Art Styles in MMORPGs

You will have to take my word for it (for now), but Heidy is a bit of an artist. Granted, I haven’t been very productive in the last few years so I don’t have anything new to show, but I used to be pretty prolific back in the day. Some day I will show off my old stuff from my Deviantart account, but today — I want to talk a little bit about the various art styles used in the most popular MMORPGs…. and why this is such an important part of the entire experience.

Incidentally, this isn’t some random thought. There is recent “controversy” that sparked this, but I will leave that to the end of the post.

Obviously, when it comes to art, everyone has their own taste. There’s no better or worse, but it’s important to find the appropriate aesthetic style to complement the game’s theme. The right art style can become a game’s signature, something that makes a game instantly recognizable and enhances its presence. To cite a couple of non-MMORPG examples, Fortnite and Call of Duty may both be shooter games, but these range from one extreme (zany cartoony) to the other (hyper-realistic) which help convey the respective atmosphere of each game.

It’s also important to remember that (A) humans are primarily visual creatures – we rely on sight first and foremost, and visual cues are critical in triggering brain responses and help us make decisions. And (B) MMORPGs are VIDEO games. Video comes from the latin verb videre ‘to see’. This is why art is so important.

So with that in mind, I want to preface this by saying that my evaluation are based entirely on my personal artistic preferences.

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BLACK DESERT ONLINE

I will start off with Black Desert Online, which I think is still one of the most gorgeous MMORPGs in existence, especially when it comes to character customization and animation. The style is fantasy-realistic with a very Asian aesthetic, not surprising since the game is published by Pearl Abyss, a Korean studio. Outside of the character designs, however — based on my admittedly limited exposure to the game — the world of BDO leans towards low fantasy — the villages and buildings are realistically medieval, as are the NPC soldiers and villagers. The environmental art, while beautiful and nicely rendered, is very generic; if you look at a screenshot of BDO without a player-character, you may be hard-pressed to tell which game it is. The extravagant/high-fantasy designs of the characters themselves can sometimes seem jarring in the generic, gritty environment.

I have noticed that many of the newer fantasy games are trying to emulate BDO in some shape and form. Most of these games also originate from Asian studios, and many are using BDO as a bar since the game is both beautiful and stylistically generic.

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Final Fantasy XIV

In terms of its environmental assets, Final Fantasy XIV is similar to Black Desert Online with just a touch less fidelity, though the world design is much more high fantasy, in terms of architecture and geology. At a glance it’s immediately obvious that FFXIV leans more “Cartoony” than BDO.

While the character designs and customizations in FFXIV are also attractive, they are definitely more “Anime in real-life” than anything realistic. I have mentioned this in older posts: I grew up with Anime, but stylistically it never clicked with me. It’s not that I don’t like anime designs, but in my brain the style choice automatically “kiddifies” the game (or TV show, or movie, etc.) so I can’t take it very seriously. To me, FFXIV manages to avoid that particular pitfall, but for other players it may still skew a bit too close to anime for their liking.

That said, FFXIV — and the entire Final Fantasy franchise, for that matter — manages to establish a signature style that distinctly theirs. It makes the game distinctively recognizable, which is definitely an artistic success.

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GUILD WARS 2

Now we come to my current bread-and-butter game, Guild Wars 2.

GW2’s graphics are nowhere near to Black Desert Online’s levels, but as a western MMORPG, it manages to have its own distinctive design style that is notably NOT heavily influenced by Asian aesthetics. Ironic, considering the last expansion End of Dragons is based in an Asian-deriative setting.

For an MMORPG that came out in 2012, Guild Wars 2’s graphics may look a little dated now, but its overall design aesthetics are still solid. The style they use both in-game and cinematics, as well as posters and marketing material, is unique and striking: they make extensive use of a water-color aesthetic, giving the entire thing a dream-like, surreal atmosphere. This makes Guild Wars 2 instantly recognizable, but I also feel that it helps the game’s longevity: Hyper-realism is a double-edged sword — it may look really good, but as technology and processing power leap forward, you’d have to upgrade or become noticeably outdated in a few years’ time — in contrast, Guild Wars 2’s surreal water-color fantasy environment makes it less susceptible to close visual scrutiny 

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ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE

Admittedly, Elder Scrolls Online is the MMORPG I know the least about on this list. That’s not an accident — the game never caught my eye because of its art style. 

Released on 2014, ESO is a couple of years younger than GW2. It’s also a western MMORPG, and you can easily tell by its character designs. It looks to me that when ZeniMax/Bethesda released the game in 2014, they chose to go the opposite route of WoW and GW2 with hyper-realism — or… what passed as hyper-realism in 2014. In 2023, the game still looks OK, but I can’t get behind the character designs at all. For the most part, they lack of the charm of WoW and GW2, and just manage to edge into the realm of Uncanny Valley. 

I could be wrong about this, but the rest of the Elder Scrolls franchise like Skyrim stuck with this general art style? Correct me if I am wrong. But ESO is the example I use, when an art style turns me off from the game.

And speaking of that…

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GENSHIN IMPACT

Here’s another big name MMORPG that I know almost nothing about, arguably even less so than Elder Scrolls Online. But in terms of art style? This looks 99% similar to Tower of Fantasy, which I posted about here.

So these are a new crop of MMORPGs that unapologetically go full-hog into Anime-land, with no pretense at any level of realism. As little interest as I have in this style, it’s still worth talking about since more new games are going down this path. I won’t dismiss anime game styles because I don’t personally like them, but the greater criticism is their “genericness” — Tower of Fantasy already looks exactly like Genshin Impact, and the more of this style we get, the less distinctive they become. From an artistic design viewpoint, this is a failure since it doesn’t give the game a signature style.

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WORLD OF WARCRAFT

There is a specific reason why I leave WoW to the end, but we’ll get to it in a minute.

The granddaddy of them all, World of Warcraft was first released in 2004, waaaaay ahead of everyone else on this list… and it shows. We’re not here to discuss the graphical and rendering limitations 20 years ago, but you have to keep that in mind when you consider what choices Blizzard had in 2004. Hyper-realism was not possible at the time. Remember, WoW was a direct descendant of Warcraft and Warcraft II, both being DOS games. In that respect, WoW was light years ahead of its predecessors.

Hence, the heavily “stylized” (that translates to “cartoony”) aesthetic of WoW is as much a necessity of its vintage as it is by choice. Does it look dated today? Oh hell, YES, of course it does. But you can’t argue WoW doesn’t have its own distinctive signature art style. One look at the cartoony characters and environment, there’s no mistaking it for any other game.

Right?

Well.

An incoming MMORPG called Tarisland is making the headlines in the MMORPG community. Some anticipation, LOTS of controversy. The main controversy being…. is it a World of Warcraft Clone/Rip-off?

Arguments have been made on both sides of the proverbial fence. Seems a bit premature to me, since the game hasn’t been officially released yet. The most damning evidence comes from… you guessed it… the art style and designs. Yes, this is the controversy that made me do this post! So have a quick look at some of the art samples:

It appears that the top picture is of a dragon in Tarisland, and the bottom of one in WoW. I admit, those look awfully similar, but it’s a bit diffcult to judge from comparisons between single frames. I mean, you can comb through movies frame-by-frame until you find two actors in similar poses; do you call one a copycat? 

This one is either a promotional picture or login screen background for Tarisland. It’s not a direct copy, but here you can clearly see the stylized designs, and certain distinctive WoW elements such as the elf ears, body proportions, the tiger’s overall exaggerated cartoon aesthetics, even the stylized environment and color choices. It’s unabashedly copying WoW’s designs, not any of the other games on this list. Tarisland’s developers made a conscious decision to use/steal WoW’s art style, so it really doesn’t matter whether Tarisland is a direct rip-off of WoW — because on appearance alone, it absolutely is. 

Without deep-diving into all the gory details, the controversy around Tarisland somehow got dovetailed into the recent news of World of Warcraft shutting down in China. On January, 23 2023 Activision Blizzard, the title owner of World of Warcraft, suspended services and shut down its servers in China, because of a licensing disagreement with their partner, the Chinese gaming giant NetEase. Given the difficulty of acquiring game-publishing permits in China, foreign gaming companies usually partner with a Chinese company to enter the local market. A dissolved partnership meant that all of Blizzard’s games in China, including WoW and Overwatch were shut down. Reportedly, the “licensing disagreement” was mainly financial, but details are a bit sketchy.

While accusations of a WoW Clone trying to scoop up the Chinese market started flying immediately, a couple of things seem questionable. First of all, Tarisland is published by Tencent, an entirely different entity from Netease. Second of all, Tarisland must’ve been in development for the better part of a decade for it to be this close to release. These considerations convince me that Tarisland is not part of the WoW-Chinese-server-debacle, but that also means Tencent had been positioning themselves to take WoW’s pie right from the start.

The failure of this decision is, again, Tarisland doesn’t have its own identity. It can have the most amazing gameplay or excellent social content (it won’t, but bear with me), but it will always be looked at as a WoW clone/rip-off… and that sort of reputation is impossible to shake. It boggles my mind why a studio would put in all the work to develop a new game, then make such a fundamentally flawed decision? In this day and age of social media, you’d think developers would understand the importance of appearances.