History 3 - Facial Awesomification

               I want to talk about art styles in this modern generation of gaming. It’s always something I’m interested in. When a game dares to go away from a realistic art style and make something interesting and new, I always love it.

 The first thing that comes to mind is Legend of Zelda Wind Waker for the Nintendo Gamecube. When it was released in 2002 and 2003 at first the Nintendo community was outraged. They didn’t want the cartoony cell-shaded art style, although now it has a lot of love. The reason for this is that Nintendo gamers were promised far more when it came to the Gamecube’s Zelda title. At the Spaceworld event in 2000 gamers were shown this ; 

 A 3D Link with a similar design to the Link players knew and loved from the N64 era, looking marvelous in the new Gamecube graphics. But instead we got who is now lovingly called Toon Link. 

Using cell shading technology the Great Ocean in Wind Waker looked like a cartoon world, every character full of emotion. While gamers were outraged at the time, now Wind Waker is loved so much it got re released in HD on the Wii U (which doesn’t seem entire necessary but sure does it sell).

 Even though its not such a dirastic change, the art style in Bioshock Infinite is devine, and not just because it’s currently my favourite game of all time. The game was first designed with far more realistic faces and proportions on characters, but it was all changed for one reason. Emotion. Ken Levine, developer of Irrational Games and Bioshock Infinite decided to scrap using Motion Capture for the faces of the characters because he believed that animating the facial features of Elizabeth by hand would make her have far more character and emotion. You can see her more proportioned face before hand in early art and oddly enough in the televised trailer for Bioshock Infinite. 

 Personaly, I think this choice was amazing. Elizabeth, your companion throughout the whole game, is entirely important to the game, and her emotions doubly so. At any time in the game you can look at her and just see the look in her Disney like eyes and see her point of view. Brilliant choice.

 Similiarly, in Bethesda’s game Dishonoured every character has a far more caricature like appearance and the entire world has a more painted look. This graphical style makes the game far more interesting and stopped it from blending into obscurity.

 It’s interesting to me how now a practically photo-realistic human could be made in video games and yet sometimes going away from that look can make a far more interesting graphical style.