Modern gaming represents a true artistic spectacle. Yes, level design and mechanics are crucial, but these mean little if games lack visual splendor. Thankfully, we live in a golden era for video game art, with creatives infusing titles of all kinds with personality and meaning. Below, we will offer a detailed game graphics comparison, revealing the power of visual storytelling in games.
The Role of Art in Game Design
As a visual medium, video games use graphics and art to enhance every aspect of the playing experience. Level designers work in tandem with artistic teams to ensure players know exactly where to go and how they can interact with the broader gaming world.
Writers and directors collaborate with artists to bring stories and characters to life. Meanwhile, programmers and designers leverage artistic creations to ensure that the core gaming experience not only plays great but also looks great . Every aspect of a game is influenced by artists and designers who are responsible for giving each game its signature look and aesthetic.
Enhancing Player Immersion Through Art
Titles such as Elden Ring and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild throw players into enormous open worlds. These intricately detailed and varied environments serve as valuable game world-building mechanisms. The old expression “show, don’t tell” is top of mind, with gamers uncovering valuable details about the story and the history of their surroundings simply by exploring the caves, dungeons, swamps and other areas that make up each world.
Art as a Tool for World-Building
In 2007, Bioshock took the gaming world by storm with its memorable underwater utopia known as Rapture. Built in the 1940s, Rapture brought an Art Deco design to its interiors that hadn’t been seen before in games. The environments were packed with posters, paintings, murals, and sculptures that helped tell the story of Andrew Ryan’s city. Visual storytelling in games can be truly dynamic, and Bioshock’s focus on making the city of Rapture a central character propelled its narrative to a whole new level.
Iconic Art Styles in Gaming History
Visual styles in games have made leaps and bounds since the 1970s, when only a few pixels and even fewer colors made up the graphics for popular games like Pong and Space Invaders. While those legendary games featured simpler technology than what we can find today in our toasters or children’s toys, the central art design endures.
With each new gaming console or arcade board advancement comes a wide assortment of games featuring unforgettable visuals. While many video game art styles exist, two of the most recognizable are pixel art, common in retro games, and a modern style that adds realism to gaming worlds and characters.
Pixel Art in Retro Games
Iconic video game characters such as Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog emerged with the exciting world of 2D-pixel art. These games paved the way for others to take on that style and blow away all expectations for what the humble 8 and 16-bit consoles of the day could achieve.
Titles such as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger featured unforgettable game worlds and characters designed by artistic visionaries like Akira Toriyama. Not to be outdone, heavyweight developers Konami and Capcom consistently produced the most gorgeous retro games of the era. Konami’s Castlevania featured a distinctly Gothic style. Meanwhile, Capcom’s work on licensed Disney properties such as Aladdin and DuckTales still occupies a soft spot in the heart of retro gamers.
Stylized Realism in Modern Titles
Some of the best game graphics of all time can be found in modern titles that blend phenomenal art direction with a stylized realism that gives the characters and worlds an added emotional weight. Performance capturing, in which real life actors and their performances are transported into the game, has become a staple of modern game art .
These days, many games feel like Hollywood blockbusters. Titles such as Life is Strange: True Colors and Uncharted utilize fantastic performances by their main actors to convey emotions previously thought out of reach for video games.
Breakthrough Games With Unique Artistic Approaches
In the early days, pixel art video games dominated. Players packed arcades to dump their hard-earned quarters into the Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger, and Joust machines that lined the walls of their local bowling alley or movie theater. As the arcade scene dwindled, the console and home computer market picked up the slack.
Some artistic video games even prioritized their look and style over tried-and-true gameplay mechanics. In a market as competitive as video games, it takes a lot to stand out from the pack and an eye-catching art style can certainly make an impression.
Cel Shading and Its Impact
Y2K is remembered mostly for what didn’t happen: the calendar struck the year 2000 and the world was mostly unchanged. Little did we know that the world of video game art would be forever altered in 2000 with the release of Sega’s Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast.
Cel shading became one of the most popular video game art trends, as developers aimed to give their 3D character models and environments a colorful, cartoony look. While some wrote off cel shading as merely another fad, the style was here to stay after Nintendo stunned everyone with the gorgeous The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Debuting in March of 2003 in America, The Wind Waker showed players and developers that cel shading wasn’t just for racing and adventure games, it showed that anything was possible with enough imagination and technical know-how. A few years later, Capcom’s Okami took cel shading to a whole new level with an art style reminiscent of Japanese ink wash paintings. These two games were incredibly influential, revealing powerful new avenues for creative expression.
Abstract and Minimalist Design
The expression “less is more” can certainly apply to video games, especially those created by small teams or a single person on a shoestring budget. Sometimes, what you don’t see is just as powerful as what you encounter head-on, as evidenced by titles like Limbo and Inside.
With just a few colors, Limbo creates an atmosphere full of suspense and dread. Meanwhile, Inside uses lighting and shadows to present an equally nerve-wracking world. Developer Playdead, a small team from Denmark, has clearly impacted the gaming community with these distinct stylistic decisions.
It’s impossible to mention minimalism in gaming without discussing Thomas Was Alone, the puzzle platformer created by the talented Mike Bithell. Players control the plucky Thomas, a rectangle who must help his shapely and multi-colored friends navigate a computer mainframe swarming with AI inhabitants. This unique experience cannot be accomplished in any other medium, so it speaks to the incredible effectiveness of visual design.
Technical Advances Driving Art in Games
Console makers, Sony and Microsoft have been fighting the console wars for generations, with each new system featuring cutting-edge graphics technology that could entice consumers to upgrade.
It’s up to companies like AMD and NVIDIA to provide these new consoles with the extraordinary processing power needed to impress players. With every new Graphics processing unit (GPU) comes a handful of technical innovations that artists can use to make stylized realism games, and artistic experiments never before seen.
The Evolution of 3D Graphics
In the 1990s, veteran game companies, plus relative hardware newcomers like The 3DO Company and Philips, began fully embracing 3D. By today’s standards, early 3D graphics were pretty rough. A handful of jagged polygonal shapes left players using their imaginations to fill in the blanks.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long before artists and programmers began creating beautiful works of 3D art on Sony’s original PlayStation, the Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and certainly the PC. By the mid-90s, most games had gone fully 3D. The result? An amazing visual leap from the PlayStation generation to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, a sight unlike anything players had seen before .
Real-Time Ray Tracing and Next-Gen Visuals
Many of the graphical innovations we’ve seen over the years have involved light and shadow. One of the most popular art techniques in gaming: ray tracing. This is described by the experts at Unreal Engine as a process that involves “casting a ray out from the point of view of the camera and tracing its path as it bounces around objects in the scene until it reaches a light source, collecting and depositing color as it goes.”
Essentially, ray tracing represents a method of modeling light in an environment. This has become an industry staple in contemporary game art, especially in games that strive for visual realism.
Case Studies: Award-Winning Game Art
Several different organizations provide annual awards that celebrate the artists and designers responsible for incredible-looking games. The Game Developers Choice Awards, BAFTA Game Awards, and D.I.C.E. Awards stand out. They choose winners based on not only artistic beauty, but also technical achievement and even actor performances.
Artistic Analysis of ‘The Last of Us Part II’
Arguably the most popular and well-known example of visual realism in games, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us series has won countless awards for its visual design and technical wizardry. The Last of Us Part II brought a gripping story to life with memorable performances and a nearly photorealistic world, one that simply couldn’t have been possible without serious artistic and technical skills. The Last of Usart style reveals how games can look like Hollywood blockbusters if given enough time, resources, and talent.
Visual Innovation in ‘Ghost of Tsushima’
One look at Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima, and any film buff will know exactly where their artists took inspiration. Legendary director Akira Kurosawa has influenced everyone from the Wu-Tang Clan to Quentin Tarantino. His signature samurai film stylings are all over the Ghost of Tsushima visuals. Sucker Punch even included an option to play the entire game in black and white, a nod to the director and his iconic film Seven Samurai.
Ghost of Tsushima represents more than just an homage as the game features some truly unique ways to present information to the player in a visual way. As an open-world game, Ghost of Tsushima leads players to their next objective via the wind, which blows in the direction they should be heading in. Sometimes this breeze kicks up flowers, leaves, and other elements of nature. This lends even more immersion to the environment.
Discover the Power of Visual Storytelling With RMCAD
At Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, we are committed to supporting gaming visionaries as they bring fascinating concepts to life. Available online and on-campus, our game art degree program provides a powerful introduction to the myriad of visual styles in games. Reach out to learn more about our game art degree and how it can help you prepare for an exciting career path.
