What makes a good game - A critics perspective: Episode #1 - Graphical Fidelity and Style

Hello everyone and welcome to a new series starting here on Kralizec Gaming - „What makes a game good – A critics perspective“

In this series we will look at mechanics that make for good, fun and entertaining games.

Today we are going to start with one of the things that many people consider as being most important – visuals, also know as graphics.

Even-though the view on the visuals and graphics and the visuals and graphics themselves have changed a lot throughout the history of the gaming industry, it has always been one of the most important things when gamers are picking out the game they are going to buy. For a pretty decent chunk of gamers visuals and graphics are even the most important factor in their choices.

Pong - 1972 | Wolfenstein3D - 1992 | TES: Oblivion - 2006 | The Witcher 3 - 2015

But I'm here to talk about my own opinions on what makes a game good in terms of its visuals. And in my opinion there are two paths to great visuals.

Option #1 - Graphical Fidelity

Probably the option that would jump to most of the mainstream gamers is the graphical fidelity of of the game. This means essentially means how well the details, effects, textures and everything that your graphics cards processes for you is executed.
These days, there are two ways a developer can achieve great graphical fidelity in their games.
The first one, the way that is somewhat restricted to the giants of the industry is creating a graphical engine. This is quite expensive and that is the reason of it is limited to big companies.
The second way, much more accessible is to use one of the engines that are on the market, like Unreal Engine, CryEngine or even Unity. Then you either create assets for these engines or if you aren't capable of that, you can even buy these assets for these engines and then use those for you games.

From a video-game critic's point of view, graphical fidelity will certainly play a huge role when considering how you will talk about the game. I personally usually care the most about the quality of textures, how well the lighting is executed in game and whether the particle effects do look awesome (in the original meaning of the word - as awe inspiring).
And my reasoning for this is following:

1. Textures create the tangibility (whether you feel like you could almost touch these surfaces) of the game.
2. Lighting plays a huge role in creating the atmosphere for the games
3. The particle effects create the feeling of amazement, because those are usually the things we don't have that much in real life (magic for example)

Option #2 - An unique visual style

Now this is the option you can often see small to medium sized studios going for. And for a reason. If you pick your visual style well. Meaning one that fits the theme of your game and has its own charm you can create visuals that not only look amazing, but also are timeless. A lot of people don't realize is, but the fact that a lot of games from the consoles of old still look good today is exactly because these games were essentially forced to use a unique style for their games. Not because they didn't want to use the highest graphical fidelity the consoles allowed for at the time, but because the consoles just didn't allow for higher fidelity then the games already had.

So when it comes to the visual style, it is very hard to quantify what makes it great. Because you can have great visual styles in both 2D and 3D, they can be computer generated or hand drawn (or a combination of both) and in general just be made in many ways.
But in my opinion, the thing that all the great games with awesome visual styles have in common is attention to detail. Whether it's in the form that every single thing in the game has been hand-drawn or it's the fact that each element has been placed individually in a way that it actually makes sense. Even Minecraft didn't come up with voxel-like graphics, but it added it's own charm to them by using them well by making everything have it's own charm.

In the end a combination of these two routes is what makes the best looking games. Of course same games will lean more towards focusing on style and some will focus more on the fidelity. But whenever a games manages to do both, create a game with a unique style that perfectly fits the game and the graphics are also high quality (and doesn't matter if that means that the artist drawing them was really talented or the 3D modeler knew how to make the models look real) is when a game that competes for the place of best looking game in our hearts.