We're just getting to the other side of a whole slew of AAA trailers and reveals. Starfield, Spider-Man 2, Star Wars Outlaws, Fable, and many more have all been unveiled or have been given new trailers. All these games look to be sporting the expected bells and whistles of an upcoming AAA release, specifically graphics that border on photorealism. I recognize being habitually stuck in the previous console generations makes me a little behind on these things, but I was blown away at the trailers for games like Star Wars Outlaws, with real-time gameplay that looks better than the cinematics that were coming out a year or so back.
However, when everyone's selling games with graphics good enough to show every individual thread on a character's clothes, it's a bit less impressive.
Chasing realism has been a goal in the AAA market since around the seventh generation, and we're really starting to see it peak. But it's causing these games to blend together when every trailer sports the same motion-captured faces rendered to perfection. That's not a knock on those in the trenches making back-to-back visual bangers, but talking from the perspective of art direction, I reckon AAA games could take notes from the indie scene and go for a bit more style. Not only would it help titles stand out more, it would help shave off a couple zeros from bloated budgets.
What really sold me on the need for this was Game Pass. Go and have a look through that service and try to tell me that the hyper-stylized collection of indie games there don't stand out more than any game sporting a photorealistic lad on the front. I was looking at the games soon to arrive on the service recently and completely ignored the upcoming Lies of P, assuming it was some hundredth entry in a franchise that would take too long to get caught up on. Now that's probably a more middle-shelf example, but the cover presenting a face that looks like a de-aged Sweeney Todd with the typical giveaways of realism didn't make it stand out, it made it blend in. The prevalence of this exact same style among AAA and middle-shelf games has given those titles a truly chameleonic effect to the untrained eye. Meanwhile, indies really catch my eye by going for stylization—such as with the charming Toem, a black-and-white puzzle game with the look of a Paper Mario-esque pop out book. A unique look is usually what gets me to take a chance on a game, and I reckon I'm not alone in that.
The other major issue with chasing photorealism all the time is that it costs the GDP of a small country. Games are getting more expensive and are requiring bigger teams and comically large file sizes. While it's tricky to find exact numbers for many releases, everything from huge multiplayer franchises like Battlefield to big single-player titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Horizon Forbidden West are either estimated or confirmed to be within or above the $100-200M threshold. This is supported by skyrocketing budgets always being the chief reason given for increased monetization or $70 price tags (next to inflation, which is also a cost-related point). Meanwhile, indie games with smaller budgets are often forced to go the route of style over even attempting a realistic look, making those games less resource-intensive and cheaper for the player while still looking absolutely gorgeous.
While all of this isn't currently a big issue for the industry, it might be worth AAA developers getting ahead of the curve given what's happened in the feature animation industry (because god forbid I don't take advantage of any time I get to talk about animation in one of these). A passing glance will reveal just how much stylization has taken off there, with everything from the SpiderVerse films, Puss in Boots 2, Nimona, and the upcoming TMNT: Mutant Mayhem ditching what works in favor of experimentation. Even Disney looks to be getting in on it with the film Wish in November. Meanwhile, Pixar's Lightyear—which went all in on realism—flopped. Big animated films are branching out more and more into doing what would've been solely relegated to middle-shelf or indie studios just a couple of years ago. As a medium that is practically exclusively animated—I can only think of those interactive movie games like Night Trap having notable live-action elements—it might be wise for the big players to try something new.
Almost every big or semi-big publisher in the AAA space, unless its name is Nintendo, has been roped into making games that look very similar to each other. We seem to be ways off from the days when Ubisoft made Rayman Legends or when EA would roll out Garden Warfare games in addition to its typical catalogue. Will games go the same way as other mediums where animation is prevalent? Hard to say, especially considering the current trend still works for many gamers. But I'd really love to see what a studio with vast resources could make with an art direction akin to something like Cuphead or Have A Nice Death.