Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare? It may not be 100% pure hand painted goodness, but it's still stylized and has a nice Next Gen/Stylized vibe to it.
Airborn is stylized and use detail normal maps. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62779 http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1674251#post1674251
Not sure if anyone mentioned it but borderlands looks well, and they from what i know have handpainted textures. And nicely stylized graphics can look better than wannabe realistic graphics.
It really depends on how you look at it, if you want to confine it to the really narrow box that is "hand painted", eg, every texture in the game is painted by hand with static lighting, then no, it doesn't really make sense to do that with current/next gen technology. On the other hand, if you're mearly refering to…
Animated movies look much better than anything we can achieve in games yet. So there is certainly a place and ability to use a hand painted stylized look in the new-gen games. It's just that the current trend is going for realistic.
The character team on COP relied much more on sculpting, just with very defined edging work to help with the stylization. With the environments we often *painted* the normal map by hand using a facet palette for reference. It solved some very specific project pipeline issues and ended up being quite a bit of fun. It was…
I definitely think it's possible. Heavily stylized games will typically rely on hand painting their textures, while some of them still make use of normal and spec maps. Some things that come to mind immediately are Wildstar, Darksiders 1+2, Dota2, and Skylanders. Also, there are many games that use high poly models as a…
Look at the darkness 2 and the wolf among us. They don't use normal maps in the traditional sense, but use it in the diffuse shading with a ramp shader to get really stylized lighting effects. As far as pbr/PBL goes you can still go stylised the tech dosnt limit you at all, in fact it can help you a lot of stylzation will…
It looks like Epic's Fortnite is shaping up nicely! Also Insomniac is working on Sunset Overdrive: I think skylebones brings up a great point too. Feature animation keeps getting better and better. I think a lot of that is attributed to better rendering solutions. For example, I read somewhere that Monsters University was…