: Eh. I don't know. The video was so focused on the reasons we will not achieve
: TRUE photorealism that it all but ignored the benefits of realistic-ish
: graphics in games. It was rightly pointed out that a realistic looking
: version of Minecraft wouldn't make much sense but then we were shown a
: realistic looking racing game. Does it somehow make sense for the Forza
: series, which is concerned with recreations of real race courses and the
: setups of actual cars, to render its visuals as Minecraft blocks? Or
: Rez-like glow-y wireframes?

: What about things like mood and setting? There's this great effect Alan Wake
: uses several times to signify enemies are about to attack. The wind picks
: up and the fog gets really dense and it starts wiping and flowing through
: the forest of trees in front of you while the shadows dance about in a
: decidedly unnatural fashion. Alan Wake's graphics on the 360 were ok, but
: not the best, but that one effect was extremely well done and, for me at
: least, helped build legitimate tension.

I don't know how you can go from "Photorealistic graphics take development time and resources from other aspects of a game and often aren't worth the investment" to "Let's get rid of lighting effects and environmental animation," but you managed it. Somehow.

Your example of Alan Wake is an example of graphics being used to further gameplay (Yes, Cody, I'll get to that in a few paragraphs). It looks cool, it heralds a fight, and it sets the mood. But sometimes, high-end graphics get in the way of good gameplay. Remember all the discussions this board saw after the release of Halo 4? That game invested a lot of resources into graphical capability that just didn't matter. All that extra detail on the enemies might look great in screenshots, but they were muddy in motion, and the bodies (and weapons, which probably matters more) were deleted before you could get a closer look.

In the end, I think that the only thing Halo 4's graphical prowess had over Reach was the lack of ghosting. All those resources, both computing and development, would have been better spent on making larger maps and better enemies.

Another problem that photorealistic graphics can get into is one of abstraction versus simulation, but I'm going to use D&D 3.X to illustrate the problem. 3.X (Including Pathfinder) is a mess of mechanics that range from abstract to simulationist. Having your character's traits represented as numbered stats from 7-18 is an abstract system. Using those numbers to determine how hard your paladin swings a mace is an abstract representation of real life. What kind of damage each weapon does (A paladin's mace deals bludgeoning, a Rogue's dagger deals piercing or slashing damage) is a more simulationist mechanic. There's no real balance between Simulation and Abstraction. Whichever is the most fun is what was used.

This doesn't sit well with some people. There's been attempts to make the game more 'realistic' by replacing abstract mechanics with simulationist ones that take into consideration what kind of sword you use, how you swing it, what armor the enemy mook is wearing, and the like. And if all that detail doesn't bog the game down into unplayability, other abstract mechanics beg to be made more realistic until the players have to spend an action unstringing their bows at night* and the Italian troops need more water rations to boil pasta.

Now, where was I going with this...

I guess that a good game will have a fairly uniform level of abstraction/simulation across all its mechanics, and graphics are gameplay (There you go, Mr. Miller, I said it.). Forza is fine, it's a very simulationist game. Hell, my little brother is a gearhead and he basically used Forza 6 for wish fulfillment, because it's as close as he'll ever come to driving some of those cars for a very long time. Photorealistic graphics reinforce the true-to-life vehicle handling.

Contrast Minecraft. Minecraft is as abstract as you can get, and photorealistic graphics would get in the way of it. Imagine killing a photorealistic cow in Minecraft. Now imagine that little steak jumping out of the cow. The animations wouldn't work either: swinging a sword is the same as swinging a pickax is the same as digging with a shovel in Minecraft, but not in a remotely realistic world.

Photorealistic games like Halo and Mass Effect have that sort of problem, actually, where everything outside of combat is accomplished by pushing a button. One. You press a button on your controller, and they push the only button on a control panel. Which is probably green, glowy, and flashy. In the earlier Halo games, this was kind of abstracted by not showing the button press and letting you assume that the Chief or Cortana entered a complex series of commands into a control panel, but Halo 4 just had to become Button Pressing Simulator 2012. Which sorta ties in to my earlier statement about gameplay being sacrificed for graphics.

*A friend of mine is working on this. He's also doing a turn-based strategy game that has what sounds like dozens of different kinds of archaic ships, each with different stats. Keep in mind that naval warfare is only a part of the game.

: What other method of visualization
: would allow that same effect? It seems like something would be lost if the
: world was cartoon-y and cell shaded like the Zelda game the video showed.

What if it was heroically stylized, like the WarCraft and, to a lesser extent, StarCraft games?

: I keep thinking of photorealistic games I enjoyed and trying to imagine them
: in an art style that would have made them better. I'm not having much
: luck...

Sometimes, I wonder if Mass Effect would have been better if it was as stylized as some of the early concept art. There's a lot of times where the more photorealistic route they took falls flat because they didn't have enough animation to back it up.

Try playing Femshep with a ponytail. It's a rigid skull protrusion with a coat of hair. Get into a conversation where someone will give you something or the other way around. The characters are just sorta miming the act of passing each other an object that is conveniently out of the frame.

Half a liter of vodka. This will not be my most well-articulated post ever.