Duke than the ones in the linked article (which feel more cartoony).

[1] http://dorol.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/jeu_duke_3d_dorol.j...

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