Gamers will always argue about the way a game looks – that’s just part of being a fan. Sometimes this comes in the form of critics whining about the evolution of graphics, as with the Secret of Mana remake. Most recently, it has raged across the Battle Royale scene with fans of PUBG and H1Z1 complaining about the ‘cartoony’ feel of Fortnite. But the truth is, Overwatch has a cartoony style and is the only hero-shooter out there of any note. And Fortnite, despite objections, is killing the competition, so maybe there is something to this cartoony argument after all.

One of the biggest problems with realistic games and the constant march towards better graphics is the uncanny valley. The idea is simple, the closer we get to technology that reflects perfect realism, the closer we get to it kind of freaking us out. This uncanny valley came around in the 1970s, but it has become an increasingly large problem in gaming as our technology gets scarily good. But it also leads to some pretty off-putting things, like NPCs staring soullessly at players or their movements coming off as jilted or weird.

For instance, no one complains about the faces in Super Mario games or earlier RPGs like Final Fantasy IX. That’s because the art style of these games makes them unrealistic or cartoony looking to begin with, so there is no expectation for them to look real. However, if you take something like Mass Effect Andromeda, you can see what happens when we get too close to realism. Despite Bioware’s attempts, what we got were characters that looked like animated corpses or with face twisted into expressions of bizarre, unreadable emotions. That, coupled with piles of bugs and glitches, made the game nearly unplayable and killed the entire franchise.

It is a problem for other realistic looking games as well. While no one bats an eye at characters in Borderlands, games like H1Z1 are already starting to look ugly because it isn’t just character models, but buildings, trees, and the entire environments of the world that have to look realistic. This is what has also allowed the Switch – which is a much less powerful system than the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One – to run Breath of the Wild so perfectly. It all comes down to the cartoony style which dictates the level of detail of the world. By adopting a cartoony style which is more focused on colors, developers are allowed to focus on things like making the game run properly.

For designers, there are very practical reasons for creating a unique style. By creating a style all their own, games can create legacies that live on beyond them. Borderlands 3 – whenever it finally drops – won’t have as hard a time making a next gen game as Wolfenstein did. Fans expect Borderlands 3 to look much like the last installment, so development takes less time.

It also helps with games longevity. Valve has discussed before that part of the design choice for Team Fortress 2 was creating a look that would age gracefully in the years to come. This, along with many other reasons, is one of the reasons TF2 is eleven years old and still pulls in more players than Lawbreakers. Design is a huge part of what draws players in.

Overwatch’s freedom with character design is largely from its cartoony style as well – a gorilla scientist certainly wouldn’t work with realistic graphics, and characters like Roadhog would simply be received differently. This is arguably one of the factors pushing Fortnite ahead in the Battle Royale game as well. While the tone of its competitors – H1Z1 and PUBG – are gritty, realistic, and hardcore, Fortnite went in the opposite direction, with insanely bright colors, goofy mechanics, and items and gameplay geared at fun more than real.

While some fans may prefer one over the other, it’s hard to argue with results. After all, the image below shows what 2K almost made Borderlands look like before scrapping the visual style completely and going with the iconic cell-shading on the right.

None of this is to say realistic is always bad or that cartoony is always good, but as technology moves forward, it will probably be the games with distinct style, not amazing graphics, that become the ones gamers are drawn to most.