Visual styles are essentially the appearance a game itself takes, and how it's designed to looked and feel to the player to represent a certain mood. As researched by (Jahmel Coleman, 2012), a game's artstyle can be wildly different depending on what it's trying to convey, ranging from photorealism where everything is designed to look as close to real-life as possible to immerse the player in the game's world, to pixel-art with everything being very stylised as a throwback to the days of the NES, to induce nostalgia into the player. There are various styles between, like cell-shading that uses bright, blocked-in colour to have a more 'kid friendly' appeal and even black-and-white artistic games, where perhaps a horror game wants to use washed out colours to induce fear into the player..
However, regarding sprite-based pixel artwork, even though it may seem archaic and dated, pixel-art became very popular throughout the years and has influenced many modern classics like Shovel Knight and Undertale, two popular pixel-art games that have been released in the last year, but play incredibly differently to each other. These games use pixel-art visuals, even though they're released on powerful modern hardware, due to their innovative gameplay designs and to provoke a nostalgic response in the player, and they've both been successful even with these artstyles. Firstly, even though these games both share a similar 8-bit visual style, they both play completely differently when it comes to their mechanics. Shovel Knight is a 2d puzzle-platformer that is inspired by older games like Castlevania and Super Mario Bros, whereas Undertale is a turn-based RPG where you don't have to kill anybody, that resembles games like Earthbound and Dragon Quest. Even though these games are visually similar, their gameplay is so far apart that it's incredibly easy to tell them apart from a simple glance. Here is a comparison between the two below:
Visual style doesn't always solidify a game into being good though, and it's possible for two games to be mechanically very similar with the same core gameplay, but still look drastically different to each other. Two games in particular are Super Mario 64 and A Hat In Time, both games are 3d platformers that involve running, jumping and collecting a variety of collectables. Both games offer very similar mechanics and feel similar to play, and since Super Mario 64 came out 20 years before A Hat In Time did, the graphical style is bound to be very different. Mario's visuals use many lower poly models and low quality textures due to the graphical limitations of the Nintendo 64, which is a style that was great for the time, but hasn't aged very well at all. Whereas A Hat In Time due to being a PC release, has a lot of fancy visuals like strong bloom lighting, cartoony special effects and an incredibly high draw distance means that there's much more eye-candy to look at. To conclude this, even though these two games play very similarly, A Hat In Time can be considered a better experience by today's stadards simply because it's not as grating to look at, proving visual style can make a very big difference towards a player's response to your game. Here are two images comparing both game's looks below:
Discussion of Legend of Zelda:
This series is a great example of visual style in video games, as the
artstyle is inconsistent and different between games in the franchise, but they still retain similar base mechanics throughout the series (solving puzzles and killing enemies).
The original games that started the series had a 2d perspective from
above, and had a pixelated
visual style due to the graphical limitations of the NES and SNES, and they couldn't do much more with it so they made the most of what they had. They also took a few design choices to bypass these system limitations to the best of their abilities, as researched from
(Miller, 2015). For one, the original Legend of Zelda was designed to be a semi-open world game that let the player learn from doing and exploring for themselves, which was huge for the time. The player can wander around the fairly large tile-based world wherever they liked, discovering secrets and completing puzzles/ fighting bosses in any order they like to progress through the game and unlock extra goodies. However the designers didn't want to just throw in the player with no explanation of what to do, which is why the start outside of an enticing cave that immediately contains a sword when they enter, to teach them to fight their way forward and defeat enemies with minimal text involved.
The Zelda series has
continued to evolve since then with the release of the Nintendo 64,
where Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask were the first 3d Zelda games
showing a 3rd-person perspective, but they still had the colourful visuals that the previous 2d games had with various gameplay enhancements like a lock-on system and new items. It didn't stop there though, the series continued to evolve from there.Wind Waker on the GameCube for
example has a very cartoony and cell-shaded appearance, whereas
Twilight Princess goes for a more realistic and gritty look. The downside to the realistic appearance is that both games are on the GameCube, and the art direction of Twilight Princess hasn't aged very well at all over ten years later, as modern games continue to push forwards graphically. Wind Waker on the other hand was released before Twilight Princess and has aged very well, since the stylised block-colours and cell-shading has let the game's graphics stand the test of time, which still hold up today.
Here's a comparison between both games below, showing how they're so shockingly different in appearance and visual design, yet they're games of the same series on the same console that have the same core gameplay and controls. It's evidence that goes to show your game's art direction can make a much larger difference to a player's experience than you'd initially think. For example looking at bright and colourful characters can detract from more sad and emotional segments of a game's story and narrative, however this works both ways, with a cartoony game being able to include many more charming and comedic elements with its cute characters compared to a realistic one which can also make for a very memorable experience.
The Legend of Zelda series also contains a 'layered rewards system', as explained by
(Sala, 2013). With this system you can create tiered rewards to give the player a constant state of progression and continual things to look forward to as they play through the game, and this adds enough balanced variety to give the player lots of options to make their own decisions, but never make one collectable so strong and overpowered to the point where it makes every other item redundant. A layered rewards system can appeal to both casual and hardcore players, and to appeal to such a large demographic normally there are main overall tasks and objectives (like reach the end of a level or beat a boss), but to add a fair amount of longevity to a game it can include various other optional missions for a more dedicated fan to enjoy. This can range from finding a variety of hidden collectables for a reward, to killing a certain amount of enemies, which ends up with a system that contains many more deceptively hidden 'layers' to the game's overall purpose than you'd initially expect.
So for example, an item you can acquire in Ocarina of Time is the 'hookshot', which lets you grapple onto distant objects you could never reach before, and you can return to previous areas to find new secrets after obtaining it. Later on in the game after getting used to the hookshot you can find the 'longshot', which replaces the hookshot as a direct upgrade and lets you reach even further distances and hit enemies harder than the previous item, meaning you can go back again to older places and find even more items. Some of these items off the beaten path that you find after exploring can be useful, but aren't ever needed to beat the game, like 'farore's wind'. A hidden item that lets you create a checkpoint anywhere in a dungeon to teleport back to. It's handy to have, but not the end of the world if a player misses it and never finds its location, which makes it rewarding for the player to play as much of the game as they can, and lets them enjoy it more afterwards.
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