Agreed. You can also look at the direction the codex covers have gone in terms of art for more cues as to ways of showing this. In the art for Eternal Crusade, the picture with the Space marine, Chaos, Eldar, and Ork standing together, the Ultrasmurf and Ork have me a bit worried as each has a few issues that make them look a bit goofy and general art problems as well (shoulder pads being different sizes, backpack perspective not matching up, etc). I've seen a lot of artists sounding off here and I know I'm not the only one seeing these things. Hope they get it under control.
We should also keep in mind Space Marine was set on an industrial forgeworld in ruins, so dust and dirt covering everything from all the destroyed concrete and burnt electronics makes sense, as well as the brown environment overtone due to the polluted skies. As for the over saturated colours from 3rd and 2nd edition Warhammer 40 000, that's fondly remembered as the "toxic red" period, where everything was coloured big bright shades of in your face on all the artwork which was exemplified with increasingly white highlites to make everything overblown shiny, over saturated glossy and to top this they had Red Spraypaint, where everyone just base coated everything in red or they used excessive amounts of red, red was simply the in colour at the time, there were a lot of red eldar, blood angels and red tyranids, also the art style of the day when painting was a period of equally lazy over the topness, spray on base, drybrush highlights, cover in devlin mud then coat in a gloss varnish. Pretty sure people were encouraged to make their models shiny too. It was a very stylistic period in GW history, peaking with Armageddon global campaign and died out shortly after the release of Tau. I remember those days fondly, because even for the 90s, that was very different to the "edgy" look every other sci-fi and fantasy related products other companies made. And it was what made warhammer interesting to a lot of people then when they first bumped into it. It was very striking and different. The switch to the gritty style was to try and emphasis of the despotic nature of a grim dark universe. It had nothing to do with the current flaviour of the decade in artistic style... In fact gritty never really became popular in video games till around 2005; A good 4 years after GW started doing it in Warhammer 40 000.
From what the devs have said in the past they are aiming for a gritty rendition of the universe, akin to Space Marine...but we need to see what they come up with.
ah i see, i agree, to save time(want game naw), money, or framerate i wouldn't mind if the models skimped on deatil.
Personally, I'd love to see clever lighting effects be put to good use in the art style. For example if any of you have played Dark Souls, remember the moment you first entered blight town? The lighting compleatly changed the atmosphere and feel of the entire game. The same could be done for entering a tyranid hive or an area tainted by chaos.
I'll still stand behind my original statement. I'd also like to point out that 'cartoony' and 'stylized' are to very different things. 'Cartoony' is just a single way to stylize things, you know. I also still think that it should depend on who you're fighting AGAINST and who you're fighting AS. And also WHERE. Blood and gore is an obvious must, it's 40k after all.
Realistic >> Stylized. As many of us said before, it is WH40K after all, the visuals of Space Marine: Warhammer 40000 is a good starting point, but I'd like to see more gore and filth, the picture (brightness, saturation) should change for each faction territory, so you should be able to distinguish for how long that faction controls it. Hear us, dear devs!
I honestly think Warhammer SHOULD be set in a realistic visual, but I'd have to see what the developers would show for the stylized shade if they were to do that. Stylized doesn't have to be cartoony, it could be something unique or different and it might look really nice. Of course if they can render hundreds of models in high quality with little or no frame drop then i'll be happy too.
