Mass Effect director says the next game won't feature any Veilguard-style aesthetic switchups: 'Mass Effect is photorealistic and will be as long as I'm running it'
Who cares about photorealism ? Artistic direction just has to be consistent to contribute to the world building. Other than that, I think many will agree with me that most important are: good writing (characters and story arcs), good gameplay, creative concepts.
Except the complaints about Veilguard are about the pixar-like characters with very little expressiveness. So even if that were what he meant he's still actually not addressing the real issues
Well, realistic graphics are costly and time consuming. If development time and budget is spent of photorealism, it's not being spent on game mechanics or additional stories.
Not photorealistic, realistic. So normal proportions, faces, textures etc.
Like I’d argue Golden Eye is a game with a realistic art style. It is as realistic as the technology allowed at the time. But it clearly tries to emulate the real world, and not a fantastical cartoony world or a woodcarved illustration, or anime etc etc.
The comment from the ME guy is probably in response to Dragon Age Veilguard being much more cartoony than Inquisition. Characters have huge heads, textures are flat and stylised etc.
Eh stylized assets aren't necessarily easier or less time consuming than PBR. It's not difficult to make a game look realistic these days at least to a reasonable amount of scrutiny. Also this is a large developer with a lot of funding so EA isn't going to cut corners in the art department with one of their flagship IPs. You also can't just reallocate artists to work on mechanics, these are entirely different departments and the process of hiring/firing workers dynamically doesn't gel well with a production pipeline.