I am super late with this reply, but it can not be stressed enough that artsyle is far more important than ‘graphics.’ You referenced Portal, which is an excellent example. I’d cite ARC Stystem Works’ Guilty Gear and Dragonball Fighter Z as equally excellent. They don’t follow the real world intuition principle you mentioned (which I think is a great point) but they put 100% of their ‘graphical’ effort into ensuring that the art style of the subject matter is conveyed consistently and as envisioned.
I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is far more important than graphics, and there is a very important difference between the two that is often ignored by large game studios. \*
Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles, but choosing the color, composition, and visual coherence of those triangles is more important to how people interpret your world than anything else. Humans have an extremely attuned visual processor that infers so much about the way the world behaves solely by the way it looks.
The reason that classic games can be immersive despite a low poly count is because the artists have made the visuals behave in a way that is coherent with our internal model of the game world.
An example of this is Portal. The portal gun is an interesting gameplay tool, but the game was able to fully take advantage of it because the artstyle of the game was very tightly coupled with the mechanics. They did a great job of making sure that the visual environment offered clues to how the game mechanics worked, which made it so easy for people to quickly grasp how the portal gun operated in complex environments. Had the artists failed, Portal would have been "oh yeah, I remember that game -- the portal gun was a neat gimmick but it felt clunky."
The easy way out is to just try to make your environments and game mechanics as realistic as possible, essentially borrowing that creation of intuition from the real world. But the most creative games have worlds whose completely novel or alien mechanics are coupled with art direction that preserves this coherence, which makes the world just "click." Putting more triangles on screen makes for much prettier art, but the true substance of a game is something completely different.
\* not on purpose; it's just extremely difficult to pull off.
That's probably true. Good art style/aesthetics is a foot in the door for a lot of gamers, unfortunately. A game needs to stand on a foundation of good game mechanics (and possibly good writing), but the mainstream players' choice to try your game is gated by the production value and direction/style of the art.
For me personally, art direction is more important than technical limitations/issues with graphics. A game with beautiful stylized art will stand the test of time much longer than a highly polished game lacking any kind of style. That polished game might look "real" today, but not tomorrow when compared to whatever is the latest and greatest tech.
And a game with strong unique art will always look good for what it is. You can have both, but it's usually a rarity.
I think you're forgetting what actually makes a game at its core. What separates the medium from others are roughly these things: interaction, objectives, mechanics, feedback, challenge.
The art department can make the feedback better, the objectives clearer, the interaction easier, but fundamentally you can have a game without any art at all (see dwarf fortress, zork, etc.) and have it be a game, whereas a bunch of art assets don't a game make.
Nowadays it's all about marketing material and lying to people, so having good game art is prerequisite for great prerendered trailers that will drive preorders. But when you allocate all your budget to art, you don't end up with a game, you end up with false promises.
I think you overread the "necessarily" part of my quote. Good art can cost a ton and it does so for a reason. I (among other things) worked as a freelance designer, so I know.
What I meant however is that depending on the genre you might find solutions that you can do yourself far easier with equally good (or better) results. You could work with one-color abstract shapes and give them a good feel by using the right deformation and stick some eyes on them. Minimal styles can work in your favour at times etc. Filmmakers also use similar ideas – can't afford to show thing A? Let the protagonist tell us about it in a internal monologue and use it to your advantage. That kind of stuff.
This approach obviously won't work for every game or genre, depending on the scope, but I didn't say it would.
Art direction has more influence on realism than hardware capability. Good visual artists can get much closer to "real" than poor artists simply by choosing what to depict.
Additionally it helps to have a unique, well thought out and recognizable style in a game when you want to convince your audience that you are making good games and you are not some guy who tried out a game editor for the first thime with that generic texture pack he found on the internet.
People are very visual and your game can be amazing in terms of story or programming, but you also need to sell them visually. That doesn't mean every game has to go for amazing graphics, but it must make sense and look interesting. E.g. nethack looks more interesting without generic sprite package, till somebody developes one with a consistent style.
It takes years to get good at this, unless you did it since you were born. You pay good artists exactly for these years.
I'm not a professional artist or marketer, but I suspect the main reason we see the pursuit of realism in games is that it's easy to communicate and coordinate, so it reduces uncertainty across the board. Developing a style is hard and requires a lot of coordination across different teams to understand and internalize what approximations are being made where. At scale with hundreds of artists, it becomes very difficult. If, instead, the approximations are enforced by the tech and the goal the artists need to consider is just to create something realistic, then that's easy to get started with without needing a concept artist to dictate everything. There's probably a crossover point of team size where realism has lower risk and lower cost. In practice, I think what we see is that the more creatively-minded large studios shoot for 90% of assets being "realistic" with some strong stylistic choices for the last 10% that really defines the look.
On the marketing side, there's something to be said for knowing that your visual style will be uncontroversial for the most critical time period for getting sales (launch). Looking horrible 10 years from now doesn't really matter if you're trying to recoup your investment today. It has slowed down now because a lot of the low hanging fruit has been done, but a decade or so ago, graphical features were one more reason marketing could point to for someone to buy a game. Some people really do buy games because they look pretty. Even today, there are games notable only for being benchmarks.
To some extent, graphics are important because with extremely primitive graphics, like the graphics of the NES, it can get difficult to tell what things are represented by the image, and the limited color palette presents a challenge in making the game look aesthetically pleasing.
A game doesn't need the most advanced graphics to look aesthetically pleasing, though. It can be made up for by using an art style that doesn't need powerful hardware, e.g. modern pixel art, or the simplistic, cartoonish look that 3D Nintendo games use. Mirror's Edge still looks great due to its art direction and use of techniques like precomputed lighting.
However, different people have different standards. I've been really enjoying playing the game Crypt of the Necrodancer, and I think the pixel art is also pretty good and aesthetically pleasing, but when I showed the game to my friend to see if he might like it, he rejected it because "the art didn't speak to him." Evidently, compared to me, he has a higher minimum for graphics in order for a game to be fun for him.
A lot of those games aren't actually quality work. Especially because they tend to settle with out of the box settings instead of having the ability to customise it. Though a good artist can hide it through good artwork and sound.
Vogel is conflating 'good art' and 'good aesthetics', though. Many games 'look good' with 'bad' art because they spend the effort to cultivate a certain aesthetic.
I don't think most games are intended as "art" in any high sense, but only as "entertainment". Personally, I'd find it awesome if WoW looked more realistic. (If you're not familiar with the graphic style of World of Warcraft, it's very cartoony, even crayony).
The emphasis on art in games frequently goes way too far these days. There is frequently a very heavy investment in art assets to a degree that is pointlessly excessive or even actively undermines the quality of game play.
"Less is more"
When cartoons became a well established business and newcomers couldn't compete, some professional artist left the established studios doing things like Bugs Bunny and created Droopy The Dog which had a great deal less animation involved, yet did not fail to tell a story and amuse audiences.
Consider what information actually needs to be conveyed visually. It probably doesn't have to be anywhere near as elaborate as the art in games coming out of more established studios.
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