Something I've been hitting with bricks rather heavily these last few years, NWN graphics... so I can't help but toss my own spectacularly futile and uninteresting observations into a more or less pointless discussion since the subject comes down to individual perceptions of what may or may not look crap... rendering a consensus on the issue highly improbable.
Blatantly, NWN is not photo-realistic and it never will be. To try to make it utterly realistic is an exercise in ultimate futility and, despite being engaged in ultimate futility far more frequently than is healthy for me, that's not a waste of time I'm going to bother with. (Please don't think I'm getting at CC creators trying for a more realistic, detailed look - more realistic than vanilla NWN would be hard not to do.
Better textures, nicer, higher poly models, more types of trees, ground that isn't utterly flat, etc, all more than worthwhile... But an effort to make NWN totally realistic? No chance, so there's no point bothering. Game engine just isn't up to it.
But as has been pointed out, NWN has SO many other things going for it. There is no other platform I know of that allows you to "make your own video games" in this way, certainly not anything like as efficient and effective. (Though I do still struggle with Electron every now and then, but it's so slow and involved to work with by comparison).
That's why in creating all my CC, (just look at Kali, the Aliens, etc, etc,) I try to make something that's got a reasonable glimmer of realism and solidity about it but also has an edge of over-the-top comic strip vibrancy... NWN isn't real, so I try to play up to such strengths the graphics have and create worlds that are quite stylized but form a homogenous whole - creatures, environments, etc all forming a cohesive in-game world untroubled by intrusion from graphical elements of either vastly higher or lower standards.
After all, I've been drawing and writing Demoness Tales for 25 years on paper - that's not photo-real either. It's a caricature of reality. NWN is also, in essence, a caricature of reality which I've hammered with a big brick until it's the specific caricature I want.
So to me it seems if you want to ignore the storyline and instead just criticize a game's graphics for not looking real, you might just as well criticize comic strip art for not looking real and not bother actually reading the story... You'd have to dismiss half the art ever created in fact, for not looking real...
OK, I admit it. NWN wasn't a great game. It was enjoyable enough, but I never found it very involving, never really clicked with the characters. (NWN2 was infinitely better in terms of its actual game, story and characters). But the point of NWN, a point so open to being honed to individual tastes, is the Toolset.
It's all about creating wild and wonderful characters and stories, intricate and amusing dialogue, atmospheric worlds... rather than throwing myself to the ground in despair because a Demoness' horns clipped through a doorframe without splintering it in a realistic way... or that the Spleen creature's hide looks a tad pixilated round its armpits...
Aurora is the core of NWN - it's for the imaginative and the creative, not for the technologically fussy.
For anyone who won't play a game that doesn't have graphics so intensely real they lean out of the screen and punch you on the nose, then why even go near a game more than ten years old?
