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A story of political intrigue, genocide, sex and hard moral choices with life and death consequences doesn't need realism?
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I've seen anime which deal with all these subjects, and they aren't the most accurate looking representations of life.
I'm not trying to knock your point which I actually agree with. I'm just trying to get you to be more careful in your terms. And I don't mean to pick on you because I don't think anybody in this thread has been very good about defining what they mean. The subject of this thread is "graphical fidelity vs visual style." Graphical fidelity is not the same thing as realism although they overlap. Something can be realistic while not looking anything like the real world. The Lord of the Rings movies look realistic most of the time, but they also break several laws of physics.
To me, realism does not imply fidelity to the actual world. It simply means that whatever is depicted is something I can recognize and can imagine it relating to my personal experience. A character does not have to have fully rendered beard stubble to be realistic to me. He just has to be depicted with the kind of traits and details that place him within my experience so that I think of him as a "real" person instead of as a cartoon character. On the other hand, you could render him so well that he looks completely indistinguishable from an actual human being, but I could imagine doing it in such a way that he comes off as unrealistic (if we can say that some characters depicted by human actors seem unrealistic, we can certainly say that about CGI too). What we then have is graphical fidelity.
So with that said and leaving aside realism, however we define that word, how important is graphical fidelity versus visual style? I come down on the visual style side of the debate, but that's because I fundamentally don't care if videogames resemble real life anyhow. As far as I am concerned, Mass Effect could have been rendered to look like a flat shaded anime and I would have been fine with it (as long as there were no schoolgirls shooting stars out of wands at people). That's just my personal preference and I'm not saying anybody else should think the same way. Besides, it's not an either/or proposition. It's just that if I had to make the choice, I would prefer that developers spend their time on something other than making their game look as much like what I've seen with my own eyes in real life.