Different Artistic Styles in Video Games.

Realistic:

Rust:

Rust is a Multiplayer game in which you play online with others from around the world. It is essentially an Open-World Survival game in which you gather resources, build a base from the resources, build weapons from these resources and survive against the environment such as heat, cold and animals such as Wolves and Bears, the main threat though is other players.
The style in Rust is Realistic with the proportions of player models correct to a human body. I like this style of game as it can easily captivate you into a different world. The sense of escapism and in captivation is very appealing to the players.

CounterStrike Source:

CounterStrike Source or CSS is the predecessor to the now immensely popular CounterStrike: Global Offensive or CS:GO. It is a First Person Shooter, Multiplayer game which is primarily for PC. It is similar to games like Call of Duty were you are a soldier with a gun and your objective is too kill the enemies on the other team. The teams are Terrorists or Counter-Terrorists. The art style is also Realistic although the graphics are now dated, the player models and objects are designed to portray real battle situations. The game interface is 2D such as Ammunition and Live Map. The art style was fairly revolutionary when it was first released in 2004.

Non-Photo Realistic:

Grow Home:

The developer of Grow Home has stated regarding the art style: "Another big influence came from Wall-E and other Pixar movies that rely on a lot of softly reflected light. Unlike 'realistic' games where you want to differentiate each surface and give them a unique feel, I wanted every surface in Grow Home to have the same soft, velvety look. This is where I reveal my ultimate secret art weapon... our lead coder Andy Buck. Andy is an artist too and his background is in visual FX and shader trickery, and he wrote an amazing shader that does all of our Fresnel and time-of-day effects. This means that every surface accurately reflects the colours of the sky dome according to it's angle." I think this sums up the art style beautifully.

Photo-Realism:

Grand Theft Auto 5:

This is a game that has photo realistic graphics, this means essentially that a simulated scene appears indistinguishable from a photo or by extension, real life. The main difficulty of Photo Realism is processing power. To make movies like 'Avatar' and 'Life of Pi' appear photo realistic, each frame of the movie is pre-rendered. That means that the digital models and scripted motion in a virtual scene are compiled into frames (usually 30 frames per second) and touched up, a process that can take hours per frame. But video games don't have that kind of time because the action in a scene has to respond dynamically to player input. Video games have to render their graphics in real time, usually at a rate of 60 frames per second. I think GTA5 did this extremely well with even 2 years later thinking that it has the best graphics on a video game. It has hardly any to none at all input lag and runs at a smooth 60 frames per second an a decent hardware machine.

 

Exaggeration:

Final Fantasy 10:

FF10 is a game that has exaggerated graphics, meaning it essentially looks like real life but has been exaggerated to not look a little bit fantasy. You can see this with the clothing, it almost a fashionable but has been exaggerated to make the characters memorable. The hair also stands out a lot because it is normally quite crazy colours or very flamboyant. The weapons are also out of proportion with them being extremely large or bright colours. They also hold magical powers. This graphic style is very appealing because it is bright and in your face. The landscapes also draw you in because they are very beautiful and large. Nintendo is a company known for exaggerated graphics with characters such as Mario with him being super small and then super big after eating mushrooms. It is unrealistic but appealing to players. They are also very popular with children. Anime or Japanese Animation is also a widely used art style that is considered exaggeration because of the out of proportion facial expressions and body types.