Going for realism, especially 3D, is the quickest way to look dated.  Cardinaldirection hit it on the head, you need stylization and great art direction throughout the entire product.  Games will always start to look dated the moment they are released, but with great art direction the can still look good a decade or more later.

When looking at LH specifically, you are mixing cell shaded and non cell shaded objects.  Cities, players and dead trees are cell shaded, then you have foliage that goes for a more realistic look.  On the left of the picture shown you can see a distinctive difference between the cell shading in the trees and that of the stones on the ground.  The food source in the upper right has no cell shading whatsoever.  Lighting is directly above for terrain, off to the side for units, and completely missing for some foliage (see shrubbery near army in picture).

The other areas that make LH look dated would be the flat, plain terrain (which I believe you have already looked into fixing the flat terrain), and the lack of detail in the units.  While I know why the units are fairly bland, due to the customization possibilities and the distance of the camera most of the time, that doesn't make them any less plain.

Elementals cell shaded look was never very impressive from the start.

Realism might look dated earlier but still looks great for most of the products lifespan,ala Shogun2 still looks great and all DLC is done.

In order to have a AAA look the title's will need a AAA budget.

Disciples 2 vs Disciples 3

Dated Graphic's mean little when compared to great game play.

Dated Graphic's are graphics that are well in the sega era of graphics. That's dated.

My opinion is that if the art is good, the graphic's will never matter. Sometimes you keep coming back because you love that art style. 

You wanna know what out does graphics at this point. Really good 3d. It's like movies, too though it your using black and white no one's gonna wanna watch it, it doesn't mean that it's not good. But no one is gonna watch it.

Like how far back do you go to watch a movie? And that's how know what's dated and whats not. I think i'll go back to when i was born, and a few years more sometimes. 

I wanna watch Nosferatu it's black and white. lol. I mean sometimes it's just the idea. Nosferatu draw's you in cause of the creepy looking vampire makes you wonder. Cause it was the artist side of it. 

Jaw's always pulls you back in cause it's Jaw's.

Graphics mean little if the gameplay is not up to snuff. You can get away with inferior graphics if the gameplay is truly good, Distant Worlds, Terraria, Faster Than Light. Luckily Elemental has very good gameplay and although it is pritty enough it is not the selling point behind the game, make sure you focus on what makes the game good.

As for what look sub-par in Elemental it is hands down the characters/armour and trees.

A game with really solid art direction can usually remain pretty timeless. Look at a game like Wind Waker or Mario Sunshine. Graphically they're not hugely impressive but because of their strong art direction, they still look amazing! Same reason why games like Borderlands will age so well or even Wildstar for that matter.

Games that go for 'realism' age faster because they're never perfect/realistic enough and the following year, new or optimized hardware will just put it in its place. For example, Oblivion looked great for its time, then Skyrim comes out and made it look like crap...

Dated?  Much more important is that graphics are, hm, nice.

Take a look at Drakensang: River of Time.  The graphics are nothing special technically-wise.  However, with few simple effects, the game developers and artists achieved a splendid atmosphere and amazing immersion.  The game looks just beautiful.

When it comes to graphics, I think FE:LH looks simply unfinished, just rushed out of the corner. 

I think the problem is mostly that 'dated graphics' generally means that the game looks 'weird'.

Also with the release of many DX11 games this problem has become increasingly exacerbated. Every single DX11 only game has elicited cries of "this looks like garbage why does it need DX11" or "I can run BF4 at 100FPS why can't I run Tropico 4" or other such ignorant nonsense. IT's more or less that unless 'stuff is blowign up constantly' the game is 'not demanding'.

Or with UE4, where the lighting aspects of the engine are the really key elements, but yet games like Daylight come out and it's "this game blows why does it need DX11 or UE4".

I think this particular issue is going to be a repeated with Oxide games as similar comments were made with Star Swarm. "This demo looks like garbage, there's no specular lighting, etc" and had no concept of what the actual demo was trying to showcase. Again the 'I don't see the game blowing up star destroyers like it's the fourth of july so it must suck" attitude is increasingly prevalent with gamers that are 'supposedly' knowledgeable about video cards and engines (aka I read something on IGN 10 years ago and now I'm Carmack's twin)

Bit of a rant

Hi all, 

even though I am new I wanted to chime in on this. I think personally "visual variety" makes a game look dated or not. If what I see is repetitive and gives me no unique visual anchors it will quickly seem dull and with that dated. Look at CIV 5 for example, it has been a while but I feel it looks sharp. The UI has style and flair, the landscape looks organic even though it is hexes. Cities look like they are organically grown and due to wonders, culture etc each city looks a tiny bit different. I would say it is "Satellite Realistic" and not Photorealistic. I do not expect a Stardock game to look like this, but a more organic, less square look to the landscape would be great.

Even Civ IV does the organic look better then elemental in my opinion, even though it looks a bit dated now due to the lightning. And that was using squares also wasnt´t it?.

As much as I like Civ 5's map graphics, they are soooo frickin slow to load.  When you see white instead of map texture until the game has a chance to load, that's a sure sign that the game is hugging the bleeding edge of technology instead of making a reasonable compromise between quality and what quality you can paint on screen before the user scrolls.

I mean, how hard would it be to load textures predictively based on the direction the user is scrolling?  I guess Firaxis are not bringing their A game any more.

Civ IV is indeed a sweet example.  The game is not that easy on low-end cards, like Intel's, but looks pretty good.  Terrain is very nicely crafted.

What spoils the graphics in FE further is also the way maps are generated.  For example, rivers look ridiculously bad and unrealistic, Quite often then start from nowhere, and end up in nowhere. 

Winner! 

I actually don't like the hexagonal look. But I don't claim one to be dated or not dated. Squares have a natural progression to 3 dimensions, whereas hexagons do not. Navigation done on the world is done via squares not hexagons.

I'm not arguing going for squares over hexagons, just saying I don't care for hexagons for maps in general.

That was caused by lack of memory. It was thought it would be 64-bit but one of the third party libraries they relied on had no 64-bit version.  A 64-bit version of Civ V would have been crazy fast in that department (they would have still had long turn times though as I endlessly needle them about).

That's intersting. Though I wonder with the new Linux Civ5 could they make that version 64-bit?