developing my artstyle
 

I was looking at video/images of Crackdown 2 and as I looked through it I realized that I want to ultimately work my way to creating a visual style similar to how Crackdown 2 looks like in its trailer.

I question to the community is what should I work on to develope this style. It's highly detailed, but not photoreal, and yet seems like its nearly cell shaded.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Here's a link so everyone can see what I mean.
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/1...63/imgs_1.html

i'm probably totally wrong (and feel free to hammer down on me), but i thought all non-raytraced renders look like that...

that and i think it's also down to the rendering engine these dudes used

If these are in game renders, than there is no raytracing. Raytracing is a very computationally expensive technique, so it wouldn't make sense to use it on a realtime system. To me, it looks like they have somewhat clean and stylized textures on the characters faces. Probably done by some hand painting in photoshop, but based on photo textures.

I don't see what you mean by cell shaded. What I think it is, is very harsh contrasts between warm and cool lights. This gives the shot a dramatic
look to it.

Hope this helps, and good luck figuring out your own style!