(I used to do scientific visualization and have written voxel renderers...it just never occurred to me that someone would want to do that for general purpose graphics)
Minecraft has "voxels" (they are rendered as polygons) that are 1 meter square in size. More granularity would add a lot to the games. There are even mods that try to add a more granular kind of voxel to the game, like "chisels & bits". That one specifically is very popular and used in most modpacks, so that might be a hint for a successful voxel game in the future.
Nothing as spectacular as Red Faction. I had totally forgotten about this game. The second one didn't even make a big deal out of blowing walls up
Why the appeal now? Voxels are a simpler model for describing the world and adding granular detail, at least at first sight. Ultimately you still have to model bending, physics, animation, free rotation, etc. which is AFAIK more complicated than for polygon based 3D data. Essentially a voxel object still needs to have a secondary parametric representation to describe things like elasticity or connectivity, etc. (not sure how it's done), though I assume the techniques are not too far off from skeletal animation etc. in traditional engines (which also use such a simpler representation overlayed on / inside the mesh.
But I think that leads to the second appeal: Trying to squeeze out a few more polygons per second or a specific little effect on the fundamental technique level in traditional 3D engines is pretty hard but only gives you so much in return. I can understand how something you can approach with a fresh set of eyes, with fewer established working solutions, is appealing in itself. There's (seemingly) more to discover, more to invent.
If voxels just mean the smallest rendering primitive is a cube instead of a triangle then I agree it seems just like an artistic preference.
It can be rendered or visualized many different ways including smooth curves or many other things. While blocky cubes are common that is not all they are or can do.
you can certainly also do a gaussian with alpha if you dont mind drawing jello...are there other approaches you know of for direct rendering?
I need to do some reading.
A Minecraft voxel is much more complicated than a pixel in 3d. It has textures, the shape/graphics changes depending on what angle you see it from and can even have animations.
I guess the term has evolved now but I find naming Minecraft as a voxel game mostly as a marketing gimmick. No one calls 8x8 block of a NES background tile a pixel
They might, if the point of the NES game was to arrange those blocks into personal artwork.
2) The finite limitations "leave more to the imagination" - in the same way that low resolution pixel art might, vs a high resolution vector image.
3) A very minor factor, but worth noting: not only are voxels visually novel, but they are technologically novel - in order to make a competitive voxel engine, you typically are not using an off-the-shelf engine like Unreal or Unity (though you can, and there are many voxel pluggins for these engines). Thus programmers are drawn to them (IMO) - they are an easy way to visually show off your technical know-how, just as you might many other effects in the demo scene.
4) A false sense of nostalgia - voxel engines never were very widespread, and the closest thing in the early days tended to be height-map driven rather than volumetric (the earliest notable exception being Voxlap). But the "nostalgia" exists, just as it does with synthwave (most of which does not fully mirror any music of the 80s/90s).
5) Voxels are point-based volumetric representation and thus are much easier to use for procedural generation (vs describing a surface, which is much harder). Though voxels are often wrapped on the surface with polygons, this is trivial (vs, say, describing the polygonization of a metaball without using voxels).
They're good for giving mass to objects instead of just having a shape. Thus far that's mostly meant they're used for terrain which is destroyable.