Game Design Series #1: The importance of art styles in games.

After seeing this post by @naysayer I was inspired to make this thread.  

One of the great things about gaming is how many ways games can be presented by developers. Video game art can generally be summarized into two broad terms, one is stylized and one is realistic.
NOTE: There are some games that fall between but from my experience these still lean one way or the other. 

My personal definition of realistic styles is when the developer aims to make the game look as real as possible and stylized styles are when they do not. The art style of a game affects four major aspects of it, Target Demographic, Immersion and Performance. 

Target Demographic 

Realistic visuals are normally reserved for games that are aiming for an older audience as well as sports/racing games. Some examples of these are the God of War Games, the Call of Duty games and the Assassin’s Creed games.   

Softer, more “cartoony” art styles are much more welcoming and are normally used for family friendly games or simply to attract a broader audience of gamers. Examples of these are Mario, Zelda, Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
NOTE: There are exceptions to this (as always), that’s why I used the word “normally”, more on this below. 

Immersion 

Art styles must fit the tone of the game in order to be more immersive. Realistic art styles in games like Witcher 3 allow us to escape in a realistic fantasy world on an epic adventure. Witcher 3 looking like say, Minecraft, would practically destroy any sense of immersion it was trying to achieve. Skyrim is another game that uses realistic graphics to immerse us into a realistic fantasy world and Mass Effect does it for Sci-fi. Wolfstein’s tone would feel odd using stylized visuals over realistic ones so your immersion would be affected as a result. 

Even stylized art styles add to immersion. One of the biggest draws to the recently announced Dragon Ball Z fighter is that it looks so much like the anime that it feels like you are playing that anime. Another fighter I’d like to mention here is Marvel vs. Capcom 3 which literally looked like a comic book. This is important because Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite is aiming for a realistic art style but it looks visually unappealing and frankly out of place for the material it is based on. 

Some games like Bioshock Infinite use its art in a much more inventive way i.e. by looking visually welcoming but the actual tone is far from it. This is juxtaposed with the narrative and shows that the “Utopia” that Columbia (the setting of the game) is supposed to be are actually quite far from it. Some like Team Fortress and Borderlands use them to convey their sense of dark humour even! 

Performance 

Games that use realistic art styles strive to get as close as possible to being as realistic as possible. As a result of this they are generally very detailed but this comes at a cost. They are extremely hardware intensive and many, if not all, suffer from frame rate problems or must be brute forced by extremely powerful hardware to run properly. 

Stylized games tend to have great frame rates since they style adds to the charm of the world and can produce great looking visuals without overly taxing hardware. Stylized games also age a lot better than realistic games because a stylized game is limited by the developers own imagination while realistic games are compared to the real world. That means the expectation for what is considered good realistic graphics is consistently changing. 

Let me say, I am not a game designer or artist; these are my personal opinions (from experience) of why art styles are important in games. So do you guys agree or disagree with the points I've brought up? Do you have any to add as well? As always, if you like this stuff leave a comment, upvote, resteem and follow me for more stuff like this!            

Image Sources 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9