Verisimilitude is defined as: The appearance of being true
or realistic.
When playing a game I admire both graphics and
aesthetics that strive for verisimilitude, and those that used stylized art. I
think though that there can only be one sort of goal with pure photorealism
within a game and that is immersion. But with this focus on photorealism will
there be a cost to many of the other key aspects of a game? The visuals of a
game will always play a huge part within a game but the fact that stylized and
non-photorealistic graphical games are still around and extremely popular shows
that players don't just want photorealistic games from developers. Yet. I most
certainly cannot fault developers for trying. This is just another branch of
progression for video games which as an art form is always progressive. I
definitely have played many games seeking this high verisimilitude and been in
states of awe. But I think that there shouldn't be an emphasis on this as a
direction that video games should be going but a branch of progression that developers
could take. In saying that I think that this could be just an overrated topic
but only due to the encroaching trade off of game play for visuals. This is
shown in Destiny. Carrying a movie blockbuster budget the game play and story
of this was lost in its goals for amazing graphics and focus on verisimilitude.
Not that the game doesn't have stunning aesthetics but it doesn't capitalize on its potential for an encapsulating story.
Instead players ended up finding it repetitive and monotonous. This has started
showing the damaging and unbalancing potential of a dev team putting too much
emphasis on photorealism in games but I don't see any harm in devs striving for
this as long as there is no expense to story and game play.
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