There is a huge variety of cartoon styles obviously, so saying that doesn't mean anything.

It's not that it is just cartoonish, but that it's extremely minimalistic.

Because a game that could potentially have 32 players and hundreds, if not thousands of units should have graphics like Crysis, and should only be playable on computers that won't exist for another 3 years. Gee, that makes total sence. Oh, and that's sarcasm, by the way

The style isn't going to change between now and next August, though. So for people who don't like the style, waiting until next year is kind of pointless.

As long as people aren't being jerks about it, there's nothing wrong with those who don't like it saying so.

Yep all opinions are welcome I am sure, but anyone claiming that the art style they are going with is going to doom the game - just flat stupid IMNSHO. BoogieBac (?) or one of the devs posted the graphics from Galciv2 at this same point of development - they have repeatedly said that the graphics are not done.

A lot of people, I am one of them, thenk the graphics are just great and not cartoony at all! I like the stained glass posted above, even before that was posted I thought it was kind of a stained glass effect and thought it would be cool to see that style in actual gameplay.

I think we have a WoW player here that is lashing out because his game's graphics have been called cartoony, lol.

I dont care about the graphics all I care about thats its made by Stardock and the game will be EFING GREAT!... which it will be...

This thread is civilized.  The other one was simply an uninformed rant (which I felt obliged to troll) which has now got locked.

I think that there needs to be a distinction between quality and style.  The images released are lets be honest pretty poor quality.  I'm pretty glad they are, since from experience if the graphics are up to standard this far before release then they haven't been working on the important bits like gameplay.  See Spore.

As for style, given that it is a fantasy game, it shouldn't be photorealistic IMO.  My all time favourite console games (don't worry I play almost exclusively PC nowadays) are Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.  Completely different from Elemental, but a good example of how photorealistic and ultra sharp graphics are not the be all and end all.  Look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4po_D4bsdA for example.

I love a good argument about what makes one piece of art better than another, but I've liked the Elemental art direction since I saw my first examples when the site launched so this is a boring topic for me.

On the other hand, I'd like to speak up to any other defending fighters in the War on Verbs and say that one large reason that 'related' thread was such a failure is that "to fail" is a verb. Part of what makes the enemy so insidious in the War on Verbs is that they despise (or just can't understand?) the fundamental Indo-European sentence structure of subject-verb-object.

Sure, it can sometimes make very good evolutionary-linguistic sense for the occasional verb or noun to hop the fence, grammatically speaking. But this willy-nilly use of constructions like 'x=fail' or 'x is covered in fail' just need to stop on account of their being ugly and stupid. Not to mention how handy the tactic is for purging any particular leader's speech of the slightest trace of accountability...

I like that the art style for this game is distinctive, nothing wrong with stylised graphics.

In any case the sort of player who is put of because the game doesn't look like a fantasy version of Crysis is probably the sort of person who desn't have the attention span to really enjoy a deep turn based stratergy game anyway.

And Supreme Commander runs on my machine... not. While Elemental will (I hope ).

Anyway, I want to give negative Karma for people complaining about the artistic direction by not understanding the meaning of different graphic styles (style different from photorealistic =/= bad graphics), sadly (or fortunately) I cannot.

And that was my non-sequitor to this discussion.

And yet, 3 years later, SupCom still can't be run on high settings on most computers. And of course it was limited to only 8 players. And it had wonderful simulated physics. Shots fired from the top of a hill went just as far as shots fired on flat land. And it was totally "non-symbolic" That's why you had tons of people complaining about how the game was basicly watching a bunch of colored icons moving around the screen because you had to play zoomed out all the time.

You should really think things through before spewing such blatant stupidity.

Honestly, I remember playing Civ2 with its graphics and those being some of the best gameing sessions I ever had. Graphics only mean as much as people let them.

The other day, after hearing about MoM for the first time, I Dl'd it (its freeware now) and had a great time. I stopped playing only because the game suffers from late game "janitor" syndrome (ie you won, but you have to find EVERYTHING and kill it to be acknowledged). But the graphics didn't mean anything to me. The game was fun, the hell with all else.

Now, recognize that I still love great graphics, but if eye candy is all a strat game has going for it then you will quickly lose interest. If these somewhat styled graphics allow me to have thousands of units on screen for a battle, then the hell with 3d crap. Also, the more involved your graphics become the harder it becomes to mod. Most half life mods die not because of a lack of coding, but because the modeling and texturing is both hard and unrewarding. Most people bash modders for simplistic graphics, despite the effort that goes into them and the quality of the gameplay.

Oh, and BTW I like the grphx as they are (assuming shadows give em some depth)