Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I have zero interest in realistic character models in video games. There are limitless possibilities when it comes to art styles in gaming, and the one AAA picks over and over is realism. It's so boring.
A previous title in the same franchise (Wind Waker) was also lambasted on release for it's alternative art style & today has aged considerably better than most games of that era.
If anyone is interested in an example, I found this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0B45hUPgo
That's exactly what happened. People complain about the way high-frame-rate cameras look cheap.
The language of cinema is always unreal. Even the most "natural" performances are always highly stylized. Camera motion, lighting, makeup, etc are all very different from real life. You can see it even in behind-the-scenes footage; everything looks so fake. It's designed to feel right in the captured image, and that's the only goal.
They'll use whatever tools they have for it. This might be a good tool, but it's hard to predict. They never really worked out a good use for 3D in film, even though it's also more "natural" than a moving 2D image. It's a different kind of uncanny valley: it didn't resemble real life enough, but you were content with the really unrealistic language of 2D cinema.
Newer generations growing up with 30+ FPS and better animation will develop different tastes.
Yep, and it’s also mistakenly assumed to be a necessary ingredient of all the great films you remember, rather than a nearly unavoidable ingredient. After all, those great films were all 24 FPS! And they used that medium in really creative and technically proficient ways!
And that’s true and great. But all the bad films were also 24 FPS, and it would be weird to say “imagine how much worse that terrible low budget film from 1978 would have been if they had modern professional digital cameras and shot in 48 FPS.”
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, especially regarding aesthetics. But this is pretty much the same sort of complaint that I was criticizing. You can have a genuine steadfast aesthetic preference for black and white films, or silent films, or SD digital video, but I disagree with extending that to anything of the form “technology X is undesirable because it makes films more realistic and films are not supposed to be realistic.”
People liked some things, like talkies. And they rejected other things, like 3D. I could come up with an after-the-fact rationalization for why some things worked and some didn't, but it's pretty much impossible to tell beforehand.
I want game characters that feel alive in all the ways my brain expects creatures to act alive, which I have yet to see done with most NPCs. Even key NPCs usually fall very short.
Cartoons have done this for decades, but it's (relatively) easy when everything can be preplanned.
This makes that easy whether you want to go realistic or not.
AAA isn't a value marker. It's a shame every time I see discussions of gamedev it's always "but can you do AAA with this library?" Who cares!
We also happen to be very good judges of what looks real.
And at some point I want to play realistic open world VR D&D, with multi-model intelligent NPC’s, enemies and beasts! Oh, how I have been waiting…
Exceptions exist of course, japanese developers are able to get very cartoony visuals but that means they won't be able to use this metahuman 3d model and animation technology.