Ehhh...."artistic vision" etc. are just platitudes at this point. More often than not I hear these terms being deployed to handwave away deeper discussion, and as a rallying cry for those people who think "graphics don't need to get any better" blah blah. The best looking games are always the ones that understand the techniques and limitations of the hardware they're targeting, and combine tech and art to create something striking whether it's 2026 or 2006 or 1996. But who's to say what any dev team
would have done with fewer or no limitations? Video games are also products and any final "artistic vision" is the result of tremendous compromise to even get to the finish line.
That's what a lot of the people who harp on "artstyle" choose to ignore. A lot of the "artistic vision"/"artstyle" discourse these days is coming from people who use it to
disparage technical ambition....a million retarded variations on "ray tracing is a scam, all you need is ARTSTYLE!" and I've heard them all. Most of the "best looking games" that always get brought up (AC Unity, Arkham Knight etc.) were pushing
insane tech in their day, often with significant drawbacks to performance or image quality or just being buggy as fuck. These games were using every trick in the book and inventing new ones along the way. Plenty of them had the same issues people blame modern games for and forget were always an issue when ambition meets tech meets art.
Back in the day everyone knew that graphical fidelity and advanced tech were joined at the hip with a game's "art" but these days it's far more common to hear that you don't need good tech if you have good "art" almost to the point where people start sounding artistically/morally opposed to cutting edge rendering, as if you can't have both
Again, nobody here is really saying that, it's just super common on social media etc.
