Best Art Direction of 2015 - Article
by Brent Galietti , posted on 09 January 2016 / 7,668 Views
What is the best piece of artwork ever made? That's a question that is too subjective to answer with certainty. You'll find people from all walks of life arguing for completely different art pieces as the best of all time. So how do we decide what game has the Best Art Direction of 2015? Well, with a staff debate and vote, obviously, but we look across all of the games of 2015 and determine which game's art direction most impressed us.
This is a complicated category, as many games can be argued to have just the right art style for what the game's creators wanted to convey. We've listed our nominees and the winner below, but there's no doubt that one could make a strong argument for any number of other titles as well. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
The Nominees:
Bloodborne
Splatoon
Ori and the Blind Forest
Tales from the Borderlands
Yoshi's Woolly World
Fallout 4
And the Winner is...
Ori and the Blind Forest
Community's Choice - Bloodborne (20% of the votes)
Ori and the Blind Forest visuals are a storm of beautiful color. The vibrant backgrounds are lovingly crafted down to the tiniest detail, and the characters move gracefully as you would expect of these animalian creatures. The alluring art style not only floods the optic nerves with iridescent artistry, but also carries with it a tinge of sadness, which perfectly connects with Ori's emotional storyline and the wonderful soundtrack that accompanies it.
Playing Ori and the Blind Forest isn't just fun, it is an experience that tickles the senses and elicits the full range of emotions from players. For achieving this, Ori and the Blind Forest wins our Best Art Direction of 2015 award.
More Articles
Happy with both Bloodborne and Ori getting these awards as well as them been complete opposite end of the scales for their art design.
Great Game
Congrats to Ori!
Yeah, Ori is fahkin' gorgeous (to be read in Boston accent for proper effect).
Your right it is but no idea how as Boston accent is but it sounds great read in a London accent :)
Great choice by the community! for Bloodborne. Ori deserve is spot there too.
Seen a few of these best art in a game awards and always confused why xenoblade is not mentioned. The art in some of the areas in that game are amazing! Never spent so much time just running around sight seeing. Easly best art direction of the year in my book.
Ori was an amazing game. Best $5 spent!
While Bloodborne DOES have an amazing art style, it's far too gothic and dark for me. At first, it has it's charm but after awhile, for me anyway, it was like... enough with all the darkness, death and doom. It really is overwhelming.
Didn’t play Original. I chose a different console because it had more of what I liked. Is it on PC? Otherwise I'll just skip it.
halo 5??
Great choice! Bloodborne a close second :)
I would have voted Yoshi. Love that yarn look.
At the rate Ori is pulling in awards, maybe Xbox should start investing in more Indies? :P
Imho Yoshi might have won this it wasn't for the Wii Kirby game using wool; while I find Splatoon to be innovative under many aspects and agree that it should be praised for trying to be so colourful I find nothing special in it's Art Direction, it's simply a good looking game. I apreciate the presence of Tales from the Borderlands among the nominees since it looks pretty unusual at least from the picture used here...
