The 'photo style CG anime' is definitely my favourite.

That song plus those two anime girls bouncing all around had me hypnotized for a moment. Crazy mocap.

Please no cartoon or anime style. It would be the worst thing you can do to the game.

Every time you say that, a contrarian modder just gets more motivation.

One thing I forgot to say about the Photo style CG is that they have actual mouths, instead of those weird face apertures that you see in anime that sometimes appear on the side of the cheek.

I think that trying to avoid the uncanny valley is good, but going overboard and trying to make it look like 2D is just never going to fit with this game. However, style-wise I think Illusion hit a great middle road with the graphics in Artificial Academy. It's not a 2D shader, and the faces aren't too exaggerated anime with huge eyes and almost no mouth.

A quick googled example:


I definitely don't think this game should go that way, but a more unrealistic shader would maybe be worth trying out.

Even though many people don't seem to "pick up" on the uncanny (just glance at how many play 3DSV2, AChat, 3DXChat) I think they instinctively discard the likeliness to something alive and/or just learn to ignore the uncanny feeling when it gets close to being real. In other words: It's just not real enough to be uncanny for some.

The "uncanny valley" is not an effect that I experience at all, and as a result, I get really irritated that its use as a boardroom buzzword has been making us afraid of realism.

Imagine if the majority of the population suffered a phobia triggered by many things that you love. Ugh.

That being said, I also love stylization, of course, and I think it's strange to call XSP's art style realistic. It seems quite stylized to me and I think it's a pretty good style that will look a lot better if the shaders especially have a chance to evolve.

There's also the animations and some physics weirdness (with fabric and penises especially, I think), but I wouldn't call those consequences of the art style.

I definitely agree, I remember a lot of people bashing FF:The Spirits Within for this, to me it really looked incredible and realistic, and it still does. But I guess for cetain individuals is a lot easier to get emotionally involved with fictional characters and worlds.

@Kalrekos: I think you misunderstand what the uncanny valley study is about and thus why it's very appropriate to use when discussing a game like this. It's about statistics, meaning it's not a law, but a likeliness that some will find it uncanny. The study shows that more people have a tendency to think it's uncanny the more realistic it gets. It is in other words not something you can dismiss just because you don't "suffer" from it. It is a fact and it's actively used in e.g. robotics dealing with helping disabled/old people.

I don't think it's a problem in this game, but that doesn't mean that somebody else might not think so. I know that I am not immune to it, because I think e.g. the young Jeff Bridges in Tron:Legacy is very uncanny in some scenes.

I'm not sure what I said that contradicts any of that, however.

What triggered me was that you posted that it irritates you to see it being used as "a bussword", so...