I think everyone here recognizes that, and for most of us the graphical "mechanics" - the lighting model, the technical stuff you'd fiddle with on a game's graphics menu - more than meet that "threshold". The fact that when the game looked considerably less polished (free-to-play era) it had still more players than it has now, demonstrates that, for a considerable audience, it met that threshold a while ago.
Competing with mainstream games - or big indie games like Space Engineers - is not even something many of us are looking for. If you do hire an artist some day in the future, all we'd probably want from him are a bold and unified sense of style for plant and animal generation, a few more interesting details and planetary features, plus some of the things we've talked about above. We wouldn't be looking for any drastic revamp of how the actual scene is rendered - except insofar as performance can be streamlined, of course.
I, for one, don't need my cities to look like this:
![[Image: hasN8PE.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/hasN8PE.jpg)
(Assassin's Creed: Origins)
I'd actually be happier if they looked more like this - it's easily more characterful, in the hands of a good artist:
![[Image: Y0DSgUI.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/Y0DSgUI.jpg)
(Asterix and the Laurel Wreath)
Graphics are there to evoke and atmosphere and convey information. There's just a whole lot of technical stuff you really don't need in order to achieve that (though, of course, other developers should be commended for their own approach).
Competing with mainstream games - or big indie games like Space Engineers - is not even something many of us are looking for. If you do hire an artist some day in the future, all we'd probably want from him are a bold and unified sense of style for plant and animal generation, a few more interesting details and planetary features, plus some of the things we've talked about above. We wouldn't be looking for any drastic revamp of how the actual scene is rendered - except insofar as performance can be streamlined, of course.
I, for one, don't need my cities to look like this:
(Assassin's Creed: Origins)
I'd actually be happier if they looked more like this - it's easily more characterful, in the hands of a good artist:
(Asterix and the Laurel Wreath)
Graphics are there to evoke and atmosphere and convey information. There's just a whole lot of technical stuff you really don't need in order to achieve that (though, of course, other developers should be commended for their own approach).