As a matter of personal taste, I much prefer the darker, more realistic art direction in The Witcher or Planescape Torment.
There's too much of that style for my taste already. I'm drowning into it.
The current fashion is that colourful, bright graphics are considered
- immature
- childish
- outright stupid
- not "Fantasy", at least not "right" Fantasy
- etc. .
Me, I'm beginning to believe it might be a backslash from the Blizzard games : Popularity -> taste settles -> ALL games have to be like that !
I'm just waiting until board games get "dark & mature" graphics as well … But wait, gamers don't play board games …
Is that really a trend? I would say the current trend is in the opposite direction actually (Witcher, FO3, Skyrim, Risen, D3,… the announced Dishonored, Cyberpunk, Wasteland… to an extent even AoD and ME series - all rather grim, mature-themed games. Just ask Alrik, he complains about it endlessly! I don't particularly dig the art style myself, but I think some variety in styles is actually good.
Yes, that's what I see as well.
To be honest, we can see that -
- either I am using "this is becoming too dark !" as an argument to get everything's brighter - which implies that I'm "seeing" an non-existent "trend" or "fashion" that makes everything dark,
or
- others are seeing an non-existent "trend" / "fashion" in "things becoming too bright" to get EVERYTHING darker.
This way, it's a question of instrumentalizing things. Is there really a fashion/trend there or not ? Are both sides instrumentalizing it or not ?
Fact is that those who would love everything to be as bright as in King's Bounty would like to instrumentalize a current fashion of "everything becomes too dark !" into their favour [wording ?],
but on the other hand those who love "Heavy Metal Fantasy" would love to see everything that looks like a Smurf to be eradicated, too, to put it cynically.
I think we are at some kind of crossroards here now : Which way will the Fantasy genre in terms of gaming go ? Or even not only in gaming, but also in literature ? TV ?
My personal impression is that the way into "darker Fantasy" has already been taken - despite those who love "dark, mature Fantasy" claiming the other road has been taken.
But fact is : The art style that is liked by the majority is going to cement the art style for at least a whole decade, if not even longer.
And I fear that Blizzard already planted it 10 years ago with their dark & bloody looking Action-RPGs, which were in all of their "bloodiness" a novelty back then. Nowadays they have rather become the norm. A relatively bright-looking Action-RPG like Sacred 1 would not be possible nowadays. Sacred 2 was already becoming more dark than its predecessor.
I repeatmyself . We stand at some kind of crossroads, I believe, with in my opinion the road into "Dark Fantasy" already being taken. Since several years already.