Why are they still going in a cartoony direction with the graphics?

Zaarin said:
I also thought Ara looked ugly until the third demo. Interestingly, Ara and Civ7 both seem to be targeting the same aesthetic: diorama/mini terrain art.
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Yes. :-) One thing which I forgot to mention which I think is interesting about it, and will impact it visually, is that it doesn't have regularly shaped tiles. It has regions, each of which has a variable set of irregularly shaped "tiles".Off the top of my head, I can't think of another Civ-style game which does this.
 
zaint said:
Even if the graphics are good, the artstyle they go for makes it look messy and bad.

Why the oversized scale of everything?
Why does my city cover half the continent?
It would look much better if you cut the size with 50-75% More realism please!
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I don’t think the cities being oversized relative to the map is a “art style” complaint—that’s a gameplay complaint
 
To the OP: The reason why is highly likely because a lot of people seems to like the style of modern 3D cartoons. It is unfortunate, but there's not much that can be done with it. Also I find it difficult to criticize the graphics in this game, as I can see that they have gone through a lot of effort both to please people like us, and the people who like the cartoon style. It seems like a good choice given the circumstances. While I certainly would have loved a stylized direction that looked less like cartoons and more artistic and creative, or something that was more realistic, and I probably also would have preferred a color palette that reminded me less of Civ 6, it is much more important that they have gotten rid of all the hideous caricatures, the Warcraft influences and all the Pixar influences that plagued Civ 6. Given how atrociously ugly everything looks in that game, what we have now is a major improvement visually.
 
The civ leaders look like a step back from the cartooney stuff, at least in the footage I've seen. Seems like they're trying to strike a balance between V and VI.
 
CiV GraPHics RnT whAt they USED to bE!!
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I hated it precisely because everyone wore a suit in the modern age. So boring and unimaginative.
 
Thenewwwguy said:
ngl, realism always ages poorly. Civ V graphics looked cool when the game launched but now a lot of those models look borderline creepy. The stylism of Civ VI hasn’t aged in the same way—you don’t get a feel of “outdated” in the same way. You might not like the stylization but if not for it, you’d probably be feeling that the game would look outdated now, 8 years in.
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The often repeated idea that "realistic" visuals ages poorer than less realistic ones does have some truth to it, but it is often very exaggerated. The thing that is a lot more important for the perception of bad aging than "more realistic" or "less realistic" is if the visuals uses 2D graphics, early 3D graphics or later 3D graphics. Personally I still think a lot of early 3D graphic games look good, especially when viewed with CRT emulation and scanlines. But there's no denying that for a lot of people these visuals have aged badly.

A good example of this is to compare the visuals of Diablo 1 with those of Warcraft 3. Diablo 1 is a 2D game with a quite realistic style visual style. Warcraft 3 is a 3D game with a less realistic style, and where the proportions of everything is very deformed, and it is the game where Blizzard found their modern style. To me the visuals in Diablo 1 holds up far, far better than those in Warcraft 3. But to be fair, I found that game to be really ugly also when it was released.

www.mobygames.com

Diablo screenshots - MobyGames

In-game screenshots for Diablo
www.mobygames.com www.mobygames.com
www.mobygames.com

WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos screenshots - MobyGames

In-game screenshots for WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos
www.mobygames.com www.mobygames.com

Another interesting example is comparing Super Mario 64 from 1996 with Resident Evil 1 from the same year and Resident Evil 2 from 1998. These are all 3D games. Super Mario 64 uses mostly real 3D with some 2D elements and the Resident Evil games uses a mix of real 3D and pre-rendered 3D to good effect. Now I do think that Super Mario 64 still looks quite appealing, if a bit plain in some parts. But would you say that it looks better than the Resident Evil games? (Which uses a more realistic visual style.) I most certainly wouldn't.

Super Mario 64

Resident Evil 1

Resident Evil 2

(These screenshots all uses a CRT filter so they look close to what they will do on real hardware and they run with the original resolution and polycount.)
 
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Zaarin said:
I hated it precisely because everyone wore a suit in the modern age. So boring and unimaginative.
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The Civ 4 leaders was a significant downgrade from the ones in Civ 3 for me. They are all quite weird in both games if you look at them critically, but when I play, I tend to filter out the things that detract from immersion and focus on the things that add to it. But the fact that people in the diplomacy screens didn't (roughly) belong to the era you were in anymore, was a real letdown. The leaders in Civ 3 could certainly have been more imaginative, among other things, but meeting Lincoln in ancient times in his caveman outfit, was vastly preferable to doing the same when I met him in his suit from the 19th century.
 
TempusFugit said:
The Civ 4 leaders was a significant downgrade from the ones in Civ 3 for me. They are all quite weird in both games if you look at them critically, but when I play, I tend to filter out the things that detract from immersion and focus on the things that add to it. But the fact that people in the diplomacy screens didn't (roughly) belong to the era you were in anymore, was a real letdown. The leaders in Civ 3 could certainly have been more imaginative, among other things, but having Lincoln around in his caveman outfit was vastly preferable to seeing him in his suit from the 19th century.
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I don't think of leaders as literal leaders. I think of them as faces or avatars of their civilization (which I think has always been the intention behind them). They're who I'm playing with/against. Real leaders would send intermediaries anyway. It's why divorcing leaders from their civilizations raises my eyebrow.
 
This cartooney slander is complete bunk. 5 was a terrible looking game. Civ VI looks pretty good.

7 looks pretty good, too. Whether it plays good is another question entirely.
 
Zaarin said:
I don't think of leaders as literal leaders. I think of them as faces or avatars of their civilization (which I think has always been the intention behind them).
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Yes, this is the way I also always have interpreted them. There is a number of things that suggests that this is the correct interpretation. They aren't intended to be a part of the historical narrative that you can make as you play the game, but instead something the designers of the first game, and from 3 and onward, added to give the other civilizations you compete against a more personal feeling.

But when I make an historical narrative in my head, I do also sometimes like to imagine that what is happening on the diplomacy screen is a meeting between envoys or leaders which takes place at exactly that point in time and that it has some relevance to what is otherwise happening in the game. This is probably because I do like the diplomacy aspect of the game a lot. At least in 3, 4 and 5.
 
Since I've been playing Civ VI for several years now with a Mod that changes the Civ VI map graphics into a half-way type between Civ V and Civ VI, Civ VII's exaggerated heights and somewhat vibrant colors are fine and familiar.

I've posted it before: 'Realistic' maps would be completely unintelligible to the average gamer. Please remember that interpreting maps and aerial photos, which is what Game Map Realism would look like, requires specialized training in the military that takes weeks or months. Not exactly a 'realistic' requirement before you can play a game.

As to the Districts and Cities. I see lots of individual and distinctive buildings in the Districts shown in the videos, which means that we will quickly get used to which Building is which and be able to tell at a glance that 'This city already has a Library/Market/Bath/Dance Hall/whatever and so it will, as Civ VI did, make managing cities much, much easier than having to look up a separate chart/diagram to tell what's in the city.

And note that there are Less Than City independent 'districts' or tile-sized Towns also - which adds variety to our maps and I'd bet money will also add variety to how we claim territory and resources. Yum.

I am a little worried about the massive city sprawl showing in what appears to be a Pre-Industrial Age, because that's pure fantasy. On the other hand, they may have been simply 'showing off' the city graphics and it may in-game be much more difficult to sprawl across the landscape before Railroads and modern Highways make it really practical.

We shall see.
 
KayAU said:
When it comes to Civ 7's graphics, what I have seen of it so far, I think it looks pretty good overall. I understand that people have different preferences. I grew up with crisp pixel graphics on systems like the Amiga 500, many games which looked a bit like this:

I guess this had an impact on my tastes. Later there were a lot of 3D games, but the games which were most pleasing to look at for me, was often the crisper, 2D, pixel art style. Like Patrician 3:

That game came out in 2002, but I still think it looks stunning.

Getting back to Civilization and its more recent competitors, I think the ones which are most visually noteworthy, are probably Humankind and Ara: History Untold. Just as a reminder, Humankind looks like this:

I think it is quite pretty, but it has a few drawbacks. For one thing, this map view disappears when you zoom out a bit, and is replaced by a rather dreary, I guess "strategic" view, full of little numbers, symbols and text. For another, due to the way cities and regions work, there is extreme urban sprawl, and almost the entire map will quickly become plastered with districts. It ends up looking very visually busy to me. I'm not saying it's a bad looking game, but in my opinion, it doesn't quite live up to the promo screenshots in practice.

As for Ara, it is a game which I thought looked rather ugly in the early promo screenshots. With the third alpha however, my opinion changed. I'm not allowed to post screenshots from my own gameplay, and the promo screenshots mostly don't quite do it justice, but I grabbed some screens from a trailer. There is some compression, but they give an idea of how it looks:

It has kind of a detailed, somewhat realistic, "city builder" aesthetic, which I personally really like. It also helps that the map is full of life, with people and animals walking around. For me, this is probably going to be the main competitor to Civ 7, both in terms of visuals and gameplay.

Getting back to Civ 7, it seems they are going for a similar style to Civ 6, but clearly modernised and improved. The map looks pretty good...a bit sparse, but not bad. Where it shines for me, is the buildings and improvements. Screenshots like these are beautiful for me:

Of course,this is zoomed in and angled in a way that doesn't reflect normal gameplay, so the game will not look *this* good all the time. But it's still impressive to me.
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ARA looks great from what i have seen,they need to nail down gameplay ,especially the combat and they could be a real competition to CIV 7,much more so than humankind.
 
BackseatTyrant said:
I'm sorry, but anyone who only ever calls a game's artstyle either "cartoony" (derogatory) or "realistic" (affectionate), is a philistine dog who only sees the good in art when it unites the aesthetics of the room
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"Cartoony" or "cartoon-like" is a perfectly valid way to describe the visual style of something. It is a bit vague, but it shouldn't be hard to interpret. The word in itself doesn't necessarily say anything about the visual style being good or bad, or if it fits where it has been used. Civ 6 is clearly very cartoon-like in the way that the leaders look, for their style is very similar to the one that Pixar and other companies uses in their 3D cartoons. The leaders in Civ 7 could also be described as "cartoony", because they do look similar to people in 3D cartoons. But notably much less caricatured and more realistic than the ones in Civ 6.

Calling a visual style just "realistic" is more problematic, because what is it supposed to mean? All visual styles in games subscribe to realism to some degree. Saying that one visual style is more realistic than another one is alright and sometimes the best you can come up with, but it is vague and subjective.

For the record, I was pleasantly surprised with how the visuals looked in Civ 7 .
 
TempusFugit said:
The leaders in Civ 7 could also be described as "cartoony", because they do look similar to people in 3D cartoons.
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I don't see it. They're definitely aiming for realism, and have gotten close enough to trigger some uncanny valley responses. It's simply low resolution.
 
The graphics look gorgeous. I really like this art direction, a bit stylized, very colorful and easy to tell everything apart at a glance.

I know it's not brown and grey for the "MUH REALISM" crowd, but I swear the real world has vibrant colors too that you would see if'd you leave your mother's basement for once in your life.
 
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