STRONG ART DIRECTION WILL BE THE KEY TO UNLOCKING THE TRUE POWER OF THE NEXT GEN.

Looking at the past, the cases for realism haven’t aged completely gracefully

As often happens, one of our recent exclusive interviews made the rounds online after we broke the news. The man interviewed? Flavourworks’ Jack Attridge. The comment? That PS4 has some of the best-looking games in the world right now, which is “down to art direction, not power”. And he’s right.

I recently moved house, which went about as well as the removals in Team 17’s upcoming Moving Out, all chaos and mad packing (though thankfully nothing got flung out of windows). This left me for at least a week with no PS4 hooked up to my TV, and only my old faithful PS3. It felt like an opportunity. Thanks to a big HDD I had plenty still downloaded to flick through. The games that invested in strong and unique art directions aged better than those that chased realism.

The big releases of the day that pushed graphical realism looked a bit rubbish in the cold light of 2020. They were still enjoyable, once I looked past all the brown and jaggy textures, but took more of an effort to get into. Others, though, like PS3’s Jet Set Radio HD port, and the original release of Ni No Kuni, still managed to look stunning. While obviously not graphical powerhouses, they don’t just work around that fact, but work off of it too, lower-res textures becoming building blocks on a wider canvas.

STYLE FIVE

It has me wondering what games will look like in future, especially with PS5 on the horizon. It might be a lot more powerful than

PS4, but we’re going to be getting diminishing returns on graphical realism in future. But I think Jack Attridge is right. A lot of devs creating games for PS4 are already leaning into this to create incredible-looking worlds. While the likes of God Of War or Marvel’s Spider-Man might take a lot of cues from realism, they’re also uniquely, beautifully stylised, whether you’re talking to a giant snake or twirling gracefully in the air above a shiny skyscraper. PS5 will bring more of this, strong art direction combined with the fidelity of realism – we’ll have truly stylised worlds to get lost in.