GOTY 2015: Visual Design

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Honourable Mentions

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain certainly looked the part this year, with fantastic visuals across the board in what looks like will be Kojima's final game in the series. Some of the cutscenes were truly breathtaking.

Until Dawn might have made more waves because of the series of choices it offered players, but it also sucked us into the experience thanks to some incredibly polished visuals that delivered real tension.

The Order: 1886 may well have had the best in-game graphics of any of the titles mentioned in this list, and it also boasted a pretty interesting setting. A touch more originality might well have seen it finish higher still.

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CD Projekt Red crafted a masterpiece in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but perhaps the most impressive of all their achievements is the composition of the world, and the design of the creatures that live within it.

Claustrophobic doesn't even come close to describing the atmosphere created by Frictional in Soma. The studio delivered an almost flawless underwater setting full of detail, and there's was some memorable visual distortion that accompanied some of the scarier moments.

Splatoon was a much needed breath of fresh air in the shooter space, and the child-friendly design is wonderfully implemented. We'd been waiting for a colourful shooter for too long.

Lara Croft's latest adventure - Rise of the Tomb Raider - was absolutely stunning on Xbox One. Gaming's leading lady has never looked better, and her more open playground was a marked improvement over the last game.

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Destiny: The Taken King

Destiny takes the third podium place largely because of the excellent work of the designers and artists at the studio when it came to the use of light, and more importantly, darkness. Excellent lighting design is nothing new, it's something we've seen time and time again, but Bungie took it to a whole new level with The Taken King, the expansion which not only added new content for players, but that also reworked the entire base game.

The Dreadnought that players had to battle through in the new story campaign was a moody, foreboding place, with Geiger-esque architecture and a menacing sense of scale. It felt like a place where death had made its home, and the use of light to accentuate the disturbing atmosphere only enhanced the experience. We fondly remember moments in the Raid and during boss battles where we were denied sight, fighting back via the flash of light that sprang forth from the muzzle of our respective guns.

Bungie also did a neat job remixing the existing enemy classes, and the Taken enemies that you encountered on your various adventures looked great. All of these new features and designs layered in on top of already sterling work by the studio, with new foes standing alongside (and often fighting against) superbly crafted enemies of old.

Destiny has several distinct environments, and each of them is extremely well put together and characterised by individual pockets of diversity. From original locations on Earth, the Moon, Mars and Venus we've been able to extract adventures galore, but in The Taken King we've been given something completely different, and it was a welcome change of pace for a game that surely needed it.

Star Wars Battlefront

The work that has gone into the visual design of Star Wars Battlefront began a long time ago in a galaxy found inside of George Lucas' head. There's simply no denying the iconic nature of Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Imperial Walkers, Lightsabers or Imperial Walkers.

Almost four decades later a team in Stockholm, Sweden was tasked with recreating Lucas' vision and they did it with incredible precision and unbelievable attention to detail. Using the relatively new photogrammetry technique they went to the locations where scenes from Hoth, Tatooine, and the forest moon of Endor were filmed to capture the scenery, and even the original movie props were scanned.

It's a bit weird to go on about the level of authenticity when speaking of a science fiction IP, but clearly DICE went further with this than anyone had prior. The very capable Frostbite Engine played no little part in this, allowing for incredible detail and destruction.

At the end of the day Star Wars Battlefront provided players with an incredibly immersive experience, and the visual design played a massive part in this, and it's not just the elements lifted from the movies that have been executed well, as evidenced by the Sullust levels which delivered the same level of polish.

Ori and the Blind Forest

This may be a 2D Metroidvania title that is rather old school in its premise, but there's nothing old school about its visuals. Simply put, Ori and the Blind Forest looks absolutely stunning. It's a fairytale come to life in front of our very eyes.

Studio Ghibli has clearly been an inspiration for Moon Studios, not only for the visuals, but also for the tone and narrative, and it all comes together as a wonderful whole. This is one of those games that you can play and people who normally have no interest in gaming will stop whatever it is they're doing to watch. Simply put, draws you in to its atmospheric world, and the visuals are chiefly responsible for this.

It has taken Moon Studios many years to create their masterpiece, and that investment of time shows. There's so much love and attention that has gone into every little animation, every tiny effect, and the end result is that of a vibrant and living world that rivals anything we've seen before. It's technically incredibly well-crafted, but this really only serves the creative vision here and empowers it.

The visuals of Ori and the Blind Forest remind us of Trine and Child of Light, but here the developers really take it to a whole new level in our humble opinion. It might not have had the most polygons especially when compared to other titles that made this list, but the quality of its design is out of this world, and it's for that reason that it's our winner for best visual design in video games in 2016.